If you have experienced some downtime on your building, encountered unexpected problems that have caught you off guard, such as water pipe bursts, mechanical failure of plant or worse, you are not alone.
Among many important aspects of building management, the most crucial is choosing the right building maintenance strategy. However, we often know things are not always straightforward.
Without a doubt, keeping a building operationally running and functional, with any long-term effectiveness, requires the correct strategy in place. As the manager of your building or estate, you want to prevent issues, reduce costs and improve your overall services.
So how do you identify which maintenance strategy is right for you, your business and/or organisation? Well, that really depends on your short and long term objectives.
In general, building maintenance strategy falls into two categories – Reactive and Proactive. But, let’s get onto the big question, should you choose a reactive maintenance strategy, or can a more proactive approach resolve all issues? Is there a space that sits between planned maintenance and reactive maintenance?
What is reactive maintenance?
Typically, with the reactive strategy, no maintenance is carried out between failures unless a maintenance manager or technician detects a need for it. A reactive strategy commonly known as the run-to-failure strategy is often associated with making repairs once failure occurs to equipment or needed restoration.
The advantages
While the reactive method may seem wasteful, it can be the most cost-effective solution to your maintenance needs, and here is why:
Limited contact is needed with the maintenance team you hire or manage, all thanks to the reduced planning and organisation time. management reduces costs on additional and frequent spending – quick fixes or temporary repairs are completed to cut down any ongoing maintenance cost and spend.
The disadvantages
Reacting to last-minute failures and repairs can be tiresome for a property/building manager. As the stakes get higher with assets requiring more urgent attention, costs can stack-up pretty quickly. Any major costs may be associated with catastrophic failure, systemic failure or equipment defects.
Furthermore, a major meltdown or one-off event can cost thousands in reactive replacement, significant lost time, and major safety/ environmental impacts.
BASSE Solutions’ tip:
If you choose to utilise the reactive strategy, make sure you have a reactive maintenance company readily available for convenience and peace of mind.
Now that we have examined the first strategy, let us take a look at the alternative.
What is proactive maintenance?
A proactive strategy looks to prevent last-minute issues, overall long-term costs and services.
When looking at proactive approaches to maintaining your building, the real deal is identifying the problems before they occur. Planned Maintenance work is done regularly and according to a schedule to prevent standard malfunctions. Opting for the proactive strategy to your maintenance aims to take this one step further and looks to reduce unplanned downtime, equipment failure, and many more risks associated with your building, facility or estate.
Important note: Proactive maintenance is not to be confused with planned maintenance. Proactive maintenance is supplementary servicing, inspection and condition assessing in-between planned/statutory maintenance visits and is ideal for identifying failure potentials and keeping plant and equipment operational for much longer lifecycles.
Where reactive maintenance may appear to minimise maintenance time and investment, i.e. operating until all systems fail, the true costs of failure are often hidden and not factored in. As your business experiences down time, further catastrophic failure, increased management time, availability of cashflow and much more. Proactive maintenance allows us to reveal issues in advance, helping your business manage the overall lifecycle cost of an asset or building and have an operating model that helps avoid the peaks and troughs of spending.
The advantages:
Choosing to go with the proactive strategy for your maintenance can make an impact on your property, and here is why:
- You actually save costs over time by trimming unnecessary expenditure from asset management budgets, improving the view of true asset lifecycle costs.
- Ongoing maintenance schedules are pre-planned ahead of time at frequencies that fit with you and you can choose when these occur.
- Regular checks extend the useful life of your assets by reducing the need for replacements or repairs.
Planning work to be carried out during downtime or slower periods of the year.
The disadvantages:
Not being all sunshine and rainbows, the proactive strategy also has its drawbacks:
- Investments in time and resources at the start.
- Substantial planning and thorough examinations are needed to ensure maintenance procedures are cost-effective and beneficial.
Our take on the strategies
While there are pros and cons to each type of maintenance for your property, it can be beneficial to use a blended strategy of them all.
You can create long-term plans and put all the steps in place, but things can and will inevitably always go wrong.
At Basse Solutions, we offer both proactive and reactive maintenance programmes to ensure your facility is always covered.
Having a reactive maintenance team on hand to help with breakdowns and repairs is essential to ensure your business is back up running smoothly as soon as possible. Our team are available to talk through any problems you may be facing (often meaning a call-out is not required).
We also offer a fully comprehensive planned proactive strategy program to help you reduce your property expenditure by creating an all-encompassing maintenance schedule that minimises problems before they arise.
We work alongside you to compile or validate an asset register and agree to the right level of maintenance for you. With an extensive team and network of contractors, whether you are after a hands-off reactive approach or the opposite, a hands-on proactive approach, we have got you covered.
As a UK based reactive maintenance company, BASSE are available to you 365 days of the year, your problems are our problems; get in touch with us today on 03335 677560 and see how we can help!
