The economy. It wreaks havoc on budgets when it’s down and most organizations plan for a down economy. Where does that show most clearly? In your budget, of course. In a maintenance budget the bottom line becomes extending the life of your assets for as long as possible to prevent or delay a capital expenditure hit to your already taxed budget.
As a facility manager, accurate data is necessary to track the life of an asset over time.
When the asset is first purchased, a long look at the variety of manufacturers you’ve purchased from in the past is essential. You’re looking for which manufacturer has sold you the most productive and least expensive asset over the lifetime of that asset. For example, if you’re looking for a refrigerator unit and you’ve got three from different manufacturers, a maintenance report and the costs associated with the maintenance will highlight which refrigerator unit has performed in the most cost effective manner over time. If your data isn’t already loaded in your CMMS, it’s easy enough to extrapolate or import from another source.
After you’ve made the decision to purchase, add the warranty information and suggested preventive maintenance dates. A good CMMS will flag any warrantied maintenance before you spend money on repairs covered by warranty. Using your data and any other accumulated repair data allows you to implement an intelligent preventive maintenance schedule designed to prolong the life of the asset.
Sometimes corrective repairs are necessary and unavoidable. By running regular reports on the repair costs for a specific type of asset, you can adjust your budget to manage the expense. Running these reports regularly will also help you when you run a vendor search in your CMMS to discover who does the best, most cost-effective and longest lasting work.
With the proper preventive maintenance plan, the data in place to help forecast your spending and a proactive mindset to maintain not only mission-critical equipment but to extend the life of every piece of equipment, the expense hits to your budget should be both manageable and predictable.
