Category: Building Maintenance

Spring has finally arrived which means it’s time for a seasonal facility inspection and outdoor maintenance checkup. In Florida, where MaintenX is headquartered, we see drastic changes between the spring and summer. Some of these changes are minor, while others can cause a host of maintenance and safety issues for your staff. 

While scheduling your spring maintenance, be sure to plan for these inspections and services: 

Assessment of winter damage

Even with the mild winters, we have in Florida, the change of season can reveal issues from colder months. Potholes, dead landscaping, and damage from freezes can all contribute to maintenance issues addressed in the spring. It’s important to schedule a consultation to identify these issues before jumping into your spring cleaning plan.

Address issues with water drainage and irrigation

Spring usually brings more rain in Florida, and can also come with melting snow and ice in northern parts of the country. That is why it’s essential to check your water drainage systems as early as possible to ensure you don’t run into problems when the first April showers hit. Issues with water drainage can lead to slip and fall hazards, flooding, mosquito breeding, and hardscape damage. The sooner you act, the safer your facility will be. 

Spruce up your landscaping

As the weather warms up it’s important to tend to your landscaping. Remove debris, trim overgrown landscaping, and ensure that hazardous materials are cleaned up from your property. This should be taken care of early in the spring so that your landscaping doesn’t become overwhelming to manage in the summer. 

Plan for pest control

Pests cause serious safety hazards for your facility. Not only can they spread disease, but they can also do serious damage to your infrastructure (not to mention your reputation if they are seen by clients). Schedule pest control services for the early spring and ask your maintenance team to address any infrastructural damage such as chewed wires or termite-infested wood. 

Protect your parking lot

After a long winter, your parking lot may need repairs. Colder months can cause cracks in asphalt or for potholes to get worse. Don’t let employees and visitors injure themselves or damage their vehicles on your property. Schedule parking lot maintenance to ensure everyone has a safe ride. 

Spring maintenance can be easy with MaintenX by your side. We ensure that your facility tenants and employees are not only safe but are always taken care of with their maintenance requests. To learn more about our spring preventative maintenance services, contact us today!

Very few facility managers want to admit how intimidating their backlog can be. It’s a never-ending problem that only seems to grow. Tackling the backlog all at once can seem like an impossible task, but the longer a facility waits, the worse it will get. However, MaintenX can help you eliminate the backlog and get you in a position for maximum maintenance success. 

Typically, the backlog includes all work that has been requested, planned, but not completed. The backlog is measured in its entirety by the predicted hours or weeks it will take to complete. Some facilities are able to schedule their backlog effectively, while others treat it as a first-come, first-serve order of services.

While you may think you need to eliminate the backlog completely, experts believe that having zero backlog can lead to an increase in maintenance costs. Without scheduled services, the maintenance team may focus on corrective and preventative maintenance that is low-priority. This can lead to unneeded labor hours and services, which is not ideal either. 

MaintenX recommends scheduling two weeks’ worth of scheduled services, and two weeks of lower priority services for planning in the future. Your maintenance staff needs a game plan for their week if they are to use their time efficiently. However, you should always be looking ahead for preventative services to ensure that your long-term maintenance pals are reached. 

In order to achieve this ideal four-week backlog, you’ll want to prioritize your workload based on available parts, staffing, and urgency.  Equipment that is near the critical point should be addressed in the first week, while regular preventative repairs can be scheduled for weeks two and three. A system of balanced planning and execution is essential for a seamless backlog. 

You also want to plan generously for reactive maintenance during this four-week backlog planning period. You never know when reactive maintenance repairs will come up, so we suggest scheduling for 5-10 hours less than your regular workweek to accommodate these changes. You don’t want to overwork your maintenance staff while they’re trying to eliminate existing work orders!

With these tips in mind, your facility can effectively reduce downtime and create a process for backlog management. To learn more about our system at MaintenX, contact your local team today!

The effectiveness of your maintenance team is a great indicator of your overall facility performance. If your maintenance team is overworked and undervalued, that’s a good sign that your facility is facing growing pains (or is aging quickly). However, if your maintenance team is on top of work orders and has a short backlog, signs point toward a healthy and productive facility. 

You can learn tremendously from your work order data. By analyzing downtime, wrench time, labor costs, and equipment performance, you can learn a great deal about the inner workings of your facility. However, when you ignore these data points, you are only setting yourself at a disadvantage. If you want to learn your facility inside and out, follow these steps for using work order data to improve facility performance: 

Define your goal.

There are hundreds of data points to analyze in your maintenance program. You could study wrench time, costs of reactive maintenance, or labor hours, but without context, these numbers won’t help you improve. What do you want to accomplish this year with your maintenance team? Do you want to: 

• Strengthen your preventative maintenance program
• Create a more lean strategy for maintenance
• Reduce downtime and reactive maintenance costs
• Grow your maintenance department on pace with the rest of your facility

Once you define your maintenance goals for the year, you can move on to determining your key performance indicators. 

Choose KPIs

Not all data will be useful in reaching your goals. Depending on the size of your maintenance team, you may want to stick to three to five KPIs in order to narrow your focus and create a practical plan for your ground floor staff. Some KPIs for small to midsize maintenance teams can include: 

• Percentage of reactive vs. preventive repairs
• Frequency of reactive repairs per month
• Number of expected versus actual labor/overtime
• Costs of reactive repairs and increase/decrease over time
• Number of daily work orders in the backlog 

Build your maintenance strategy around these measurements.

Once you’ve determined the metrics you want to try and improve within your maintenance team, it’s time to put that plan into action. Brainstorm with your maintenance team leads to determine what actions can be taken to reach your goals along with key performance metrics. For example, if your goal is to reduce the daily backlog, you can devise a plan to clear out the backlog or to improve the work order management system speed. 

Implement “big picture” ideas into day-to-day operations. 

Once you’ve determined your strategy and KPIs, you can implement daily solutions to reach toward your bigger goals. Improvements are achieved one day at a time and can accumulate when everyone on the maintenance staff is on board. When you work together to achieve your bigger goals, you can see them work faster and more smoothly than when implementing a top-down approach. 

MaintenX believes that work order management is the key to any successful preventative maintenance program. That’s why we use a fully automated work order system that gets your work order request from dispatch to inspection in only a matter of hours. To learn more about our preventative maintenance system, contact your local MaintenX team today. 

For many facility managers, work order management is like the family junk drawer. It’s messy, disorganized, but functional enough to set aside. However, when it goes unchecked for enough years, by the time it starts to cause problems no one knows where to start. If you let this happen in your kitchen, it’s not a big deal. However, when you let your work order management process get out of hand, you’ll have a big mess to clean up sooner or later. 

On average, maintenance departments handle 45 or more work orders per week. Without a seamless management system, this can easily become overwhelming for your staff. In addition, with no work order management system, you cannot look at your maintenance trends over time. Your management process serves as an analytical tool for wrench time studies and much more, but only if it is in order. 

Work order management issues will inevitably affect your entire staff. That’s why it’s important to address them now so your maintenance team can work effectively and save your business money. Below are the steps to maximize performance through more effective work order management: 

Steps To Clean Up Your Work Order Management

• Identify missing inventory, inaccurate records, and outdated service requests. The first step is to clear out the clutter within your work order management system. Oftentimes when work order management gets out of hand, the staff leaves old or outdated information because they’re overwhelmed. In order to create order from this chaos, you have to do an overhaul of your outdated system. 

• Reorder your current work order list by priority, not time. Once you’ve eliminated or addressed outdated information within the system, you can reorder your work requests by urgency. Talk with your maintenance team to determine which repairs are necessary versus which can be put on the backburner for now. The goal is to eliminate all work orders from most to least urgent so your maintenance team can start fresh. 

• Convert your work order management process to digital. If you are still using handwritten notes or emails for your work order management, it’s time for a change. MaintenX uses a fully automated work order management system to ensure that every request is addressed immediately. Our dispatch team receives the work order as soon as it is submitted, and we can send a team out within hours to address the problem. Communication issues are significantly reduced, leading to increased efficiency for both the business and maintenance team. 

• Implement goals and standardize your work order processing. Managing work orders isn’t just about crossing tasks off a to-do list. You want to look at the big picture and understand how your work order management can impact facility efficiency and costs. By providing a direction for your maintenance team, you can see a greater reduction in costs and inefficiencies. 

According to Fiix data, you can increase asset performance by 50% when you organize your work order management. MaintenX can help you achieve these results with our automated work order management. We work with the finest maintenance specialists who will be dispatched to your location within hours of submission.