Cost Cutting Tips for Facility Management

Managing a facility may often include wearing a lot of unexpected hats. A facility manager, for example, needs to also play the role of a project manager, a civil engineer, a financial advisor, an emergency preparedness specialist, and many more. Operations like routine maintenance, cleaning, repairs equipment maintenance as needed all are part of developing management and ownership and as expected, these do incur some expected costs. 

It is true that there are always expectations for routine maintenance but whenever we talk of tightening the budget allocation, it is always the facilities management department that is the first to feel the crunch. Therefore, the important question here is if the budget constraint trickles in your direction, how would you be able to assure that your facility will continue to maintain high-quality standards? How will you be able to save your costs now and also for the future? 

How will you reduce costs?

As a facility manager, regulating your cost of operations is extremely important. Let us take a look at how you can reduce your overall costs in managing your facility:

• Reduce your overall relative maintenance requirements: as a facility manager, you need to be on top of your routine maintenance activities inside and out in order to reduce your reactive maintenance requirements. Some of the examples of reactive maintenance include:

1. Light fixtures operating successfully

2. Locks working properly

3. Door locks and seals 

4. Toilet flush

5. Air filters are being changed routinely

6. Drinking fountains are cleaned properly and are flowing well 

You need to create a routine checklist or use facility management software to record routine maintenance work that has been performed on a day-to-day basis. Stay ahead of the game with well-planned maintenance and cleaning cycle and this will reduce all your reactive maintenance needs. This will also be helpful in reducing the costs by eliminating the after-hours emergency repair works that are a result of equipment failure owing to lack of maintenance. 

• Making energy-efficient changes: upgrading the energy efficiency of your facility by making a few simple tweaks will help you save thousands. A few of the areas where you can actually make adjustments to achieve higher efficiency is HVAC and lighting. You can transform the older and high wattage bulbs with modern LED fixtures and control systems that can monitor space occupancy and switch lights on and off accordingly. As a facility manager, you can also consider replacing your HVAC handling units. In the initial stages, it might seem like a big expense but the return to investment and cost savings can be great. 

• Planning maintenance work in advance: if you focus on making improvements to your daily maintenance routine and cleaning schedule to incorporate preventive maintenance tasks will not just save you money over time but will also enhance the efficiency of your facility. Over the passage of time, maintenance tasks will start getting quick and the team will become more efficient. In the early phases, most of the maintenance operations might seem to take longer as certain things may be kept untouched for a long period of time. And as time pass, these tasks will not seem difficult or time-consuming.

• Information management: we all know how important information is in the facilities management sector. Daily maintenance work leads to piles of paper getting stored one after the other. Most of the times it is seen that when there is an emergency, facilities teams are not able to locate the right information at the right time. This is because when there are too many documents physically stored at a place, it becomes humanly impassable to organize and manage them. This often leads to a problem becoming a big one because a solution cannot be found at the time when it is needed the most. This is where facility managers can sort their important information and save costs by using a facility management app. You can very access to crucial facilities and equipment information in one single platform with the help of an app. These apps use the latest technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence that can extract information from building drawings. The technology of optical character recognition draws texts from images that are old and faded as well. These apps act as a single information management platform that also makes availability of information easy and simple. These therefore not just save time but also saves costs and helps you manage maintenance and management work faster.

When it comes to saving costs in facilities management, a lot of factors come to play. As a facility manager, the onus will always be on you to manage the overall costs and at the same time maintain high standards of maintenance in the facility.