Choosing The Right Building Maintenance Plan
It’s a foregone conclusion that all buildings will need some kind of maintenance each year. The problem facility managers face is deciding what kind of maintenance plan to utilize. Is it best to be reactive, only utilizing contractors as necessary? Or, is it a better solution to schedule preventative maintenance throughout the year, even if you don’t appear to need it? Choosing the right building maintenance plan for your business can be challenging, so let’s look at four approaches you could take.
Preventative Maintenance
Preventative Maintenance is the opposite of reactive. It involves tasks such as inspections, planning, & action plans. For example, rather than wait for a roof leak, a Preventative Maintenance plan would have a biannual roof inspection performed with potential future problems addressed today.
Preventative Maintenance can have an ongoing cost, such as monthly agreements, or scheduled appointments even if there are no visible signs of potential failure. Generally speaking, however, it’s a more cost-effective method in the long term than Reactive Maintenance, which .
Reactive Maintenance
Did you recently discover a leak in your commercial roof? Or has there been a noticeable drop in air quality? Both of these, and so many other facility issues, are often the result of a breakdown with a particular component or fixture within your building.
Effectively, these are emergency issues and they’re handled via Reactive Maintenance. It’s the “if it isn’t broke, don’t touch it” mentality that, while it can save money in the short term, frequently leads to higher costs in the end.
Predictive Maintenance
Condition-based monitoring is a hybrid model between the Reactive and Preventative plan approaches. We call it Predictive Maintenance, and it looks for typical failure points to proactive plan for problems before they happen.
As a basic example, let’s assume your central copier has an expected shelf life of 10,000 hours before requiring service, and 20,000 hours before failure. Predictive Maintenance would evaluate the usage time and schedule service before either of these milestones happen. This approach prefers proactive monitoring, rather than set service intervals such as with a Preventative approach.
Renovations
You may not think of Renovations as maintenance, but they’re just as much a part of your annual budget as repairs or inspections. Renovations look to improve the quality of the working environment, updating fixtures and features with more energy-efficient solutions. Renovations can be Reactive, Preventative, and even fall into the Predictive approach as well. How you plan for them can be a mixture of all three or something else entirely.
Integrated Facility Maintenance programs are a great solution
As you’re evaluating Reactive, Preventative, and Predictive Maintenance options as well as Renovation needs, you may feel somewhat overwhelmed. That’s where an Integrated Facility Maintenance program comes into play. IFM takes all four approaches and combines them into — you guessed it — IFM addresses all facility needs. Rather than settling on one solution, IFM companies can help you utilize all of them correctly.
If you’d like to learn more about our IFM program and how it can ease your maintenance plan worries, contact us for a free consultation.
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