Experienced facility managers will tell you that no 2 days are ever exactly alike in a modern and busy facility. It’s not uncommon for them to have their hands full daily while working to keep all the systems and processes in their facilities running efficiently.
But whether large or small, commercial, industrial, or residential, there are some common facilities maintenance problems that FMs need to identify. By doing so, they will be in the best position to proactively resolve them. We’ll highlight some of the major problems below:
Facilities Maintenance Cost Containment
The problem of cost control is a constant source of concern in facilities maintenance. Maintenance teams have to keep their facilities running efficiently regardless of limited budgets and this equates to the pressure to do more with less. For the quality of services to remain optimal, facility managers and their teams need to work together and control the overall operational costs in their buildings.
They can start by making even seemingly small changes in the following areas:
1. Budget planning
Plan for all potential costs whether fixed or variable and always include a buffer to absorb emergency expenses. Track your maintenance costs and financial information with digitized reporting tools so that you can quickly catch abnormal spending before it escalates.
2. Inventory management
Do you know that you may have expensive items in your spare parts inventory that have been idle for months or even years? That’s capital that could have been used elsewhere. Unfortunately, this is a common scenario in many facilities, especially where they still utilize manual or paper-based inventory management. You stand a better chance to keep your inventory cost-efficient when you use automated inventory management. Also, it helps with generating work orders, monitoring pricing, and helping to quickly compare your vendors.
3. Energy management
There’s no escaping the fact that one of your major monthly expenses will be energy costs. However, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that about 30% of the energy used in buildings is unnecessary. You can save your facility this problem by trying out more environmentally friendly options like using more natural light or LED lighting or deploying energy management tools.
Poor Data Management and Insights
Facility maintenance is a very busy job. On a very large facility, a couple of days is enough time for a facility manager to get swamped with paperwork if there is no proactive system for managing data and records. Furthermore, poor or inadequate data management usually implies that the organization can’t leverage the insight that their data offers.
For example, we discussed cost control in the previous section. How can a facility manager hope to control costs if they can’t easily track their maintenance expenses on a day-to-day basis? To get ahead, they’ll need to capture accurate and reliable maintenance data then organize and store in a central repository like CMMS or IWMS. Organized maintenance data creates a reliable foundation for making informed and strategic decisions.
Handling Asset Failure
Asset failure is undesirable and it’s a critical problem in facilities maintenance. In every industry you could imagine, it remains an inevitable issue. Asset failure can cause anything from catastrophic safety and environmental accidents to excessive production losses especially with regards to aging assets.
This is a widely recognized problem.
Having said that, asset failure can be minimized through:
- Mobile CMMS: quick information exchange and equipment monitoring on the go.
- Planned maintenance: routine or preventive maintenance strategies rather than reactive (run-to-failure) maintenance will not only save costs but reduce operational worries as well.
- Predictive maintenance: for high-risk and mission-critical assets.
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Axxerion’s innovative and intuitive platforms don’t guarantee that all your facilities maintenance problems will vanish. That’s unrealistic. Rather, they will empower you and your maintenance team with the best tools on the market for minimizing these and many other facilities maintenance challenges.
Would you like to know how? All it takes is a few minutes to schedule a demo. Let’s see how we can provide tailor-made solutions for your organization.
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