No longer is facility maintenance the “necessary evil” where technicians sit around all day waiting for equipment to fall apart.
Nowadays, your maintenance team is the heartbeat of your organization.
Your facility can crumble without it.
Most organizations continue to view their facility maintenance team as a cost center.
Low efficiency, unmanaged resource allocation, and faulty equipment can lead to money lost rather than cash gained.
Is your maintenance team a cost center?
Over time, we’ve noticed many facility managers are still missing what it means to take control of their facility’s maintenance.
Using a CMMS with preventive maintenance (PM) that allows for the implementation of disciplined planning and scheduling practices is how facility managers can move their maintenance department from a cost center to a profit center.
Keep reading to find out how.
Use Planning and Scheduling
As simple as it may seem, planning is often a missed practice when managing maintenance
Some still identify with the “necessary evil” concept and conduct maintenance activities as such, waiting for the next piece of equipment to break before wasting the resources fixing it.
With discipline, you can help your team persevere.
You need to reduce your operational and equipment downtimes and reduce your costs associated with completing activities and tasks – it’s your overall production.
To help you put a plan in place, here’s a simple seven-step plan for achieving a reduction in all aspects of your operation.
- Prioritize your work.
- Develop checklists and specific steps for completing your work.
- Make sure you have the necessary materials and equipment available to perform work effectively.
- Produce a schedule of the work to be done for each equipment category associated with your facility.
- Complete the work on time as scheduled.
- Inspect the equipment for additional work to be completed.
- Digitally document the details for long-term analysis and historical records.
Are you currently taking this approach to managing your maintenance?
This is the time to utilize preventive maintenance practices to get the best results for your ‘profit’ center.
As a facility manager, this supports your objectives by allowing you to reduce the reasons for inefficiency.
You want resources allocated to the correct activities, at the right time, and for the right amount.
You also want to reduce the downtime of your equipment, requiring more attention from your workforce.
The more often you need to send staff to fix faulty or broken equipment, the more your resources are being over-utilized.
The more dollars being used up, the more your boss looks at you like a cost center.
Preventive Maintenance Software Supports Your Maintenance Foundation
As a central pillar to your organization, it’s imperative to execute your preventive maintenance plan efficiently.
Efficiency in your facility maintenance will lead to more profits.
More profits lead to infinity for your organization.
How do you use your preventive maintenance software to accomplish the goal of remaining or becoming a profit center?
The answer: Execute your planning and scheduling using an automated preventive maintenance solution.
It used to be that we would often hear of facilities that would wait for their equipment to fail.
It’s less likely we hear it these days, but that’s because facility managers are finding ways to prevent these drawbacks before they occur.
Preventive maintenance is one way to counteract the mishaps associated with a reduced workforce, poor management, over-utilized equipment, and overworked facility managers.
Consider what might be currently occurring without planning in place.
Your facility is a living, breathing organism consisting of engineers, technicians, vendors, materials, and equipment that all require attention now-and-again.
On top of it, you more than likely need to maintain proper safety standards to stay compliant, to keep you from losing your job.
Does that sound like a lot of stress and responsibility on your plate?
That’s because it is!
Are you sweating yet?
We are.
If you don’t have a solution or game plan in place, it’s a good time to start looking into one.
If you have an overturning workforce, resources being allocated to your business's wrong areas, and more responsibilities piling on your desk, the chance of you worrying about being more efficient moves down the list of priorities.
Doesn’t it?
You need to change this.
Efficiency is what gets you to where you need to be. It needs to be high on your priority list – if not the top! Identifying, prioritizing, and completing your maintenance activities as efficiently as you need to can be done with preventive maintenance software.
It removes the questions, gives you the answers, and helps you know what needs to be tracked and maintained and the frequency at which it needs to be.
A Preventive Maintenance Solution Drives Efficiency
Lead your organization to effective equipment usage, improved material and workforce allocation, and less operational downtime.
Be a profit-centric maintenance team.
Executing your simple plan using your solution will result in the efficiency required to accomplish this.
Here’s how.
A valuable system will give you the ability to organize and manage your preventive maintenance activities centrally.
The details of your maintenance can be recorded, tracked, and maintained from a single place.
Imagine being able to manage your preventive maintenance with ease from one activity detail.
Work to be done and all tasks, materials, labor, and equipment needed – in one place.
Easy for you to access and simple to understand.
That’s the key to your efficiency.
Can you see it yet?
Less time is being spent on the computer, and more time is being spent in the field getting your work completed.
Now you can easily create schedules and view them in a calendar format.
Some systems even allow you to manage your scheduled maintenance in the calendar format.
Add activities to the specific date and make changes as needed.
It makes understanding what’s being done and when a whole lot easier for you.
You know, a bird’s-eye view.
The stress of allocating staff to the right place, identifying what equipment always fails, “Do I have enough materials and equipment available?” and are your employees conducting inspections and completing work as expected, can finally subside.
Quantify Your Performance for Higher Profits
Sustaining this requires you to do a thorough analysis and dive deep into your numbers while getting everyone on board with your vision.
Not only are you working towards profits for the organization, but you’re also changing the facility maintenance culture.
Everyone needs to acclimate and accept the changes.
We wrote a blog post on the fear of change that you should check out.
We understand change is a hard fact that many want to avoid.
The article gives you valuable tips on how you can get over it and start being successful on your terms.
It may take some time to get everyone up to par.
The purpose is to create the plan, get your people up to speed, and execute using your preventive maintenance solution.
After that, focus on measuring and improving every aspect for a fully optimized profit center.
For the highest level of performance, you will want to use the reporting features available in your solution to measure preventive maintenance elements with the most impact on your facility.
Preventive maintenance summary reports will allow you to track multiple facilities, the status of all your activities, and associated tasks.
See a detailed look into the frequency of maintenance tasks and how you can improve the utilization of equipment for increased production quality and a reduction in inspections.
Finding the balance and knowing your priorities will support better business decisions.
From material costs to labor costs, the empirical data facilitates your key performance indicators so you can improve them.
Over to You
Define your plan, execute it, measure it, and use the data to propel your facility maintenance to higher profits.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and freshness.
