How to Make the Best Use of a Small Facility Maintenance Budget?

Facility maintenance is very rarely considered as a time and money-saving activity. Instead, it is widely seen as an expenditure. With little to no wiggle room in the maintenance budget, it can be difficult to improve the efficiency of managing your facilities. But it isn’t impossible. Discover four ways to make the most of your small maintenance budget for facilities and assets.

Track Inventory

Accurately tracking inventory and spare parts can save you from spending money on supplies you may already have on hand and avoid having an unnecessary inventory surplus to ensure the best use of your small maintenance budget.

• Implement a process to improve your inventory tracking.
• Reallocate that ‘saved’ money to other aspects of the maintenance budget.

In the long run, inventory tracking can end up saving you hundreds to thousands of dollars, which you can then ask to be redirected to an increase in the maintenance budget.

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Keep Logs

Keeping a detailed log of past maintenance activities can help solve problems faster and provides valuable insight into your operation. It can also help you allocate your budget where you need it the most.

• Track how your maintenance staff is spending their time.
• Keep a close eye on time spent on cosmetic facility improvements rather than preventive maintenance and critical repairs.

Maintenance activity records allow you to gather powerful data about your operations. This enables you to target inefficient processes that are a waste of money and identify work orders that are most prevalent and costly for your organization. This way you can ensure maximum utilization of a small maintenance budget.

Prioritize Tasks

Oftentimes, when a maintenance budget is very small or cuts significantly, preventive maintenance is one of the first things on the chopping block. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality can seem logical at times, but eventually, it always ends up costing more in the long run.

• Establish a preventive maintenance program.
• Commit to performing this scheduled preventative maintenance.
• Assign each preventative maintenance task with step-by-step instructions for your technicians, and issue reminder notifications to your staff or vendors to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Preventive maintenance can save 33% to 50% of maintenance costs as well as reduce equipment downtime by 40-60% (In the first two years). Additionally, it also increases the lifetime of the asset, equipment, and infrastructure.

Even if you already practiced the three strategies above, sometimes they still aren’t enough. You may just need a bigger budget. Make your case for a larger budget to upper management, and be specific with your goals. You should be prepared to back up your case with data and statistics that support your argument for a larger budget. If you’re still declined, keep your chin up. Budgets evolve over time, and if you’re persistent you may succeed with increasing your maintenance budget in the future.

We Have the Perfect Tool to Optimize Your Maintenance Budget

The CloudApper CMMS software is an affordable mobile and cloud application that simplifies the maintenance of enterprise assets and equipment, maintenance schedules, inventory, work order routing, and reporting. The solution helps employees to operate machines more efficiently and provides facility managers with real-time visibility into the status of their assets and maintenance plans.