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Lean management is overwhelmingly popular in modern businesses. By reducing wastefulness at the strategic level and implementing that into daily operations, you can help your company grow faster while spending less. Lean management methodologies often incorporate feedback from people at all levels, from executives to ground floor employees. This approach to lean management can also easily be applied to your maintenance protocol. 

Smart companies are starting to recognize the untapped potential of their maintenance staff and partners. These hardworking individuals can tell you a lot about your maintenance program and how to maximize it for performance and efficiency. Those who spend time with your facility equipment will have the greatest knowledge on measures for efficiency and improved performance. 

Therefore, in order to adopt a lean maintenance strategy, you must work closely with your maintenance staff. Decisions made by upper management may be slowing down your maintenance department or costing money and resources without your knowledge. Your maintenance staff will know how to make the right changes to obtain the best results. 

Adopting lean maintenance strategies may be as simple as upgrading equipment or scheduling routine checks on heavily-used equipment. Rather than using a reactive or run-to-fail maintenance strategy, you can invest in preventative repairs that reduce overall costs. When developing a strategy for your lean maintenance program, consider all of the following areas:

• Labor – Are you hiring or contracting experienced maintenance staff? Are you conducting wrench time studies to determine where your contractors are struggling to complete tasks? Are you hiring based on competency or wage? 
• Parts and equipment – Are you providing the correct tools for maintenance work? Are tools outdated or overused? Are your workers able to maintain a preventative maintenance schedule or has your equipment reached the end of its service life? 
• Utilities – Are you using efficient equipment that is water and energy efficient ? 
• Management – Are your maintenance management and facility management teams working together to solve problems? Are they in regular communication? Do they understand each other’s needs and priorities? 

Lean maintenance management can help to both reduce costs and increase facility performance. Contact your local MaintenX team to learn more about lean maintenance and your service options today.

At MaintenX, we strive to provide affordable services for businesses of every size. Whether you’re operating in multiple states or have one small, local facility, we work hard to provide services at a budget that works for you. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t understand the difficulties in accurately budgeting for annual maintenance costs. 

Because of the inherent volatility of maintenance servicing, facility managers struggle to accurately predict maintenance cost needs year to year. You may be making a mistake without realizing it. Below are just a few common ways in which we see facility managers miscalculate their maintenance budgets, and what you can do to fix it: 

You’re using zero-based budgeting. 

Zero-based budgeting has been adopted by many high-performing enterprises. While this approach is useful in many applications, it does not fully address maintenance needs based on intelligence gathered from the previous year. Your maintenance budget should factor in the service life of all equipment, the average maintenance costs, and include a budget for equipment upgrades as needed. 

The maintenance budget is arbitrary. 

Oftentimes, when facility managers are in a rush to finish their budget reports, they provide an arbitrary budget for maintenance, either adding or subtracting a percentage from last year’s budget. Again, this fails to take into account the many fluctuations in maintenance service and can pressure the maintenance management into cutting corners when they are not adequately funded. A holistic approach is best suited for ensuring your maintenance team stays on budget but is well-funded for all preventative tasks. 

Your budget is made without feedback from those “in the know.”

Management makes the budgets for most departments, but oftentimes it is the people on the floor who understand the needs and limitations of the equipment within a facility. Your groundfloor staff will know when equipment needs to be replaced better than you do, so ask them for input before you assign numbers to your annual maintenance budget. 

The budget is broken for the wrong reasons. 

When an unexpected breakdown happens, you have no choice but to break the budget and pay for a repair or replacement. However, this same logic is rarely applied to preventative maintenance tasks that could help you avoid these expensive breakdowns. Instead of only breaking your maintenance budget in emergencies, invest a little extra to prevent them from happening in the first place. This is the easiest and most efficient way to cut maintenance costs. 

Investing in proper maintenance now will increase reliability and reduce unexpected repair costs for the rest of the year. It is the easiest solution to your maintenance budgeting problems, and can be applied immediately. Consider retooling your maintenance budget and see what maintenance can do for you. 

Call your local MaintenX team today for a preventative maintenance consultation.

When you first buy a new car, you keep it in pristine condition. The pride of ownership makes you check your oil more often, take it to the car wash once a month, and maybe even learn to do a few of the maintenance tasks yourself. However, as the years go by, you see your automobile in a new light. 

Trips to the car wash become less frequent. You lose interest in doing the oil changes yourself. You may even start to skip some of the manufacturer-recommended maintenance services because they’re inconvenient and cost more than you want to spend on a hunk of junk. This slippery slope leads to mechanical problems, which make you even less enthused about caring for your car. 

The same is true in building maintenance. Most facility managers start with good intentions, but over time the constant service calls start to seem unnecessary. When you start looking for ways to cut costs, the maintenance department is the first to receive a hard evaluation. Unfortunately, this leads to less effective facility care and major problems down the road. 

Before cutting your maintenance service budget, consider these ways in which maintenance contributes to your profit margin: 

Improves your online reputation. 

Online reviews are a major contributor to buyer purchasing decisions. If you have a poor online reputation due to the physical state of your facility, selling your services will be that much more difficult. This is even more true with rental properties. Keep your online reputation in high standing with routine maintenance and cleaning service. 

Increases energy-efficiency in your building. 

Energy consumption is one of the single greatest expenses for facilities. By reducing the energy required to operate at peak performance, you can cut facility costs tremendously. A small investment in maintaining energy-efficient applications can create huge payoff in the future. 

Extends the service life of critical equipment. 

Maintenance services may seem expensive, but they are far more affordable than equipment replacements. Proper preventative maintenance can extend the service life of your machinery, leading to cost savings in the future. You will thank yourself in five or ten years when your HVAC or roofing is still holding up because you invested in minor maintenance services. 

Creates a safer, healthier place to work. 

Preventative maintenance does more than prevent repairs. It can improve indoor air quality, provide healthier access to water, and other benefits that your employees will notice. Preventative maintenance also reduces risk when employees operate on or near facility equipment. These impacts will set you apart from other local employers. 

If you are interested in learning more about your preventative maintenance options, contact MaintenX today!

Business models and strategies change every year, but one thing never ceases to be important: your bottom line. Companies plan most of their strategy around optimizing the bottom line, from marketing strategy to operational protocols and everything else in between. Much like your business, your building needs to be analyzed to ensure that it is meeting its goals in regards to maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. 

Your maintenance programs can help your company stay in the black in several ways. Reducing annual maintenance costs and simultaneously improving quality of service can be achieved when you work with a professional commercial maintenance service. Below are just a few ways in which maintenance service impacts your bottom line: 

Improve energy efficiency. 

Energy-efficient is an adjective often translated as “higher upfront cost” when facility managers shop for new equipment. Unfortunately, many business owners opt for the cheaper piece of equipment without fully understanding the cost benefits of energy-efficiency. When you install energy-efficient equipment and schedule regular preventative maintenance for it, you can see reductions in energy costs for decades. 

Avoid downtime due to major repairs and breakdowns. 

Any time your facility is not working at maximum performance, or must shut down entirely due to equipment breakdown, you’re losing money faster than you can earn it back. Breakdowns often occur because equipment is overrun and not maintained properly to keep it working at optimal performance levels. Instead of cutting costs upfront, you can save on expensive repairs by investing in routine maintenance now. 

Improve online reputation. 

Studies show that between 78% and 87% of people use online reviews to determine whether or not to work with a company or rent in a facility. Whether it’s a property renter or your next client, that person is far less likely to buy if the online reviews include complaints about the maintenance or cleanliness of your building. Use a proactive approach to your maintenance program, and you’ll avoid nasty reviews online that can hurt your reputation. 

Maintenance services help keep your building in tip-top shape, which helps you create a better environment for conducting business. If you want to make the most of your facility, schedule preventative maintenance services with MaintenX. 

MaintenX serves commercial facilities in over 13 states with electrical, roofing, plumbing, and HVAC repair services. We hire the most experienced contractors to ensure that when you call us, you get the job done right. Contact us today to see what MaintenX can do for you. 

Are you under pressure to cut costs? Whether you’re experiencing a slow season or have pressure coming from upper management, budget-cutting is one of a facility manager’s least favorite tasks. Unfortunately, cost-saving measures typically come from ancillary services, such as your maintenance department. 

However, have you ever asked why your maintenance costs are so high in the first place? Could you, instead, achieve the same results while reducing your budget? 

Maintenance costs are typically so high because the maintenance programs are inefficient. These problems in your maintenance plan may be causing unnecessary expense: 

• An untrained maintenance staff is making mistakes that lead to further issues
• Your maintenance plan only includes reactive maintenance
• You are not budgeting for equipment upgrades
• You do not have a schedule for routine maintenance
• You do not have an efficient work order management system
• Your maintenance staff is not getting to maintenance requests quickly
• You do not update your maintenance plan when new equipment is installed
• You do not have a maintenance plan

Effective maintenance starts with prevention. It is much easier, and much more cost-effective, to provide preventative service on equipment than it is to fix machinery that is breaking down. The time of emergency is never the time you want to be repairing or replacing failed equipment. The best strategy is always preventative maintenance. 

While preventative maintenance should be the core of cost reduction in your overall maintenance management, there are some things that cannot be prevented. Aging equipment has to be replaced inevitably, yet many facility managers fail to budget for these upgrades adequately. It is typically when the piece of equipment starts to fail that the facility manager starts looking into what upgrades are available and what they cost. If you plan ahead, however, you can avoid this surprise cost and have the cash saved for better, more efficient equipment. 

If your equipment is in working order, high maintenance costs could be caused by untrained staff’s mistakes. Companies that do not invest in proper training or an experienced workforce can pay the price when misoperation of equipment leads to damage. If you aren’t hiring the best for your HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electric, or general contractor services, consider switching to MaintenX. 

MaintenX helps you cut costs on unnecessary reactive maintenance. Our team of experienced contractors are there every step of the way to help you budget for new installations, provide preventative maintenance, and provide emergency service when problems arise. Our work order management system makes it easy for us to track the status of your service and send technicians out for 24/7 emergency repairs. When in need, call your local MaintenX team!

Preventative maintenance is one of the biggest time- and cost-saving measures a facility manager can invest in. However, this service is often overlooked by facility managers trying to cut costs. This approach to maintenance budgeting, while effective in the short-term, will cost your facility dearly when a critical piece of equipment breaks down and renders your space underperforming at best, or shut down at worst. 

Preventative maintenance is critical to any facility’s operations, but the benefits can be easily lost in the monthly costs. There are also things that preventative maintenance cannot achieve that should be understood before you begin your program. Let’s look at some of the things preventative maintenance can and cannot achieve: 

Preventative maintenance (PM) detects problems before they arise. 

A PM program can help your maintenance team detect defects, deteriorating equipment, and damage that will likely lead to failure. This information is incredibly useful when budgeting for upgrades or planning out your routine/corrective maintenance schedule for the month. 

PM does not fix out-of-date or malfunctioning equipment. 

PM programs will extend the service life of your functioning equipment, but it will not be able to give life back to your aging, wear-and-tear equipment. In some cases, the best option is to replace equipment if it is nearing the end of its service life and could be replaced with a newer, more energy-efficient option. 

PM reduces costs due to unnecessary downtime. 

When a PM program is implemented, your equipment will be in better shape. Over time you will see a decrease in rates of breakdown and overall facility downtime. This means, however, that you must trust your maintenance department when they schedule preventative maintenance services, order spare parts for emergencies, or request time to work in critical machinery. 

PM does not immediately affect breakdown rates. 

While PM programs are effective in reducing downtime due to equipment breakdowns, results are not immediate. For some programs, it takes a year or more to prove cost-savings. Managers must also consider alternative issues that could be causing equipment breakdowns. For example, studies show that approximately 63% of commercial equipment breakdowns are due to improper operation. You must address issues of reliability as a whole before expecting your PM program to do all of the heavy lifting. 

PM can make regular maintenance more cost-effective. 

When your equipment is well-maintained, corrective maintenance becomes easier and less expensive. A unit that is in proper working condition will require less time spent fixing issues and working on aging, inefficient parts. This will reduce overall maintenance service time and therefore your annual costs. 

PM does not stop normal wear and tear. 

While preventative maintenance can help reduce breakdowns and failures, it cannot stop your equipment from needing regular tuneups. It also does not affect the need for basic maintenance, such as replacing air filters in your HVAC or replacing roof shingles over time. If you incorporate these tasks into your PM program, however, you can reduce the number of maintenance calls and save money. 

MaintenX specializes in effective preventative maintenance programs for commercial facilities in 13 states. If you’d like to learn more about your options, contact us today!

When you encounter an equipment breakdown, you might not treat it like a big deal. Equipment wears over the years, and while it is a major inconvenience, there is a great likelihood that your problem can be fixed relatively quickly. But, what if we told you that an equipment breakdown is actually a sign of an unreliable system? An unreliable system that will likely cost your facility thousands of dollars if not addressed. 

The cost of unreliable equipment should be viewed as part of the bigger picture of your facility operations. Individual maintenance service calls are not typically expensive, but their increase in cost and frequency is a sign that your equipment is underperforming. Any form of productivity loss should be addressed by your management, and defined in terms of annual failure cost. 

By reducing the complexity of unreliable facility systems to individual equipment failures, you lose sight of the overall problem at hand. When failures are given a monetary value rather than simply counted each month, they can suddenly seem much more important to upper management. The lost gross margin, repair costs, cost of downtime, and other figures add up very quickly when an equipment failure is not addressed proactively. 

This financial approach to calculating maintenance effectiveness can help you and others in management prioritize preventative and reliability-centered maintenance. Fortunately, most facilities see 80% of their maintenance costs drained from 20% of unreliable equipment. This can easily be fixed with a proper upgrade or a more thorough preventative maintenance schedule. This is where MaintenX steps in. 

MaintenX offers preventative maintenance and installation services for businesses in 13 states. We work with experienced local contractors to ensure that your service is delivered on-time and by the experts. Whether you’re looking to give your preventative maintenance protocol a boost or are budgeting for equipment upgrades, we are the place to call for all of your maintenance service.

When trying to achieve higher levels of productivity in the workplace, several different things come to mind. Designer office spaces, work-from-home options for employees, and visual management systems are often the first of suggestions that managers will use to speed up or reduce costs for daily operational tasks. However, there is another way you can improve employee morale and efficiency and it will cost you next to nothing. Can you guess what it is?

Water. That’s right, the simple accommodation of having access to filtered water has proven to help improve self-reported employee productivity. Recent studies have shown that the availability of drinking water throughout the day helps more than the office coffee maker, and can even be more effective than different managerial styles and traditional methods of productivity training. Here’s what the recent Hydration in the Workplace Report had to say.

In a survey of more than 6,300 respondents:

• 72.6% reported that access to water during work hours improved overall wellbeing 
• Over 20% stated that access to drinking water would increase their likelihood of staying at their jobs. 
• 95.4% reported that water intake is beneficial to individual concentration and productivity; only 80.8% said the same about coffee and 47.3% said the same for energy drinks. 
• 70% of survey participants believe that their employer could be doing more to reduce single-use plastic waste, but 40% believe that their employer has no interest in doing so.
• It is estimated that nearly 19 billion plastic bottles could be reduced if workplaces offered drinking water to their employees.

Clean drinking water can benefit your company in more ways than one. If you invest in providing water for employees, they will be healthier, more satisfied, and more productive while at work. These benefits will grow within your company tenfold if employees are encouraged to drink water while at work on a regular basis.  

Clean water starts with clean pipes. In order to keep your water clean and employees happy, you must first talk to your local MaintenX team about preventative maintenance services for your entire plumbing system. We offer affordable preventative services, as well as timely and efficient emergency services to keep your facility running smoothly. 

Talk to your local MaintenX today to get started!

Facility upgrades are costly, no matter what. Even if they provide energy-efficient savings over time, the upfront costs of renovating or moving to a more advanced facility can be prohibitive. However, there are certain areas of existing facilities that can be retrofitted to save on upfront costs while including modern technologies in your operations. 

Before retrofitting your facility with energy-efficient appliances and equipment, it’s important to calculate the total cost of the upgrade. When you retrofit a facility that was designed to accommodate certain equipment, you may find additional expenses are incurred once you replace that equipment. Conducting a facility audit will help you better understand how all of the moving parts of your facility work together before replacing any old equipment.  

Fortunately, once you retrofit your facility, you will be able to see immediate energy and cost savings. Resources your business uses everyday — including water, sewage disposal, and electricity — incur costs that could be significantly decreased with an energy-efficient retrofit. This will make your business more sustainable both environmentally and economically. 

Energy-efficient upgrades can also earn you money back when you apply for government incentive programs and rebates. Many energy-efficient appliances and equipment qualify for these programs, putting extra money in your pocket for future investments. When you maximize these benefits and cost savings, you can easily pay for your retrofit in a matter of months. 

There are several ways in which you can easily and effectively retrofit your facility. One way is to upgrade the essentials, such as your plumbing and HVAC systems. HVAC units easily account for a third of some buildings’ energy consumption. By retrofitting with an energy-efficient air conditioning and heat pump system, you can reduce monthly energy costs which add up quickly. 

However, you need to audit and budget beforehand. Many older buildings are constructed around the original HVAC and plumbing systems. You can’t retrofit a facility like this without careful research and an understanding of your facility as a whole. This is where your local MaintenX team steps in. 

MaintenX can help you renovate your facility with expert consultation and installation services.

At MaintenX, our goal is to provide effective preventative maintenance programs to all of our clients. Most clients implement these programs in order to save on costly repairs and reduce downtime. However, there is an even more crucial element to preventative maintenance that most facility managers overlook: safety. 

Preventative maintenance makes your facility a safer place to work. It prevents dangerous shutdowns and malfunctions that can lead to serious onsite injuries. This is the first and foremost reason for why we provide thorough preventative maintenance checks. Without this precaution, your employees or tenants may end up in trouble. 

Services such as fluid checks, replacement of old pipes, and gauge checks can not only save your equipment but can save those who operate it. Other maintenance tasks, such as HVAC and roofing maintenance, can help improve the health and safety of your facility overall. Below are just a few of the ways you can make your facility safer through preventative maintenance service: 

Roof and ceiling maintenance. 

Poorly maintained roofing can lead to dangerous circumstances in the event of a storm. Even sturdy roofing can develop leaks, cracks, or lose shingles in inclement weather. If your roof is not well-maintained, it could collapse if pushed beyond its limits by rain, wind, and falling debris. Invest in proper roofing maintenance to protect your employees and facility from storms. 

Leak and crack planning. 

Your walls, windows, plumbing, and facility equipment ages over time. When this happens, leaks and cracks in heavily used equipment are bound to occur, and as the facility manager, you should be prepared. Work with your maintenance team to create an immediate plan for preventing disaster due to leaks and cracks. And, if you start to notice wear and tear, contact your MaintenX team immediately. 

Maintain your HVAC system.

Your HVAC system doesn’t just keep your tenants comfortable inside. It provides a crucial service to your facility at all times: ventilation. Problems with HVAC systems may not result in immediate injury, but it can result in respiratory illness. Always follow the manufacturer recommended maintenance schedule for your HVAC system to prevent tenant or employee illness due to poor indoor air quality. 

If you need reliable, trustworthy preventative maintenance service, contact your local MaintenX team. We have over 40 years of experience working with local businesses to keep your facility safe and running efficiently year-round.