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!
