Building a Case for HVAC Preventive Maintenance over Deferred Maintenance

When it comes to owning or operating a commercial facility, you probably are focusing on saving costs and achieving your profit goals. Because of this, some decisions tend to be made with the financial well-being of your company in mind instead of your facility’s well-being. However, postponing maintenance activities, such as equipment repairs, to save money or meet budget goals, could actually lead to higher costs, asset failures, equipment breakdown and potential health and safety issues.

A Strategic Approach to Quantify the Impact of Deferred Maintenance

Deferring and underfunding needed maintenance can cause deterioration and adds to the backlog. One way to help make your case to management to get funding for preventive HVAC maintenance is by presenting a business case and proposal. Below are steps that can be taken to collect data to support your proposal.

1. Facility Condition Assessment: Assess your current HVAC maintenance backlog and calculate the risk of delaying maintenance. This should provide a clear understanding of HVAC maintenance needs and the magnitude of required work. This step will not only help you validate the need for HVAC preventive maintenance funding, but can also help property managers identify current problems they didn’t even know existed.
2. Justify Preventive HVAC Maintenance: The more data and hard evidence you have, the more likely that you’ll get approval for your request for funding. Data should include historical data, the potential risk of further deferment, and cost acceleration to predict future costs from deferred maintenance. The next step is to take the findings and plot them on a matrix using a facility condition index (FCI) as a benchmark to compare the qualified condition of the building. Quantify the cost of maintenance, repair and replacement deficiencies and divide this number by the facility replacement value (FRV), which is the current monetary replacement value the company places on the facility.
3. Prioritize Results: Now you can prioritize maintenance needs as critical; potentially critical; and necessary, but not critical. Also be sure to indicate potential cost for each maintenance need.

Remember to always come prepared with a solution to the problem. It isn’t enough to say, “Deferred maintenance is bad,” you must also have a plan of attack, quantifying costs and a preventive HVAC maintenance strategy.

Implement a Preventive HVAC Maintenance Strategy

Crockett Facility Services, Inc. (CFSI) is committed to helping building owners, property managers, engineers and facility professionals lower their operating expenses through preventive HVAC maintenance. Our trained technicians evaluate existing HVAC systems to develop a well-defined maintenance strategy for improved performance, reduced costs, and extended equipment life. HVAC preventive maintenance is often disregarded – however it is well worth the cost to invest in a monthly, quarterly or semi-annual maintenance program that includes both proactive inspection and service.

With summer temperatures constantly on the rise, it’s increasingly more important to check your equipment for proper operation, and to clean and fine-tune its operation to ensure maximum efficiency to lower utility costs and ensure tenant comfort.

To learn more about Preventive HVAC Maintenance, please contact Crockett Facilities Services (CFSI) at 202.600.2787 or sales@crockett-facilities.com. We’re in this Building Together! Like us on Facebook; follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

Sources:

Deferred Maintenance: Turning Crisis into Strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2014 at . Both comments and pings are currently closed.