Category: Property Management

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. 

Any good facility manager worth their salt will tell you that regular maintenance is cheaper and a smarter financial decision than solely fixing things when they break. In addition to the financial costs of repairs, there is problem of production loss caused by unplanned downtime when an asset fails. But, with as important and crucial to a facility’s staff and the company’s bottom line as preventative maintenance is, could there really be such a thing as too much of it?

Affective Preventative Maintenance

One of the prime objectives of a good preventative maintenance program is to prevent equipment failure before it happens by performing regular, routine inspections and pre-emptive repairs. But, after preventative maintenance, some equipment can sometimes stop working correctly. There are a few different reasons this can happen:

• Faulty replacement parts leading a mechanism to work incorrectly or stop working altogether
• Improper installation or repair processes which lead to problems that result equipment in failure
• Damage caused during routine maintenance can occur that is initially unnoticed, thus causing the equipment to have a problem or fail completely
• Lengthy, prolonged maintenance work, which can cause problems for equipment designed to be in constant use

Examine and Respond

A thorough and exhaustive review of your preventive maintenance program can oftentimes lead to big efficiency improvements, leading to shorter periods of downtime and higher overall efficiency, both for the facility’s equipment and its workers.

Want to know more about preventative maintenance? Look no further than the maintenance experts at MaintenX!

Every facility manager has the same problem: how to do more with less? Facilities managers are under constant pressure to lower the price of almost everything. That’s why they are always on the lookout for new ways to cut repair costs. While deferred maintenance might shrink short-term costs, it often causes wide-ranging long-term costs. Below are some of the true costs of deferred maintenance

Lower Equipment Effectiveness

One big hidden cost of deferred maintenance comes from its effects on equipment efficiency. When equipment isn’t properly maintained, this increases the amount of energy needed to make it work correctly. As a result, the equipment has to work harder—and use more electricity, which drives up costs needlessly.

System Failure

Prolonged deferred maintenance may result in entire system failure. In HVAC systems, for example, certain components need to be replaced from time to time. That unfortunately means that the immediate price tag of replacing these parts could seem like a huge expense, but continued use of damaged or impaired components can likely cause failures across the entire system.

Put simply, the faster you can do a repair, the better for your facility and your bottom line. Being proactive can radically grow the efficiency of staff, your facility and the long-term health of your facility’s valuable equipment. Abandoning preventative and routine maintenance can only lead to trouble down the road—trouble that will be way more costly than taking the proper measures to fix problems as they occur.

Want to know more about the dangers of deferred maintenance? Call the maintenance experts at MaintenX today!

Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place in your facility? If not, you really should. Here’s why.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

First of all, what exactly is a disaster recovery plan, anyway? A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a thorough, documented process which aims to create a system meant to recover a business’s IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.

The purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to make sure you are ready to deal with the aftereffects of service outages caused by an emergency (hurricane, flood, tornado, terrorist attack, snow storm, wildfire, etc.”) and to restore services to the widest extent possible in the shortest possible timeframe.

Effective Communication is Key

When a disaster occurs, your best defense is communication. A well-planned communication strategy is of the most importance. That’s because a truly effective disaster recovery plan puts all of your company’s employees on the same page and guarantees that clearly outlined procedures are enacted—enhancing and safeguarding all communication within your company during this crucial time.

Rely on your Backup System

Make sure that your backup is running correctly and make sure it includes a supplementary full local backup on all of your facility’s servers and any relevant data in your disaster preparation plan. Run them as far back as possible. Ensure that they’re backed up to a secure location which will not be impacted by the emergency.

Want to know more about disaster recovery plans? Contact MaintenX today!

What are Energy Audits?

An energy audit typically involves a visit to your facility by a technician who assesses the efficiency of your facility’s energy consumption. This technician will walk around your facility, survey the property and point out areas where energy is being wasted.

An energy audit’s goal is to:

• Create a reference point for efficient energy use
• Gauge energy usage effectively
• Benchmark consumption compared to other facilities operating in the same field and conditions
• Find opportunities to reduce energy consumption and utility costs

What is a Utility Audit?

Electric and gas statements often contain billing errors. Utility bill audits can provide substantial monthly utility savings.

A utility audit is different from an energy audit in that a walkthrough of your facility is not required. Typical utility audits start with an preliminary review based on a facility’s recent utility bill. The technician will then look for billing errors, and then recommend a detailed audit, if one is needed. The audit process usually takes one to two days.

After the initial audit, the auditor will then:

• Work with your utility provider to assemble relevant paperwork
• Correct any billing errors
• Request any required refund from your utility provider
• Only get paid AFTER you’ve been credited with the refund

It’s essential that utility bill audits review all parts of a facility’s operations. This will maximize the benefits of the audit and save your facility the most money.

Want to know more about energy and utility audits? Call MaintenX today!