Preventive maintenance has emerged as a crucial strategy to safeguard equipment, extend asset life span, and ensure business continuity. It is about fixing issues before they become damage or liability.
A broken smoke detector, fire alarm, electric cable, and ventilation system are some of the common things that pose risks. These are also the instances that lead to poor customer experiences. Let's see why your business needs it and when you shouldn't go for it.
What is Preventive Maintenance?
It is a proactive approach to asset management involving regular inspections, scheduled maintenance tasks, and routine replacements to identify and attend to potential problems before they lead to major breakdowns, costly downtime, and production loss. It accounts for 30 - 50 percent of the total repair and maintenance costs as per the BOMA report. It includes activities you do to maintain your assets such as cleaning, repairs, lubrication, filter change, part replacement, and adjustments, while keeping the machine or equipment off. Proper preventive maintenance strategies can help you save more than 18% on equipment costs.
A general setup of businesses such as real estate or hospitality buildings involves systems such as lighting, network, and HVAC, which need to be constantly monitored and maintained for the efficient running of operations. Any negligence in it can lead to sudden breakdown of building assets and hampered operations.
Regular maintenance activities help prevent unplanned downtime, reduce the likelihood of equipment failure, and anticipate asset breakdown. Using maintenance PM software to handle the operations extends asset life cycles, increases productivity and return on investment (ROI), improves staff safety and environment, and prevents age-related failure.
Have you ever faced issues with HVAC preventative maintenance? If so, then you might also have experienced any of the conditions such as poor indoor environment, hazardous air quality, or hampered productivity.
Timely detection and resolution of asset issues can deliver invaluable preventive maintenance benefits for your business. They can prevent issues from developing into major safety or financial catastrophes. This can also help you bring things under control with little expense rather than having to spend heavily on fixing things while your entire business comes to a standstill.
1. Increase equipment lifetime
Most businesses in manufacturing often suffer from malfunctioning appliances and additional expenses either due to poor asset quality or lack of timely maintenance. This technique makes sure your assets are functioning in sound health for extended years and delivers a higher return on investment.
2. Prevent unpredictable downtime
An unexpected breakdown of equipment in a commercial real estate space not only affects operations and productivity but also leads to financial liability and unsatisfied customers.
Regular maintenance streamlines the building operations and increases the reliability of your assets, thus bringing accuracy to asset downtime forecasting and breakdown maintenance planning.
3. Reduce maintenance costs of high-value assets
The maintenance requirement of each asset may vary based on the type of the asset and the industry. As the value of the asset increases, so will the cost of its spare parts and maintenance.
A timely fix of the asset issue in a manufacturing business through maintenance or repair is cheaper than replacing the equipment and managing the damage caused by it.
4. Stay in control over budget allocations
If you know the warranty expiry date of each lighting fixture or faucet, you will have an idea of when it may break down. Then you will be able to forecast the expenses you can expect in your hospitality business for the year. This keeps you well-prepared against unplanned surprises and in better control over budget allocation.
5. Defective appliances draw more energy
A dirty and clogged AC filter consumes more power than a clean one. The reason, the occupant may need to set it to high-performance mode to get a conducive indoor environment.
The preventive technique ensures issues are detected and fixed on time so that the device is performing at optimum functionality at normal power consumption mode.
6. Enhanced safety of facilities
A malfunctioning fire alarm device increases the potential for fire hazards going undetected and poses uncontrollable risks to the building and occupants. This technique ensures you fix the issues even before a device malfunctions, thus ruling out chances of major hazards.
7. Reducing downtime, increasing revenue
A device with the lowest downtime contributes to enhanced productivity in commercial real estate spaces and manufacturing industries. This maintenance technique enables constant monitoring of your devices, thus making sure the occupants experience enhanced productivity and an optimum indoor environment.
8. Getting more out of property
While rising real estate rates make commercial spaces less attractive to tenants, making them profitable to tenants is important to increase its scalability. This asset maintenance technique increases building efficiency, thus indirectly leading to enhanced work productivity and increased demand for real estate spaces.
9. Hassle-free building occupancy
In the real estate, hospitality, or manufacturing industry, preventive maintenance benefits can help you avoid hazardous situations by helping you take maintenance measures before things go wrong. Thus providing your building tenants with a hassle-free experience.
What are the cons of preventive maintenance?
Even though preventive maintenance can save a business from multiple problems and deliver cost savings, implementing it can be a tricky thing and needs expert consultation to assess business requirements. Here are some of the disadvantages you need to consider before you plan it.
1. Training staff and realigning habits Implementing a new system of software to manage building assets poses a new set of responsibilities for the staff involved in the operations. Some may be technologically challenged, while others may be good enough to proceed with a little training.
Proper training needs to be provided for the staff to train them on the usage of the system and also should include training on regular technological updates, if any.
2. Considerable initial investment Maintenance PM software can be a potent solution for the maintenance of a building. However, it may not be a ready-to-use solution that requires customization to suit the business requirement.
Although these solutions demand considerable investment in the initial stages, they will gradually provide greater financial savings with time. The customer requiring customizations or add-ons needs to be flexible enough to accommodate additional investment requirements.
Summing up, Preventive maintenance is a proactive approach to address asset management challenges involving repair and downtime before they turn into liabilities. Although it comes with advantages that make it attractive for businesses, it demands considerable investment. Businesses must consider the cons and additional expenses incurred in getting the maintenance PM software customized for use.
