Building maintenance is a job often done by building managers. Here, facility managers are supposed to focus on improving the quality of building maintenance and reducing costs to make a solid relationship with members. Additionally, building maintenance is all those activities done to ensure that a building is safe and that all building systems are runningaptly.
Assets or facilities overages deteriorates, and buildings are no exclusion, and this can ruin structural integrity. This ensures that a facility or building remains functional and comfortable for its users.
There are two types of building maintenance important for ensuring a secure and contented environment for tenants. They include: preventative, also known as planned maintenance, and reactive maintenance, also referred to as defect management. Preventative maintenance calls for a long life of the facilities such as clearing gutters, regularly painting walls, cleaning common areas, removing trash regularly. On the other hand, reactive maintenance responds to a breakdown of an asset.
Here are the most need-to-know ways to improve maintenance of a building.
Offer Training to Your Team
Improving your teams work by training them helps them know what they are supposed to do. Implementing different training programs can be more beneficial to your technicians. Your team needs practical training in that they can handle any repairs needed.
Regular training is needed thou may seem not that important, but this will help your team to be the more skilled reducing time they could have spent following rules or instructions. Always check on your teams’ performance gaps to see where they need help for improvement.
Asset Tracking
This is a crucial way of improving building maintenance, and it’s cost-effective. This helps to know whether work has been done as it keeps a history of the work order. Also, you will be able to know if a particular asset needs to be replaced or not.
Fixed asset tracking cuts you the energy of keeping all this information in your brain, or you need to go through loads of paper works. By tracking your assets, you get to track which assets are costing you the most and about productivity issues.Asset tracking helps employees save time by providing instant access to facility details, operating data and emergency procedures.
Credible Facility Management Software
This applies and helps out when you have to recruit new staff. The old staff needs to aid the new staff to stay on track and learn the rules of your facility; hence time get lost, and productivity goes down.
All this can be prevented by getting the right facility management software. Go for software with asset mapping and digitalized floor plans, which will aid your recruits to learn all the whereabouts of your facilities with ease. The right management software can help the new employee’s training easy as they get to learn in few weeks rather than months hence cutting down on the budget.
Automate Preventive Maintenance Schedules.
Preventative maintenance, as mentioned earlier, helps reduce maintenance costs and be one step ahead in increasing the lifespan of your assets. It is often more costly to fix a problem than it does to prevent it from occurring in the first place.
Careful Planning and Allocation of Resources
Facility managers find themselves overwhelmed by trying to maintain quality services even if having budget restraints, therefore, being under pressure to do more with less. Therefore, planning carefully on the allocation of the resources is necessary to a facility.
There are a lot of ways to how facility managers can plan on the facilities resources. In energy cost, a facility manager can recommend more environment-friendly energy sources like solar panels, use of natural lights, among others.
Have Emergency Response and Safety Plans
Emergencies can be either be natural disasters(floods), security breaches, among others. In your facility, you can implement handheld radios and walkie talkies, which can communicate when such emergencies occur.
Also, routine safety drillsand evacuation scenarios areparamount to your emergency preparedness for emergency response plans, including contacts of first responders, a list of regular occupants and a step-by-step emergency response guide.
Be Quick in Request-Response
This calls for world-class customer service. Always as a facility manager, prioritize your customers’ benefits. There are ways you can reduce maintenance request response times: you can switch from paper-based work, which is an old-fashioned way and move to a digitalized facility management system. Also, you can have up-to-date floor plans for each of your facilities for your technicians to know exactly where they are supposed to service.
Final Words
In conclusion, be it at work or your office, it could be quite annoying when a particular building system is not operating well, leading to a negative result. This is why building owners need to use all ways at their disposal that can help them keep and improve on their building maintenance. A facility manager must consider all the mentioned ways for improved building management for a win-win situation.
