Author: MaintenX

Responsible buyers and facility managers should know where savings are coming from. If your due diligence isn’t uncovering optimization opportunities in management processes, then your savings may be more of a shell game than actual, realized cost savings.

Focus on production

With commercial janitorial services, production rate is the single most important factor in determining cost. A production rate is defined mathematically as output divided by input. In the case of cleaning, janitorial service production is the amount of square footage covered (in an hour) divided by the total hours worked.

Two things influence production rates: Human speed and mechanical speed.
Human speed is the rate at which janitors clean. A number of factors determine the rate at which professional cleaners move through the facility, including:

• Cleaning process
• Cleaning technique
• Cleaner’s motivation
• Building architecture and design
• Scope of work
• Management and supervision intervention

Take for example microfiber technology. Microfiber can offer significant production rate improvements by cutting out actions like “saturating a surface with chemical”. The labor required to remove the chemical is reduced, leading to gain in production. It is also much faster and more effective to wipe and remove chemical or soil from a surface than other products like paper or cotton towels.

Want to learn more? Call MaintenX today!

Window maintenance should be part of your regular building maintenance plan. Unfortunately, glass window maintenance is almost always put aside until a window breaks or is damaged. No matter how modern or stylish your windows are, lack of proper maintenance can affect their appearance and life span.

For business owners, your storefront windows can affect your customers’ first impression of your business. A dirty and grimy glass window signals that the interior will be similarly unclean, regardless of its actual state.

Why Window Maintenance is a Must

Neglecting window maintenance is too common. Electrical, mechanical, communication, and plumbing systems are usually maintained regularly, but window maintenance is frequently seen as a cosmetic issue, and therefore a discretionary expense.

Poor maintenance of glass windows can lead to hardware failure, leakage, and diminished natural light. Grime, smudges, and dirt can easily build up on your glass, and broken locks and mechanisms can compromise the safety and security of your building. The costs of potential consequences far outweigh the short-term benefits of deferring maintenance.

How Often Should You Have Your Windows Maintained and Cleaned?

There is no hard and fast rule on how often you should perform window maintenance and cleaning.

If your property is located in an area exposed to heavy rains and storms more than usual, leaves and debris can accumulate. This requires more frequent window cleaning and maintenance.

Spots. Spills. Stains. They’re often the first things visitors to your facility notice about your floor coverings. Left untreated, spots and stains on carpets have the potential to create a negative impression of your business, school or office building. However, early response can help reduce the incidence of permanent blemishes and keep your facility carpeting looking fresh and clean no matter what life throws at it.

Check for Spots and Stains Daily

Commercial carpeting is a big investment. You can help prolong its life and keep it looking attractive by treating and cleaning spots and stains as soon as they are noticed.

Prevention

Take precautions to prevent certain types of spots and stains before they happen, with exterior and interior matting or walk-off tiles to capture moisture, greasy slush, and street soil before it’s tracked onto your expensive carpeting.

Daily Vacuuming

Regular carpet vacuuming, especially in high traffic areas, removes dry soil and prevents it from grinding into fibers. A frequent spot check of all areas allows new spots to be treated quickly before they become permanent stains.

Interim Cleaning

Interim maintenance, such as low-moisture bonnet cleaning, will help your carpeting retain its like-new appearance longer and help improve performance. Interim cleaning is performed less frequently than daily, but should be planned often for high traffic areas. Triad works nicely for bonnet buffing, as well as a pre-spray spotter for high-traffic lanes.

Identify Your Stain 

Whenever possible, ID your spot or stain before attempting to remove it. Different stains require different chemicals and removal processes, so your success rate depends on an accurate identification of your stain.

Want to know more? Contact MaintenX today!

Hotel maintenance and repair teams are among the most critical employees in a hotel. Without them, many crucial services would stop working and guest frustration would surely lead to a substantial drop in bookings. But hotel maintenance can also produce large costs for property management. Key features in any solution to a well-organized maintenance department include:

Making sure tasks get to the right person for the job.

Vitally important to any successful maintenance job dispatch system is the capability to automatically direct and assign responsibilities to the proper workers. The most qualified employee should make sure that maintenance servicing is done rapidly without disturbing the work of others.

Getting the message to staff.

Another priority for any good hotel maintenance solution is the ability to alert your facility’s workers to any job the instant it is created. With lots of programs that can dispatch assignments to maintenance teams via email, those that take speed to the next level can transmit job information to mobile devices via an app. This capability guarantees that your facility’s workers are always up-to-date on the latest tasks are no matter what.

Efficient job tracking.

With maintenance departments usually flooded with maintenance job requests and tasks, it is vital for a platform to be in place that can alert each worker to the current status of every assignment in real time.

Want to know more? Call MaintenX today!

Healthcare and hospital facility management is always needed in order to maintain a clean and healthy medical facility’s environment.  It is vital for medical facilities to ensure service requests are responded to rapidly and competently and that preventive maintenance schedules are implemented strictly in order to properly preserve facility operations without disturbance.

Using new web-based healthcare facility management applications can help your medical facility:

• Extend your organization’s assets’ lives
• Automatically track facility maintenance costs
• Prevent crucial equipment failure
• Improve your organization’s productivity
• Reduce costly downtime
• Minimize investments in inventory
• Lower the total cost of your facility’s maintenance

Using these software applications, hospitals can easily set up maintenance procedures and preventive maintenance for healthcare and hospital facilities and relevant equipment in the following areas:

• Generators
• Suction Machines
• Sterilizing Equipment
• Wheel Chairs
• Electric Beds
• Arthroscopic Equipment
• X-ray Machines
• Heart Monitor
• Pumps
• Computers
• Compressors
• Coolers
• Air Purifiers
• Vehicles
• Respirator

Hospital and Healthcare Facility

Maintenance and facility management is imperative across hospitals and healthcare facilities to meet patient needs and regulatory standards.

Maintenance programs can help manage preventive maintenance by allowing for:

• Reduced downtime on critical assets
• Extended asset life across the facility
• Maintained maintenance budgets and cost minimization
• Minimized inventory
• Improved team efficiencies

Modern, energy-saving technology was a welcome sight for technicians who had been working with outdated, underperforming equipment in the old hospital. By using these powerful tools, facility managers can focus on tasks like fine-tuning HVAC equipment and performing the necessary preventive maintenance.

Want to know more? Call MaintenX today!

Maintenance problem-solving is mainly concerned with several areas:

• Maintaining critical systems
• Fixing the problem quickly
• Determining what is causing the breakdown to happen so frequently

We’ll discuss common maintenance problems and how you can prevent or minimize them.

Identification is Key

When you don’t understand a maintenance issue, you want to understand it. Facility maintenance is no different. You must first identify everything in your company or organization’s facility or have someone in your department who does. When a maintenance problem occurs, you’ll need to ascertain where and when the problem happened. More significantly, you also need to identify why you do things a certain way while keeping an eye out for new and better approaches at problem-solving.

In addition to recognizing the individual problems, you also have to be aware that problem-solving can be divided into different levels:

• Reaction or acting on the problem when it occurs
• Learning to live with the problem by correcting the system
• Keeping a proactive approach involving changing the conditions that led to the particular problem in the first place

These levels describe approaches that can be used on most facility maintenance problems.

Preventing Maintenance Problems

Your facility maintenance prevention action plan must be comprehensive and cover all areas, such as:

• Personnel
• Maintenance practices
• Hardware
• Systems

These categories are most valuable when solving cause and effect problems.

Want to know more about how you can prevent maintenance emergencies? Call MaintenX today!

Loss of an organization’s profits is the biggest reason that facilities must maintain proper conditions at all times. It is the facility manager’s responsibility to know which areas of facilities are vital for maintaining comfortable conditions at all times.

Developing an HVAC Crisis Management Strategy

The first step in the design of an emergency cooling system is to identify those areas that must be kept properly air conditioned in the event of a main power or cooling failure.

Once facility managers have determined the crucial areas of the facility, the next job is to estimate the cooling capacity necessary to maintain conditions.

Once the facility manager is satisfied with the existing HVAC system, the next step is to confirm the emergency operating conditions of these vital areas.

Facility managers should also keep in mind that some facility equipment can function at higher temperatures without damaging the equipment.

The heat produced by occupants during an emergency situation is typically insignificant.

Lastly, heat transferred through exterior walls and roofs of your facility can oftentimes be negligible in new buildings. Older buildings with little or no insulation require facility managers to determine the expected amount of heat transfer during an outage.

It is essential for property managers to make sure that the load requirement for the vital areas of their facilities do not also come with a potential risk of danger to your facility’s occupants.

While most commercial and industrial facilities along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts have been built to bear the effects of hurricane-force winds, facility managers can take additional steps to lessen the potential damage that can occur during major storms.

Understand Your Facility’s Risks

The key trademarks of a hurricane are:

• High wind speeds
• Storm surges
• Torrential rains
• Tornadoes

Any one of these can put your organization’s facility at risk during a storm.

Know Your Disaster Response Action Plan

While most major commercial and industrial organizations have fixed disaster response plans already in place, conducting an audit of your facility’s emergency strategy is never a bad idea. Before a storm hits, make sure that you thoroughly review your organization’s property insurance policy to ensure the business is sufficiently covered against storm damage.

As a Storm is Coming

As soon as a hurricane warning is issued, facility managers should check the facility’s interior and exterior surroundings and then take the correct safety measures. Some of these can include:

• Bringing in exterior displays and removing any outdoor signs or other items that could fly away in high winds and board up glass doors and windows.
• Place sandbags in appropriate areas to help stop floodwaters from entering the facility.
• Make sure all storm drains near the property are clear of debris to help keep the water away from the facility.
• Make arrangements for after the storm has passed for your staff, and emergency power connections if needed.

Have more questions about hurricane preparedness? Call MaintenX today!

Facilities that may have to deal with hurricanes should take steps to ensure that employees are prepared and that the building can withstand the weather. Here are some tips to help you prepare.

Planning is Key

The purpose of an emergency response plan is to protect your most important assets: your facility’s occupants. A thorough plan should include:

• An evacuation plan and route 
• Provisions for data backup, as well as alternate communications and power
• A list of vendors and contractors to provide disaster recovery services

Next, identify leaders with the authority and skills to direct others during an emergency. These emergency leaders must be high-performing workers who are assertive and cross-trained among various organization divisions. For the duration of a hurricane, they should be able to execute evacuation plans and provide occupants with important instructions.

Safety Equipment

Access to all necessary safety equipment is also critical. Ask yourself these questions:

• Can employees easily locate and access emergency equipment in the dark?
• Does the supply include face shields, respirators, safety glasses, hard hats, earplugs, and personal protective equipment for each employee?
• Is the emergency equipment supply regularly audited to ensure personal protective equipment will be available when needed?

It’s also imperative that you appoint a dedicated response team who understands all your facility’s systems. In case of a fire, they should also know how ammonia or refrigeration systems are secured to prevent possible release.

Want to know more about hurricane preparedness? Call MaintenX today!

As the summer approaches, so do the risks of heat and dehydration. Preparing your facility is vital to the health and protection of your occupants and valuable assets. Follow these tips to stay cool in the summer heat this year.

Get quarterly system checkups.

Routine facility inspections of your HVAC system can ensure that it is set to properly cool your facility while controlling your energy expenses. HVAC system inspections can also diminish the need for future maintenance by helping identify and address any looming system problems before they happen.

Calibrate indoor and outdoor building sensors.

Make sure to check that your facility’s control systems are responding correctly and that the proper temperature is displayed on each unit.

Make sure you have the right HVAC unit.

Is your facility’s HVAC unit the correct size for the layout of your facility? The service life of most HVAC equipment is typically around 18 years. If your equipment is getting close to that lifespan, it might be time to replace it.

Install an Energy Management System.

An energy management system can create huge time, energy, and cost savings for commercial buildings. It acts as an automated facility manager, allowing you to make temperature adjustments from anywhere.

Being proactive about your system’s needs can optimize efficiency as well as control unnecessary energy consumption.

Interested in learning more about protecting your facility from the summer heat? Call MaintenX today!