Category: Facilities Management

At MaintenX, a job well done is our top priority. We always encourage clients to use professional help when they need it, and to schedule preventative repairs so they can avoid emergencies. However, there are times when a quick time- or money-saving maintenance hack can get you back up and running in a pinch. 

 

Below are some simple DIY tips and tricks you can use to perform maintenance at your facility. These don’t pose a risk to your equipment, and can make you more effective in performing daily tasks for your business: 

 

Know where your water shut-off valve is. 

This important knowledge can save you hundreds of dollars in repairs when a plumbing leak or overflow happens. Water overflow can not only cause shutdowns at your facility, but will cost you in flooring repairs and plumbing damages. When the flood starts to come, know where your shutoff valve is to save your facility. 

 

Unclog your own pipes. 

Commercial drain cleaners are effective, but they are incredibly corrosive for your plumbing. Instead of using those, try a DIY solution of boiling water followed by baking soda to break down the blockage safely. If this doesn’t completely clear the clog, you can use a snake until your next hydro-jetting service. 

 

Air seal your facility. 

Typically, you don’t want to perform DIY repairs on your HVAC system because of the complexity and vital role this system plays in your operations. However, you can make your HVAC’s job easier by sealing any places where air escapes from your facility on a regular basis – windows, doors, and cracks in the drywall. 

 

Switch to LEDs.

LED lights are unfortunately not as popular as incandescent bulbs in office spaces, but they are far more cost-effective when looking at long-term use. An incandescent bulb costs around $3 as compared to a $6-8 LED bulb. However, the cheaper incandescent bulb will only last about 1,000 hours, as compared to the LED which can last 25,000 hours or more. This easy electrical hack can save you money throughout your facility that will add up over the years. 

 

Maintenance tips like these can make your life and your technicians’ jobs much easier. To learn more tips and tricks from the MaintenX world, visit our Resource Center.

HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and roofing repair are all dangerous careers to follow. They involve years of training and often require technicians to squeeze into tight spaces or go up great heights in order to perform the work. And that’s not to mention the inherent health and safety dangers of working with electricity or plumbing on a daily basis. 

 

Despite the dangers, these technicians do their best every day in order to ensure their clients are well taken care of. If you want to ensure the safety and continued great work of your MaintenX technicians, follow these # tips for maintenance work safety: 

 

Audit your facility for safety issues.

Accidents happen, but many of the accidents that occur during maintenance are due to improperly working equipment or facility hazards. Maintenance technicians spend years training and are well-equipped to avoid injury, but careless mistakes within the facility can cause emergencies. Ask your MaintenX team to perform a safety audit to remove hazards and create a safer place for everyone to work. 

 

Provide protective equipment. 

Many injuries can be avoided when maintenance staffing is well-equipped with masks, gloves, eye protective gear, and other items to prevent injuries onsite. These pieces of equipment can prevent injury especially during electrical and plumbing repair. However, they can also be used for anyone performing maintenance in tight spaces or dangerous conditions. 

 

Organize. 

An organized facility makes maintenance work much simpler. It can also prevent trip-and-fall accidents on the job, which result in a high percentage of workplace accident lawsuits. By keeping walkways and work stations clean, especially around pieces of equipment such as HVAC units and electrical boxes, you can ensure a safer place for everyone. 

 

Conduct physicals with new hires. 

Maintenance work requires a certain level of physical aptitude for some services to be performed safely. While physical fitness should not be the primary factor to consider when bringing on a new hire, ensuring that your staff is physically capable and won’t get injured on the job is essential for maintaining a safe work environment. For maintenance technicians with physical limitations, ensure they are partnered with other technicians that can safely perform more labor-intensive work. 

 

Provide ongoing training. 

Maintenance work is always evolving based on new tools, technologies, and equipment used at your facility. If you want your maintenance technicians to be prepared for anything, ongoing training is essential. Annual training camps or seminars when new technology is introduced can help your maintenance team stay ahead of the curve and provide more value to your facility and within their own careers. 

 

Maintenance safety is a number one priority for MaintenX. We take every precaution to ensure our workers are taken care of and know how to handle potentially dangerous situations with tact. To learn more about ways you can improve your own workplace safety procedures, visit our Resource Center.

MaintenX specializes in commercial kitchen maintenance, which means we’ve seen it all. The good, the bad, and the ugly, MaintenX is the number one source for maintenance issues in the busy world of food service. While most of our clients do an excellent job in maintaining their essential systems, there are several things we’ve seen over the years that make maintenance more difficult for us and their teams. 

 

If you work in or manage a commercial kitchen, be sure to never make these maintenance mistakes while on the job: 

 

Pouring grease down the drain 

This is the number one problem our plumbing teams see in commercial kitchens. Not only is it unsightly when it comes out, but grease can cause your plumbing to back up, leading to an on-the-job disaster when it happens. Teach your employees the proper way to dispose of grease to ensure it never happens to you. 

 

Neglecting your countertops

Not cleaning your countertops enough, or not using the right products can head to premature corrosion, color fading, and sanitary issues you’d much rather avoid. Talk to your MaintenX team about the best products for countertop cleaning, and be sure to train employees on the right way to use these products every night. 

 

Never deep cleaning your floors

You likely mop your floors every night, but do you deep clean them on schedule to remove grease and dirt buildup? This maintenance task is tedious and can disrupt your workflow, but it will save you from having to replace kitchen flooring prematurely. It also ensures a safer and cleaner working environment, which will help tremendously when it comes time for a health inspection. 

 

Neglecting HVAC/R maintenance

Ventilation and refrigeration are some of the most important functions of your commercial kitchen. Without proper ventilation, your kitchen becomes unsafe to work in and will cause the heat and scent to leak into your dining areas. Refrigeration maintenance can also help you reduce long-term costs and provide a cleaner, safer work environment. Schedule regular preventative repairs with your MaintenX HVAC/R technician to ensure you never run into major repairs on the job. 

 

MaintenX works hard to ensure the commercial kitchens we work in can function seamlessly 24/7. To learn more about our preventative repair services, contact your local MaintenX team today. 

It has been nearly two years since the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak. While major improvements have been made across the U.S. to curb the spread, new variants are taking form that makes it more difficult for scientists and government organizations to protect our citizens. Therefore, businesses are needed to help prevent the spread and create a safer shopping experience for both customers and employees. 

 

In addition to mask protocols and vaccination support, there is plenty your business can do to create a cleaner, safer environment for all of your people. Below are just three ways in which the MaintenX team is here to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and its variants in 2022:

 

Cleaning HVAC systems regularly

Your HVAC system circulates air throughout the entire building, which means it can circulate airborne viruses and bacteria just as easily. This can facilitate the spread of COVID-19 from one cough to the entire building, especially if it is hosting dust, mold, and bacteria already. MaintenX helps keep your facility clean and germ-free by performing routine air duct cleaning and HVAC maintenance.

 

Maintain hand washing and sanitizing stations

Hand washing is one of the best ways employees can reduce the spread among their colleagues, and it starts with clean restrooms and sanitization stations throughout your facility. Plumbing issues, however, can quickly make it more difficult for staff to stay clean and wash hands frequently throughout the day. MaintenX performs restroom and plumbing maintenance to ensure your handwashing stations are clean and functional throughout your facility. 

 

Keep floors and surfaces clean

Research suggests that COVID-19 is not just airborne, but can also be spread through contact with contaminated surfaces. It is the job of your maintenance team as well as regular staff to keep surfaces clean and disinfected throughout the day. Disinfectants, as well as proper maintenance of the facility to reduce outdoor contaminants, can help create a cleaner environment for everyone. 

 

Together, we can stop the spread of COVID-19 and its variants throughout the U.S. With businesses doing their part, more customers and employees can stay safe and get back to business as usual before the pandemic occurred. 

 

If you are looking for a reliable contractor to perform regular maintenance for your facility in 2022, contact your local MaintenX team today!

Lean manufacturing, or just-in-time manufacturing, was first popularized in the 1930s by Toyota with a novel approach to automotive manufacturing. The principles and structures built into Toyota’s manufacturing system helped them become one of the most successful automotive companies worldwide, and has been adopted by companies ever since. In 2011, Eric Reis adjusted the method to fit small businesses in his book The Lean Startup. Now, the principles of lean operations are used in every industry, including maintenance. 

 

What is lean maintenance?

 

Contrary to popular belief, lean maintenance is not the same as run-to-fail maintenance. Lean maintenance is a holistic strategy that aims to eliminate waste at every step of the process, from the way work orders are organized and dispatched to the methods used by the maintenance team to perform common repairs. Efficiency and long-term effectiveness are the top priorities when implementing a lean maintenance strategy. It requires both preventative, reactive, and predictive strategies as well as regular auditing to reduce waste whenever it can be identified. 

 

Types of waste in maintenance

 

In maintenance strategies, there are four main types of waste: environmental, material, financial, and human potential. Environmental and material wastes include byproducts or materials that either harm the facility or go unused in the repair process. They can include wasteful cleaners, unused extra parts, or other items that could be replaced or eliminated to create a more efficient process. Financial and human wastes include wastes of money or manpower that go toward ineffective or unnecessary repairs. These include preventative repairs that are scheduled too closely together, repairs that don’t last, or repairs on equipment that is already failing. 

 

How to create a lean maintenance strategy

 

Lean maintenance is a process. It requires patience, consistency, and cooperation from your team in order to rethink your maintenance processes and make them more efficient. Some common ways to cut out maintenance waste include: 

 

• Researching repair and cleaning equipment to find more efficient alternatives
• Providing more training or hiring more experienced contractors to reduce failed repairs 
• Experimenting with preventative care scheduled to find the right balance of services that prevent emergencies without overworking equipment. 
• Financially prioritizing preventative and predictive care in order to prevent emergency services

 

There are hundreds of ways to create a lean maintenance strategy, but only some that will actually work for your facility. Contact MaintenX today to perfect your preventative care schedule and become a more lean facility today.

Maintenance scheduling is a balancing act for most facilities. If you’re scheduling preventative maintenance too frequently, you’re wasting money on unnecessary repairs and potentially overworking your equipment, leading to shorter service life. However, if you space out your repairs too much, you’ll experience failures that could have easily been prevented. The right schedule takes time, patience, and active learning to create, starting with an auditing schedule for your facility. 

 

The average facility spends more than 2,000 labor hours on preventative repairs. If you want to schedule those hours effectively, follow these three steps for auditing:

 

Prioritize auditing

Auditing your entire facility on a quarterly basis will take too much time, and give you too much information to be utilized effectively. We recommend the following schedule to ensure your audits are useful and manageable within a busy facility manager’s schedule.

 

• Audit equipment that is critical to facility functioning, equipment related to health and safety, and equipment with higher fail rates first and frequently. We recommend on a monthly basis if necessary, or quarterly if your maintenance schedule is working well. 
• Audit other frequently used, expensive, but non-essential equipment on a bi-annual basis, ensuring it receives TLC but does not drain too much of your time and energy. 
• Audit all equipment, including inexpensive and non-essential equipment on an annual basis to learn from your yearly recap and improve as needed. 

 

Audit technician performance as much as maintenance tasks and schedule

The quality of your maintenance strategy is only as good as your maintenance team. If you have too few technicians or poorly trained maintenance staff, your building will suffer no matter how thoroughly you plan out preventative care. Wrench time should be compared with the quality of work and frequency of follow-up repairs according to the schedule. If your team is constantly trying to catch up or fix mistakes, you can use this to advocate for more staffing or additional contractor dollars in your budget. 

 

Follow through on learnings from your audits.

Once you’ve gathered as much information as you can on technician and equipment performance, use this learning to your advantage to create an optimal maintenance schedule. Don’t be afraid to revamp your entire maintenance plan if that’s what it takes to make your maintenance planning more efficient. Sometimes “business as usual” is not what your business needs in order to become a more efficient system. If you use your audit correctly to advocate for a better budget or more maintenance hours, you can improve your company’s bottom line in the long term. 

 

MaintenX can help your facility create a better maintenance schedule through preventative care and the use of our advanced work order management system. If you want to take the hassle out of preventative care, outsource your maintenance work to the #1 trusted mane in facility repair across the nation. Call MaintenX for more information today!

Facility maintenance requires a great deal of organization in order to keep up with a large building’s demand. While many facilities use a reactive maintenance approach with sporadic preventative repairs, MaintenX likes to use previous performance to our advantage, creating a preventative care approach that gets better every year. If you want to improve your maintenance performance and reduce unnecessary spending within the maintenance department, pay attention to these five metrics from 2021:

 

Common repair work scheduled after inspections

If a maintenance program is working, you should see similar preventative maintenance services scheduled after every inspection. If this occurs, that means your preventative maintenance schedule is working and you’re not experiencing many reactive or unexpected repairs. However, if you don’t see a pattern in repairs scheduled after inspections, you may want to look into preventative strategies to get your maintenance work on a more predictable schedule. 

 

Cost by maintenance type

Emergency repairs are unavoidable, but if you notice that your reactive repairs vastly represent your maintenance budget, it could be time for a change. In contrast, if you see increases in preventative care costs over time instead of decreases, you may need to start spacing our preventative repair scheduling to ensure you’re not overservicing equipment. 

 

Wrench time spent on production 

 

During or right after your business’ busy season you should likely see increases in maintenance service requests. However, if your maintenance team is being called on a daily or weekly basis to help your production team, you either need to start upgrading equipment or provide more adequate training to production staff to limit the number of outside requests for simple repairs. 

 

Size of backlog

Ideally, a maintenance backlog is scheduled no more than two or three weeks out. This backlog size is easy for maintenance to manage and should keep up with new service requests vs. completed tasks. If you notice that your backlog is constantly getting bigger instead of staying the same, it may be time to consider hiring a bigger maintenance staff or approving more overtime. 

 

Cost of preventative care vs. losses due to reactive repairs

Take a finer look at your maintenance sending to see how reactive and preventative repairs are affecting your bottom line. In this analysis, you should include production losses due to maintenance downtime, as well as increased labor or overtime hours due to emergency repairs. Then, compare these losses to your preventative care expenses to see if they’re in balance or need to be adjusted to prevent expensive emergencies. 

 

These five metrics can help you understand your maintenance department’s efficiency and improve it in the new year. If you’d like to learn ways to improve your maintenance team, give your local MaintenX a call today!

It’s the new year, which means it’s time to start fresh with your maintenance management plan. If you’re like many small to mid-sized businesses, you keep a running tab of maintenance services in your backlog that are planned to one day be addressed. The problem is, “one day” seems to never come, while your backlog gets bigger and more complex. 

 

If you want a better way to handle your maintenance backlog, here are some tips to help you get organized in the new year: 

 

Start with essential maintenance

The new year often sparks inspiration for new operational procedures or productions, but maintenance should come first at your facility. Your business can’t function properly until maintenance issues are addressed, even if they aren’t the most glamorous or exciting plans for the new year. Begin by knocking out your most important tasks from the backlog, such as major repairs or services that have been put on the backburner for more than a few months. 

 

Prioritize smaller projects

Once you’ve cleaned up your facility’s more pressing maintenance issues, you can begin prioritizing and clearing out your current backlog. The goal should be to reduce maintenance planning to 2-3 weeks out with a plan to accomplish as many tasks per week as you add.

 

Revamp your work order system

A lot of backlog problems occur because work orders are poorly organized, are sent incompletely, or are not given to the maintenance team in a streamlined process. If you want to keep a clean backlog once you’ve organized it, make sure employees know how to submit maintenance requests and that they give all the necessary information for a technician to use when dispatched.

 

The backlog should be a tool for your maintenance department to keep your facility in proper working order. However, it only works if you use it to your advantage and prioritize preventative repairs over run-to-fail maintenance. When your backlog is filled with preventative care and minor services for your maintenance team to handle on a daily basis, you can expect fewer emergency services and a better bottom line by the end of the year. 

 

MaintenX can help you make maintenance servicing easier with our independent teams and advanced work order management system. To learn more about how MaintenX handles work orders for a better customer experience, contact us today!

Work order management is one of the most important aspects of a facility manager’s job. They are tasked with the responsibility of managing workflow throughout the maintenance department and ensuring that work orders are fulfilled before minor repairs become emergencies. However, this task is not one without roadblocks and bottlenecks. Designing a system that reduces redundancies and works for both technician and employee is something most facility managers struggle with at some point in their careers. 

 

If your maintenance request process has fallen to the wayside these tips can help you get back on track: 

 

Reduce redundancies

If you have a backlog of preventative service requests, there are likely redundancies throughout that need to be eliminated. You may have incomplete work order requests, repeated requests from failure to provide service, and work orders that are no longer relevant to your facility. Before you can begin the work of streamlining your work order process, you must first clear out the cobwebs and ensure that every current work order is relevant to your maintenance team. 

 

Create a better work order request system

At MaintenX, we see many companies that use work order forms that are too simple, too vague, or that are not organized properly to truly assist their maintenance teams. These work order systems are typically at the root cause of maintenance backlog and inefficiency issues, not the maintenance technicians or management in charge. If your work order system is disorganized or does not provide adequate detail for service requests to begin, start by cleaning up your order process and see if the issues resolve. 

 

Assign tasks immediately

If a work order is anyone’s responsibility in your maintenance department, it is really considered no one’s responsibility. To ensure work gets done in a timely manner, strive to assign tasks to specialists within your department as soon as they come in. This puts adequate pressure on the maintenance team to get the job done and ensures everyone knows what their duties are day-to-day. 

 

MaintenX uses advanced work order management software that keeps track of service requests, customer notes, maintenance technician dispatch, and completion of services all in one hub. In this way, we are able to track your progress from initial request to completion and troubleshoot every step of the way. As part of our commitment to customer service, we believe this is a necessary part of what makes MaintenX a trusted source for local businesses. 

 

If you’d like to learn more about our work order system or how you can start working with MaintenX at your facility, call our offices today!