There are several reasons why commercial maintenance is essential. First, it’s the law. Every employer is responsible for protecting the health of their employers. But there are also lots of other advantages for your business of keeping your commercial assets looking great and performing at their best.
So, how can you make the commercial maintenance process easier for your business? Let’s take a look at the benefits of commercial maintenance, the challenges you face, and the solutions that can make your life easier.
What is commercial maintenance?
Commercial maintenance is the process of making sure that commercial buildings are safe, functional, and cost effective. Improperly maintained buildings can lead to big problems. That’s why commercial maintenance is an essential requirement for any business that owns office space, warehouses, retail outlets, and industrial plants.
Importantly, commercial maintenance is not just restricted to the buildings people work in. It is also about maintaining the machinery and equipment people work with, as well as the different work areas that make up commercial facilities. Commercial maintenance ensures that all of these assets and facilities are safe to use and comply with relevant legislation.
Maintaining buildings, machinery, and work areas is a big job. That’s why a full programme of commercial maintenance includes several different tasks.
What are the different types of building maintenance?
Broadly speaking, there are four different types of building maintenance. That includes:
Protective maintenance
Cleaning and repainting are not enough for some surfaces. Some structural elements such as beams, pillars, awnings, steel staircases, and entrance walkways require a protective coating to guard them against the elements and prevent rust and deterioration. Protective maintenance provides long-term protection and helps to safeguard an organization’s assets.
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance includes all work that prevents the deterioration of buildings and other assets due to wear and tear, heavy usage, and accidental damage. A full inspection survey should be carried out before the maintenance work to identify what needs to be done.
Regular inspections and routine building repairs
All buildings require a certain amount of love and care to look their best and be safe and efficient places to work. Regular inspections are central to this because they allow maintenance teams to identify the areas that need attention and the tasks they have to do.
Routine building repairs can involve all sorts of minor jobs, including:
- Oiling a squeaky hinge
- Greasing the bearings on a piece of machinery
- Replacing a worn doorknob
- Changing a lightbulb
- Replacing an air conditioning filter
These are the small, almost imperceptible changes that keep everything ticking along.
Maintenance of plumbing and electrical installations
Licensed professionals must install and maintain all electrical and plumbing systems. They should check them periodically to make sure they are operating safely and you should keep a proper record of the work to prove your compliance with the relevant regulations.
What does commercial maintenance include?
Commercial maintenance is an all-round type of facility maintenance that looks at every single element of your building. That includes:
- Regulatory compliance – One of the most important aspects of commercial maintenance is ensuring that your facilities are compliant with all of the relevant health and safety legislation. Facilities managers must be well versed in the compliance regulation and understand what checks to make and the documentation to keep to prove their compliance.
- Internal maintenance – This looks at every aspect of your facility’s interior, including the ceilings, walls, floors, plumbing, electrical installations, and fixtures. Long-term maintenance aims to reduce the likelihood of serious failures that could disrupt the organization and are time-consuming and costly to fix.
- External maintenance – External maintenance, both planned and reactive, covers the structure of the building itself as well as the security solutions in place. External maintenance includes roofing, windows, external doors, guttering, any outdoor space, and parking lots.
- Heating and cooling systems – Many organizations rely on their HVAC systems to create a comfortable workplace and an environment that’s attractive to customers and staff, too. However, there’s more to these systems than just comfort. They also impact the air quality and health of workers, particularly given the presence of airborne viruses such as COVID. That’s why ongoing maintenance is essential.
- Fire suppression – Commercial properties are legally required to put fire prevention measures in place. That includes smoke alarms, sprinkler systems, and fire extinguishers. These devices all need regular checks to make sure they are in place and functioning properly.
Why is commercial maintenance so important for your buildings?
Some organizations still see commercial maintenance as an expense that they could do without rather than an investment in their staff, their customers, and their buildings. However, the benefits of commercial maintenance far outweigh the costs. They include:
- Increased safety for workers
- Reduced rate of work-related accidents
- Protecting the value of buildings
- Reduced risk of expensive repair bills
- Fewer losses due to production stoppages
- Tangible records of work done in the event of a legal dispute
- Reduced risk of insurance claims being rejected due to improper maintenance
Commercial maintenance also gives your buildings more visual appeal, which can enhance the image of your company and cut down on future renovation expenses.
How can a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) help?
A computerized maintenance management system can help you simplify the commercial maintenance process. It can generate work orders and send out reminders for you and make it easy to track who’s responsible and what has been completed.
All that data is kept inside a central, cloud-based database. By centralizing the data in this way, your entire facilities management team can be kept in the loop and access a single point of truth. That means your data is always up to date and everyone is on the same page.
Without a CMMS, your maintenance schedules, work orders, and compliance information will be buried in paper files or scattered across spreadsheets. That causes problems with inaccuracies, inconsistent data, and damaged or lost files. When working with spreadsheets, there’s also no safety net. If someone hits the wrong key or clicks ‘paste’ instead of ‘cut’, you’re going to end up with bad data.
A CMMS solves this problem by helping you organize all of the information about the assets that you have to maintain, as well as the equipment, materials and other resources that you have at your disposal.
Want to find out how Hippo CMMS® can optimize your commercial maintenance process? Then talk to Hippo today. We can answer your questions, help you book a live software demo, or even set you up with a free trial.
Executive summary
Improperly maintained buildings can lead to problems for all kinds of organizations. That’s why commercial maintenance is a must. Facilities managers use maintenance strategies to make sure the buildings people work in and the assets and equipment they use are safe and comply with the relevant legislation. Everything from regular inspections to maintaining plumbing and electrical installations plays a part in the process and helps businesses to increase safety for their workers, reduce downtime, and protect the value of their buildings.
