How to Better Maintain the Buildings You Manage
Maintain the Buildings: Whether you’re in charge of a single establishment or a large district with dozens of buildings, you’ll know that keeping on top of repairs and maintenance isn’t just about practical work. It’s also about managing people, assets, and budgets, and keeping track of task orders and net spending.
With all of these tasks to juggle, it’s no wonder that most building managers struggle to run their teams efficiently. This article is all about how you can change that, using a combination of smart processes and advanced technology to better maintain your buildings, facilities, or sites that you’re currently responsible for managing.
Table of Contents
Your People
Maintenance doesn’t happen at the click of a button or the sending of an email; it’s something you’re relying on people to perform – either your permanent staff or third parties that you bring in to do certain jobs. Making sure you’re confident in these people is a smart way to begin tightening up your maintenance responsibilities, ensuring that your workers diligently perform their work to budget and deadline.
That means hiring wisely and inspecting work regularly to ensure that what’s reported back to you is the truth. Meanwhile, if you’re engaging with third parties to work for you from time to time, make sure you’re bringing in people you can trust. Establishing a pool of these people that you can trust will help you complete more orders reliably.
Management Systems
As a building or facilities manager on the Maintenance & Operations team, your focus is often divided between complaints, inventory, budget, and the technicians you’ll send out to resolve issues. That’s a lot to manage, and manual, paper-based systems can take a long time to compose, track, and register into a system. Luckily, digital systems have been developed to help building or site managers keep track of all the moving parts in the maintenance process.
By engaging with a work order management system, you’ll be able to monitor which jobs are urgent, how much they’re costing you to resolve, and which technicians might be available to work on them. It’s a useful overview of your responsibilities, and you’ll be able to track your costs and assets easier with a platform that stores all your data in one place.
Repeat Work
A large proportion of your maintenance is regular, making inspections of your sites or ensuring that problem areas are checked to ensure that preventative action can be taken. Those managers who are well set up to ensure that repeat orders are carried out and signed off on won’t just be better at complying with maintenance regulations – they’ll spot issues before they become more serious and costly.
It’s crucial that building or site managers create systems that account for these repeat orders. Instead of having to be on top of these every week or month, automating these work orders – via a digital system or calendar – will help you refocus on the more pressing issues that develop on your sites. Furthermore, you’ll need to make sure you have access to personnel to do these maintenance jobs in order to stay on top of the work.
