Whether you're the maintenance manager for the hospitality industry, a bottling plant, or work for the Department of Transportation, poor maintenance upkeep affects customers as well as the company itself, as the residents of Lansing, Michigan recently found out.
Declining Infastructure
In this particular case, deteriorating roads are costing the residents almost $700 per year in vehicle related costs such as tires, fuel, and upkeep. The same concept can be applied to any maintenance related business; poor maintenance at a hospitality business can mean that the added costs of security or repairs means that the cost trickles down to the customer and in production plants, poor maintenance means higher costs in repairs which means a higher priced product.
Easily Preventable
One way to prevent this from happening is with proper preventative maintenance. Of course, the budget has to be enough to allow for repairs and proper upkeep but some things are preventable even if your budget doesn't happen to be that big. For instance, preventative maintenance on machinery means less breakdowns and downtime and preventable maintenance on lighting in parking lots means that guests are safer at hotels, motels, etc., which keeps security costs lower.
Solution
One way to be sure that all of your preventable maintenance is kept up with is with a Preventative Maintenance Program, also known as CMMS. This allows you to schedule preventative maintenance in advance – days or even months ahead. By keeping up with this maintenance, you don't have to incur as many costs in the future based on costly repairs or larger “fixes” that require a bigger budget. This also keeps the costs down for your customers so that you can not only offer a lower cost but can keep the profit margin higher.
Read More: Predictive vs. Preventive
While a computerized maintenance management software program may not have fixed all of the issues in Lansing, it certainly may have helped and the city may not have had to suggest a fuel tax to defray some of the costs, along with the fact that this affects the drivers and the cost of the upkeep of their vehicles. Either way, it is a no-win situation that could have, at the very least, have been less severe.
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