Every turn of a wrench costs your organization. Repairs eat into your maintenance budget and can drain other resources, like staff and energy. Finding ways to cut costs is easier said than done for organizations already operating lean; however, even some minor operational changes can significantly impact your maintenance costs.
We have 5 questions for you. How many can you answer “Yes” to? The more of these best practices you achieve in your maintenance plan, the bigger difference they can make.
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5 Ways to Cut Your Maintenance Costs
Are you doing everything you can to keep maintenance costs to a minimum? Here are 5 effective ways to cut costs and optimize your maintenance plans.
1. Do You Have Standardized Operating Procedures?
When your team receives a work order request, how does the work get assigned to the appropriate technician? How do you capture vendor data—like certificates of insurance?
If you do not have answers to these questions or other common operating procedures, it is likely serving as a cost leakage for your department. Setting standardized operating procedures can streamline work requests, improve your team’s operational efficiency and ultimately drive down your operating costs.
2. Are You Using Computerized Maintenance Management Software?
Using a CMMS solution like vx Maintain can help you centralize your data and automate your maintenance activities. As a result, everyone on your team works from the same playbook. It makes it easy to implement your standard operating procedures and simplify the work order request process. In addition, it tracks every data point related to your maintenance activities—making it easy to pull reports, set benchmarks and understand where you have room for improvement.
3. Is Time Dedicated to Preventive Maintenance?
Repairing broken-down equipment can cost up to 5 times more than the same repair done in a planned manner before failure. However, preventive maintenance often falls to the bottom of the to-do list as higher priority activities take precedence.
Making sure your team focuses a portion of their time on preventive maintenance can significantly reduce your maintenance costs and, in turn, prevent issues with breakdowns.
4. Are You Analyzing Your Data?
Gathering data serves as one piece of the puzzle, but it means nothing unless you analyze what you collect to identify trends. Using key performance indicators (KPIs) and comparing them against benchmarks that you set can help you understand where you may be lacking. This gives you an opportunity to dig in to see how you can improve.
For instance, say you notice that your team rarely meets its service-level agreements. Reviewing the metrics behind the data may indicate that they are overburdened with work and you need to add more staff to react to issues in an appropriate timeframe.
5. Do You Evaluate Your Vendors?
Working with vendors can either be a cost-savings or a drain on your budget, depending on how well they perform. Track your vendor performance to help you understand how you can cut costs among your external partners.
