One of the considerations when managing a facility is looking for ways to extend the lifespan of your investments. Predictive and preventative maintenance programs provide facility managers with critical data and information that can help to prevent issues and costly emergency situations. Preventative maintenance strategies support greater facility utilization, building security, air quality, and overall facility operating efficiency. With the right mix of data analysis and preventative maintenance, facility managers can extend the life of their facility assets, reduce costs and improve tenant or employee satisfaction.
The Difference between Predictive and Preventative Maintenance
Predictive maintenance uses data and measurements to monitor the condition of your facility and its equipment and identify any potential problems. Predictive maintenance combines a variety of data points to estimate the timing of expected maintenance before equipment or system failure. Often utilizing sensors on equipment and building systems, predictive maintenance solutions can monitor temperature, acoustics, vibration, motion, and even particulate concertation in the air. These sensors allow a seamless real-time exchange of data to monitoring applications that recognize changes or spikes, alerting facility services teams of a potential issue or failure.
Preventative maintenance uses best practices, historical data, and manual inspections to determine the condition and performance of equipment, systems, and even facility infrastructure. Preventative maintenance can be used to predict, prevent, and diagnose problems. The process requires adequate planning and scheduling of facility services technicians or professionals like the team at Marden Services. Professionally trained technicians need to perform inspections and routine maintenance, replacing or adjusting essential system components to prevent wear and ensure uninterrupted reliability.
Predictive and preventative maintenance programs help facility managers determine the condition and performance of equipment, systems, and facility infrastructure. They allow your team to perform repairs and maintenance before failure, helping you plan for the future.
Why Predictive and Preventative Maintenance Matters
As adequately implemented preventative maintenance program can help you save money and improve bottom-line facility operating budgets. Proactive and preventative maintenance can be three to four times less expensive than traditional reactive maintenance practices.
All operations still depend on a combination of reactive, preventive, and newly evolving predictive maintenance techniques. Although some reactive maintenance is inevitable, the right combination of preventative and evolving predictive maintenance techniques can equip your teams and allow them to make more educated decisions. Here are some of the advantages of implementing a preventative maintenance strategy:
- Reduction in unexpected breakdowns
- Increasing asset life
- Enhanced system and equipment reliability
- Lower operational expenses for equipment servicing when required
- Increased production capacity
- Safer and healthier building environments
What Actions Should Facility Managers Take?
An effective maintenance plan requires a good strategy that involves stakeholders in financial planning, employs advanced technologies, and utilizes data to boost efficiency. Predictive and preventative maintenance programs can come with budgetary or internal knowledge barriers. Hiring a proven professional facility services firm like Marsden Services can help you assess and identify the best approach to optimize your investment. Here are some steps you can take to build a case for implementing a proper preventative maintenance program:
- Identify and build a list of all valuable equipment and systems
- Implement preventive maintenance and routine inspection plans
- Create an initial database including maintenance history and expense
- Analyze root cause or failure mechanisms
- Analyze your history to begin making failure estimates
- Consult with a facility services expert to develop a plan and potential ROI
Take Action to Achieve Greater Facility Efficiency
Predictive and preventative maintenance can help you achieve an increase in your systems’ life expectancy and performance. With everything operating efficiently, your tenants and employees will be happy, and your maintenance budget will also benefit as you realize lower utility and replacement costs. And with significant systems like your building HVAC operating at peak efficiency, the air quality will promote a healthier and more productive environment. Get started with the steps outlined above or contact a professional facility services provider like Marsden Services to help you achieve greater operating efficiency.
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