A planned maintenance programme (PMP) is the most logical solution to help identify areas of your building that will need regular maintenance and areas that need urgent work, therefore allowing you time to accumulate the necessary funds
Planned or preventative maintenance refers to taking a proactive approach to the maintenance of your facility. Being proactive helps to ensure that smaller issues are identified before they escalate meaning there is less possibility of business downtime.
Employing a comprehensive planned, preventative maintenance schedule from MSL will help put your mind at rest that any repairs and maintenance is taken care of before it escalates into wider problems. This can help alleviate the stress of maintenance from employees and allow more time to concentrate on other important aspects of your business.
- Decrease Energy Bills
Regularly maintaining systems, such as lighting, central heating or AC units, will ensure that they run efficiently which, in turn, means that they use less energy, helping to reduce your energy bills. In fact, bills can be reduced anywhere from 5% – 40%, which can be a significant saving for your business. At MSL we also offer an ESOS assessment service to identify cost effective, energy saving measures for large undertakings.
- Saving Money
Planned maintenance means that all aspects of your premises are checked regularly, and any issues are fixed before they become bigger problems. This can improve upon the lifespan of your lighting systems for example, as with regular checks they are less likely to fail and issues can be resolved efficiently. This saves you money on expensive replacements and ensures you get the most out of your investment.
Similarly, unexpected problems such as a roof leak can cause your business to have to shut down completely whilst appropriate repairs take place. This can cause loss of revenue and unhappy customers. Planned maintenance can ensure regular checks of the fabric of the building take place, helping to identify and repair small issues which may lead to that larger leak.
- Safe Working Environment
Regular maintenance of your facility ensures that all aspects of your premises are how they should be. This minimises any dangerous incidents and makes your facility a safer and healthier place for both your staff and customers. Additionally, many facilities management companies, like MSL, offer compliance maintenance as part of their property maintenance plan. This means that you can be assured that your facility complies with all health and safety legislation, helping you to avoid costly legal fees, and keeping your facility a safe place to work.
- Peace of Mind
Knowing that your facility is being taken care of by a comprehensive maintenance scheme means that you have peace of mind, and can continue with the day to day running of your company safe in the knowledge that everything is being done to ensure your premises run smoothly and safely.
- Prevents Breakdowns
It goes without saying that as your equipment is being regularly checked for faults, any potential defects can be spotted early and repaired before they progress and turn into full blown, costly, breakdowns.
- Greater Life Expectancy of Assets and Equipment
Replacing office equipment is incredibly costly, whether it’s simply a broken computer or an entire lighting system, being able to reduce the likelihood of them being completely replaced is a definite plus. By introducing a planned maintenance schedule to check your equipment, you are able to fix most problems before they become too big and the entire piece of equipment needs to be replaced, thus maximising their life expectancy and value.
- Time
By employing a company to undertake your planned maintenance schedule you are giving yourself back time. Time you don’t need to be thinking about your equipment and possible breakdowns, and instead can be undertaking the important things, like meeting your customers or ensuring you are making healthy profit margins!
- Protecting Your Investment
A property that is well maintained ensures that you have a much more saleable asset than one that has a large amount of issues that require attention. Should you want to sell in the future, these problems may put off potential buyers or lead them to make an offer that is much lower than you would wish. So, investing now (in a planned maintenance program) really does have a knock-on effect for any future investments.
- Business Continuity
Business continuity is highly important in order to remain profitable and trustworthy. Should your retail business for example have to shut unexpectedly due to unplanned maintenance, this could impact on the loyalty of your customers. The same would be true of an office which would be unable to answer customer calls due to closure during maintenance work. Ensuring a planned maintenance schedule is in place will help business continuity as by conducting regular inspections issues will be identified before they escalate. Any repairs can also be undertaken in line with your business opening hours to minimise disruption and keep your customers happy. Performing maintenance outside of trading hours can also help to reduce downtime and prevent impact on profits.
- Happy, Returning Customers
Customers want a company that can deliver, on time and with minimal issues. Difficulties mean delays will occur whilst being dealt with, leading to annoyed customers who may possibly not return. Planned maintenance ensures that these issues are reduced, and your customers remain happy.
Maintenance is essential to reduce degradation of buildings and prevent unnecessary damage, ensure they operate at optimum efficiency, protect the health and safety of occupants and those in the vicinity, and ensure continued compliance with statutory requirements.
It can inform plans for new buildings; determining the causes of defects can help prevent re-occurrence or repetition.
Very broadly, maintenance can be:
- Reactive maintenance (to repair something faulty)
- Planned preventive maintenance (scheduled and can prevent damage from occurring)
‘Planned preventative maintenance’ (PPM), the second of these maintenance approaches, is a type of asset management strategy. The RICS defines it as the intention to “ensure buildings and their components function adequately, preserve the value of the building, satisfy legal obligations and achieve best value in terms of built assets during the occupancy phase of the building”.
Reactive work can be inefficient, costly, and (from my own professional experience) result in catastrophic failures such as water ingress or critical structural damage.
A comprehensive PMP also works well alongside a ‘life-cycle cost’ approach to building projects. Together these systems allow critical decisions to be made relating to longer-term and capital costs that ultimately affect asset performance, longevity, disaster resilience and sustainability.
Reservations about instructing a planned maintenance programme range from ‘do we really need it?’, through to tension between technical advice and the budgets and service charge levels demanded by commercial and residential occupiers.
Historically some clients have been reluctant to plan a reserve fund for planned maintenance, preferring to rely on warranties and the latent defects period. I firmly believe however that a forward thinking approach is vital to inform future internal budgets and continually improve project specifications and performance.
For organisations with tenants, unless there is adequate planning, lessees can find that expensive projects such as lift replacements are necessary but that they lack adequate reserves to cover them