Month: March 2015

How to Minimize Maintenance Management Labor Cost?

ABCs of Advanced Maintenance: Schedule Compliance Ratio

In our last installment, we looked at the first key metric you should calculate when evaluating your maintenance operations: Maintenance management Cost as a Percent of RAV (Replacement Asset Value). In broad terms, this metric indicates whether you’re spending too much on maintenance.

So let’s suppose you’ve used your maintenance management software to perform this calculation for your company, and discovered that your maintenance management cost is high (or you’re in the benchmark best practice range, but want to become world class). Now what?

It’s time to drill down into different facets of your maintenance operations to zero-in on problem areas. And once again, the data you’re tracking in your maintenance management software will prove invaluable.

Since labor typically tops the list of expenses for any company, it makes sense to look there first if you find that your maintenance management costs are too high. The key question is, are you getting the maximum amount for every dollar you’re spending on labor?

Answering this question is straightforward–all you need to do is calculate your Schedule Compliance Ratio using data from your maintenance management software. First you’ll need to find the total number of labor hours that have been allocated on all of your work orders over a given period. In ManagerPlus, all you need to do is go to the Reports Module and select the “Work Order Labor Count” report under the Work Orders section.

Work-Order-Labor-Count_resized-2

Continue reading “How to Minimize Maintenance Management Labor Cost?”

Maintenance Benchmarking with CMMS: How Does Your Company Compare?

ABCs of Advanced Maintenance: Maintenance Cost and Replacement Asset Value

For many companies, efforts to streamline maintenance operations tend to follow a “fire, ready, aim” progression. Management wants to see improvements, but everyone has a different idea about how this should be accomplished, and pretty soon there are a dozen different initiatives underway with no unified, measurable objective.

To make matters worse, these companies often use maintenance management software to track and manage maintenance operations at different levels (maintenance techs use paper systems while managers rely on spreadsheets, etc.). This makes it next to impossible to both accurately determine what initiatives need to be prioritized, and to roll them out effectively.

Thus, the first and best step any company can take is to implement a CMMS software to centralize maintenance operations. Companies are often surprised at what they find when they start tracking their operations properly, and if there’s one thing that can cut through the noise of different ideas and opinions, it’s good, solid data.

Consistently tracking data on all maintenance costs, for instance, will make it much easier to benchmark your operations and determine where you rank among your peers. With this data, you can calculate your company’s Maintenance Cost as a Percentage of Replacement Asset Value (RAV), which is a perfect benchmark metric to start with.

In ManagerPlus Enterprise, you can run an Asset Total Cost of Ownership report for an instant look at how much material and labor you’re putting into maintenance for any asset, or for all of them together. The “Work Orders” column shows a total of all labor, inventory and other costs that have gone into the maintenance of any/all of your assets.

Asset-Total-Cost-of-Ownership1

Continue reading “Maintenance Benchmarking with CMMS: How Does Your Company Compare?”

3 Ways Facility Management Software Helps Keep Clients Happy

 

Occupancy is always at the top of every facility owner’s list of priorities—keeping current clients happy while attracting new business is the key to profitability.

The key to client happiness is, in turn, a function of facility condition and overall costs. This is where facility managers and maintenance personnel come into the picture.

They are immediately responsible for addressing maintenance needs, ensuring that facilities are helping clients meet their objectives. For your typical facility, this might be where their responsibility ends: satisfying basic needs in order to retain clients that are already there.

Elite facilities, on the other hand, bring a proactive outlook to the cost equation, looking for ways to lower overall operating expenses so they can pass some of these savings to their clients. Here are three ways you can accomplish this in your facility.

+ Minimize turnaround time on maintenance requests. Before any proactive, cost-cutting measures can get underway, you’ll need to have a solid system for scheduling and managing facility services.

They only way to carve out additional time for proactive maintenance and facility upgrades is to minimize the resources typically devoted to maintenance emergencies. Clients have cut average turnaround time on maintenance requests from 4 or more days to 24 hours or less with facility management software. Continue reading “3 Ways Facility Management Software Helps Keep Clients Happy”