Creating a Greater Facilities Maintenance Plan with Gap Analysis

Your Facilities Maintenance Plan Today vs. Where You Want to Be in 2017

As 2016 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on your maintenance plans and budgeting strategies. How did you fare? Are you hitting your goals, or are you missing them? Did your expenditures stay on par with initial plans, or have a number of contingencies caused you to overspend?

Staying perfectly in line with budgets can be difficult, but having the right tools can make it all very manageable. Tools that help with daily facility management, metrics, and reporting enable you to conduct a comprehensive gap analysis of your resources today in comparison to your goals of tomorrow. Have you optimized your resource expenditures so you can reach your goals in 2017? In this post we’ll break down how you can get the best usage out of your assets to create a better facilities maintenance plan for the future.

Analyze Assets Today to Reduce Maintenance Costs Tomorrow

If you want to reach your end of the year goals, it’s important to analyze your assets today and understand what you need to get there. This can be difficult if you don’t have clear reports detailing all your metrics. Without seeing the full picture, short term solutions can appear to be viable options when in reality they end up costing more. For instance, some companies think they can simply hire service providers based on the lowest hourly rate to support their cost reduction initiative. This can be effective for clearing up immediate funds, but often leads to incurring unexpected costs, such as additional man hours or multiple trip charges.

A good example of this is the case of a retailer who wanted to make sure all of their locations were in top shape for the holiday season. Under corporate instruction, the managers of each location set out to find the lowest hourly rate service providers. While some stores stayed within budget, many had gone over their projected spending. Maintenance on heating systems consumed the bulk of facility budgets, leaving little to no room for cleaning services. This put the company in a tough situation where more money had to be budgeted to bring the cleanliness of the facilities up to the brand’s standards. In an effort to free up funds, the company assessed their expenditures and discovered that many of the newer facilities didn’t have much to do in the way of maintenance, but had already spent their entire budgets on cleaning. The excess spending left no additional room for budget reallocation. From store to store, hourly service provider costs were unpredictable and inconsistent, leading to a pile of invoices, a huge headache, and a bad position to start the new year.

This “lowest hourly rate” approach is ultimately not effective for reducing maintenance costs and can have a negative impact on your brand and budget. That’s why it’s important to have the right tools, like a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), a flat-rate service provider network, and an expert asset consultant who can analyze your business data and find where you could be saving money. Had the retailer put these systems in place before carrying out their maintenance plan, they would have had the information needed for strategic financial planning with predictable results. Newer facilities that required less maintenance could have had their budgets reallocated to the stores that needed it more. Predictive maintenance could have been done to avoid last minute repairs. Invoices for all locations would have been compiled and easier to manage. With the right tools, maintenance strategies can be optimized, allowing facility maintenance costs to be reduced.

What to Look for in a Quality Facility Management Tool

Start by evaluating the tools you are currently using to manage your facilities maintenance plan. Ask yourself:

• How easy is it to view all of your facilities reports? If each of your facilities expenditure reports have to be opened and reviewed individually, you’re doing more work than you have to.
• Do the tools you use allow for greater business insight and decision making? The average facility management tool can help display your metrics, but a great tool will consolidate all facility reports for greater insights that enable advanced decision making.
• How easy is it to keep up with your service providers and vendors? If your vendors are not part of a professionally vetted network, you may be taking larger risks if they aren’t properly certified and you could be paying more if their service fees are inconsistent.

So, how can you better manage these areas? Software technology today allows for consolidated, easy-to-read data of both budgets and invoices. This provides the opportunity to conduct a gap analysis of where you are now and where you need to be to meet your end of the year goals. With better management software and a trusted consultant, you can make more informed and practical decisions on how you should optimize your budgets to accomplish your goals. A quality tool will also be able to manage your service providers and help to consolidate their expenses.

Not only will you be able to see where all of your expenditures are going with management software, but you can get a better view of cost projections as well. Whether your goals for 2017 are to get a better handle on your asset management, save on service provider costs, or simply streamline processes, modern facility management software combined with a vetted list of service professionals will help you reach them.

Choosing the Right Tools to Reduce Maintenance Costs

There are a number of options for facility management software available, but you want the one that will give you the clearest view of all your expenditures. NEST Facilitate is a state-of-the-art CMMS tool that will help consolidate your data, allowing you to better manage, reallocate, and save on your budget. When using NEST Facilitate, you get the benefit of expert consultants who will analyze your expenses and pinpoint the areas in which you could be saving, giving you more time to focus on the work that’s important to you. Integrated with a vetted Independent Service Provider (ISP) network, you will be able to save even more with flat-rate costs that cut out contingencies that occur with standard hourly-rate service providers.

Ready to improve your technology now to reach your goals for 2017? Learn more about NEST!

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