Facility managers know that keeping a property in tip-top shape is no easy feat. In fact, there are so many facets of facility support that it can be challenging to know where to start – much less how many people you’ll need to get all the jobs done well. Here’s our advice for creating a building maintenance plan, areas you’ll want to consider, and how to hire help as needed so you can ensure you’ve got the resources to support a safe, clean, and functional facility.

Create a Building Maintenance Plan

Whether you’re managing a small preschool or a large university, a mom-and-pop shop or a big box chain, a boutique hotel or a sprawling resort – you need to ensure you have a building maintenance plan in place for ongoing tasks and the staff members who will complete them.

What is a facility maintenance plan? Simply put, it’s a roadmap for what needs to be done in each area of maintenance at your facility, who will be responsible to get the tasks done, and the timelines and costs associated with each. Start by mapping out each area of your facility so you can better group your maintenance tasks – more on that below. Then, start listing what needs to be done. This typically falls into two buckets: Reactive Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance.

What Is Reactive Maintenance?

Reactive maintenance involves repairs on things that currently are not working. This bucket of tasks on your facility maintenance plan will involve things like fixing broken faucets and faulty plumbing, repairing lighting and HVAC systems that are causing issues, and stopping gas leaks.

Some tasks will be more urgent than others. For instance, losing heat during winter or losing electricity in a classroom will be more time-sensitive to fix than a hallway water fountain that’s not running properly. For urgent tasks, you can further group these under “emergency maintenance” to better prioritize your facility maintenance projects.

What Is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance involves making repairs and upgrades to assets that are working but may be getting outdated. For example, replacing a light bulb, changing an air filter, or cleaning your facility’s grounds are tasks that might all fall under the preventive maintenance umbrella.

Preventive maintenance tasks are less urgent, but if not taken care of, they could turn into reactive maintenance tasks in short order. It’s typically cheaper in the long run to prevent problems from occurring than it is to fix something after it’s broken. Include these preventive maintenance tasks on your facility maintenance plan so that they don’t go unattended, and set your facility up for success in the future.

Completing Your Facility Maintenance Plan

What is the purpose of maintenance planning? Once you’ve identified all the tasks your facility needs, you can more effectively schedule projects and staff them appropriately. You can also examine your budget to see which projects may need to wait, versus which ones can happen in the near term.

For this process to work, you’ll need to prioritize your projects, assign the appropriate staff members, determine a schedule, and create work orders for all of the tasks you’ve outlined. You might also jot down things like item numbers and parts needed, the expected return on investment (ROI) of the building asset, and whether the task is one-time or recurring. Once each task is complete, you can note this on your facility maintenance plan as well.

Here are some areas of your facility you might consider as you put together your facility maintenance plan.

General Maintenance Services

From carpentry to carpet care, your facility likely has a lot of areas that need constant upkeep and monitoring to notice when things go awry. Partnering with a facility maintenance company means you don’t have to keep an eye on the proper functioning of your own plumbing, the efficacy of your locks and security systems, or ongoing cracks and chips in your painting and drywall. Hiring a team to help you audit your facility for reactive maintenance and preventive maintenance puts you in the best position to keep things functioning well at all times.

Delegating your fire safety and prevention efforts can save you a headache – and could help save lives in the event of an emergency. What about your lighting and HVAC systems? These will need monitoring as well, and a maintenance services team can ensure repairs are swift and effective. Don’t lose more time and money by trying to do everything yourself. Keep your occupants safe by staying abreast of anything in disrepair, or any working assets that may be showing signs of age.

Janitorial and Disinfection Services

Whether you’re managing a manufacturing, education, commercial, medical, or other facility, part of your responsibility is to keep your building occupants safe. You might be looking at a full-service green cleaning program, a daily custodial sweep of your facilities, or cleanroom and medical cleaning services. Under the janitorial services umbrella falls solutions like recycling services, floor care programs, bathroom restoration, porter services, pressure washing, and trash removal services.

Don’t forget about disinfection. Especially in today’s climate, with flu, colds, RSV, and COVID-19, you’ll want to ensure that your tenants are protected through thorough facility disinfection. These types of services could include reme­di­a­tion dis­in­fec­tion for areas sus­pect­ed or con­firmed to be con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by infec­tious disease. Mist­ing and elec­tro­sta­t­ic spray dis­in­fec­tion uses cir­cu­lat­ing mist­ing and fog­ging devices to clean and pro­tect hard-to-reach, fre­quent­ly touched sur­faces with envi­ron­men­tal­ly safe dis­in­fect­ing spray. And the application of an antimi­cro­bial bar­ri­er can help guard against virus­es, bac­te­ria, and mold for approx­i­mate­ly three months.

Landscaping Services

Commercial landscaping solutions are a must for anyone managing office complexes, corporate headquarters, apartment complexes, gated communities, hospitals, or universities. Whether your grounds are small or sprawling, the last thing you want is to have to keep up with the maintenance of your greenery.

Hiring a landscaping service company will help ensure that plants and trees are planted during the optimal seasons and taken care of throughout the year. Landscaping services might include turf management, renovation design and installation, fertilization and pest management, soil testing, snow and ice removal, and water management. Need new mulch this spring? Are the weeds getting out of control in your beautifully planted beds? Don’t go it alone. Hire a landscaping service to take care of the details – they’ll have the knowledge and expertise to do things right the first time around, so you don’t have to experiment or use trial and error to find the best solutions for your grounds.

Speciality Services

When was the last time you thought about your air quality? For schools and healthcare facilities, this is an important factor in the safety and well-being of those who occupy your building. Or perhaps your carpets haven’t been deep cleaned in some time. Hiring a company to do this work will save you the hassle of renting specialized equipment, staffing the project yourself, or dealing with complaints from your occupants.

Construction cleanup is another service that’s well worth the investment. While some construction companies might do an excellent job cleaning up after a project is done, many don’t. And you don’t want shards of glass, rusty nails, and layers of dust causing chaos in your spaces.

Do you have a team of wonderfully efficient employees who just need guidance on how to do the job better and faster? Perhaps you’re searching for a few team members to fill gaps in your otherwise solid team. As it turns out, you can hire a company to help you find and train skilled workers for assem­bly and pro­duc­tion line jobs, mate­r­i­al han­dling, equip­ment oper­a­tion, and more. This service alone can save you sig­nif­i­cant time and resources while keeping operations running smoothly and without any interruption.

Contact The Budd Group for Your Facility Maintenance Plan To-Dos

If your 2023 goals include maintaining a safe and functional facility, The Budd Group is ready to partner with you. We serve clients throughout the Southeast United States, offering ample facility support solutions ranging from landscaping and disinfecting to repairs, maintenance, and janitorial services. We’ve been in the business for over 60 years and we have a team of subject matter experts who can complete exactly what you need, on time and on budget.

Among the many things our satisfied clients loves about The Budd Group is our “Make It Right” guarantee. This guarantee means we promise to provide thorough, professional, and timely service. If we complete a job and you’re unsatisfied, we’ll “make it right” – it’s our promise to you. The Budd Group is your one-stop shop for all things facility maintenance, which means you won’t have to work with a host of different vendors and manage different teams in order to keep your facility in great shape. We work on your schedule and complete tasks on time. Providing excellent customer service and state-of-the-art equipment, we’re confident that we can handle any task on your facility maintenance plan. If we can’t, we’ll make recommendations for what to look for when you need to outsource.

From pristine landscaping to COVID disinfection to construction project cleanup, we are at the cutting edge of how to manage any issue that arises in your facility. Don’t wait until something goes drastically wrong to hire a facility maintenance provider. Keep employees, guests, and students safe by working with The Budd Group.