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Building Maintenance – Types, Certifications, and Best Practices

Building Maintenance

What Is Building Maintenance?

Building maintenance involves a range of tasks that supports the creation of a comfortable and safe living or work environment for tenants of a building. These tasks range from bathroom cleaning, maintenance of electrical systems to any of the maintenance tasks of a building’s exterior, such as maintaining landscaping and lawn, and other maintenance services. In short, building maintenance is all about keeping properties in top quality.

Who Is Responsible For Building Maintenance?

The team behind building maintenance is divided based on responsibilities and experience:

Janitor

They are responsible for handling all the cleaning tasks of a facility or a building. Their duties include floor mopping, carpet vacuuming, bathroom cleaning, washing doors, and windows.

Maintenance Technician

These people are tasked to inspect, maintain, and repair all systems of a building or a facility, including HVAC, water, and electrical systems. Maintenance technicians are given tasks according to work order, and these people must report to the maintenance supervisor who is overseeing all the tasks.

Maintenance Supervisor

Individuals who do all the planning, assigning, and managing a maintenance team for a certain shift are known as maintenance supervisors. Their duties involve reviewing incoming work along with long and short term objectives for prioritizing the work of the maintenance department for a particular day or a whole week.

Additionally, they interview, hire, and train new maintenance workers. In simple words, their role is to supervise all building maintenance procedures.

Building Maintenance Types

Planned Maintenance

Every facility or building must have a maintenance plan. All tasks related to maintenance that must be performed within a year should be highlighted when developing a maintenance plan. In addition, once the plan is created, you can schedule appointments with relevant people easily.

You must have a maintenance manual available at hand that has essential details about all of your building’s equipment and systems along with their maintenance schedule or you can use a punched tag or something that displays information regarding its maintenance requirements.

Corrective Maintenance

This type of maintenance is performed when a system or equipment is broken, needs fixing or repair. Sometimes, corrective maintenance might serve as emergency maintenance. But this does not happen all the time.

Moreover, some of your building’s systems and equipment can perform just fine even without some of their parts working properly for quite a few time. However, it is better to discuss such systems and equipment when developing a structural building maintenance plan.

Emergency Maintenance

Emergency maintenance is performed when you have to fix, repair, or replace something that is broken as soon as possible. Simply to say, such systems and equipment are a necessity and should be maintained right away.

Managing Building Maintenance

There are three ways to manage your building maintenance effectively:

Minimizing Maintenance Request Response Time

If some failure or breakdown occurs in your building, minimized reactive maintenance response time helps you display your top quality customer services. Moreover, building occupants will be convinced to promote your business as much as they can. Make sure that you respond to problems as soon as they appear and put all your focus on providing world-class customer service.

There are many ways to reduce maintenance reactive response time, such as shifting from paperwork to digital software and systems. Once you do so, make sure you update all your floor plans so that you can your team focused on achieving the same maintenance goals.

Automating Preventive Maintenance

Automating preventive maintenance allows you to set up preventive maintenance cycles using software for facility management. You can save the time that you previously spent on entering data, responding to maintenance requests, and finding solutions to problems instead of actually fixing them as soon as possible.

By automating preventive maintenance, you can stay one step ahead and closer to making your maintenance plan a success, along with saving your money and time.

Utilizing a Facility Software

Some maintenance tasks cost more than others, and you might end up spending a good share of your budget on such tasks. Also, training of new staff and taking new facilities onboard can eat up more part of the budget than planned.

Using software for facility maintenance can help you digitized your maintenance tasks so that all of your employees stay informed about routes and the ins and outs of a certain facility. Also, for custom building maintenance, you can add essential information and maintenance manuals for having quick access when required.

List of Organizations That Utilize Building Maintenance

Business

All types of businesses utilize building maintenance services. However, small scale businesses add these responsibilities to their general operations, and they usually outsource maintenance services. In contrast, medium and large scale businesses have their in-house departments for maintenance.

Residential Societies

Condominium complexes or apartments usually have a team that is responsible for implementing all maintenance tasks, be it, fixing, repairing, or inspecting all types of outdoor and indoor maintenance.

Government

Municipalities have their building maintenance teams for ensuing their posts offices, city buildings, and libraries are always in top-quality for the public’s needs.

What Is The Hardest Thing In Maintaining A Residential Building?

Regular maintenance is a requirement for all residential buildings to keep them in good condition. However, there are some common challenges faced by the maintenance team, such as being available 24/7 to attend to any emergency maintenance task. As an owner, you are responsible for solving the problem whenever it appears even when business operating hours are off.

Moreover, you also have to take care of the safety and security of people living in a building. As the manager of a facility, you must plan emergency responses to any unplanned failure or accident. Ensuring the safety of tenants should be your ultimate goal.

You must also inspect whether or not the building has all types of safety and emergency equipment, such as fire extinguisher and smoke detectors. Also, maintaining the indoors and outdoors of the building can be quite challenging at times, especially when you are not well prepared. Simply to say, a building maintenance schedule is an important part of maintaining a residential building.

Building Maintenance Certifications And Training

Building maintenance workers are eligible to apply for several certifications to level up their skills.

Building Systems Maintenance Certifications

It is offered by BOMI International, which is a standalone institute for facility and property management. This certification is an idea for those who work to maintain building systems. It involves effective energy management, topics of water and plumbing treatment, HVAC, and plumbing.

Building Operator Certification

It is given via a network of eligible providers. This certification offers training of level one and two. Moreover, it covers topics like HVAC, control point management, electrical distribution, energy management.

HVACR Certification

Apprenticeships via the Associated Builders and Contractors and the National Association of Home Builders enable maintenance workers to achieve this certification. Additionally, candidates are analyzed based on their know-how of radiation, air conditioning, ventilation, and heating.

Building Maintenance Checklist

What Is The Most Important Operations And Facilities Best Practice?

The reactive approach to facilities management used to result in operational and financial inefficiencies, diverting resources away from mission-critical functions. Therefore, Facility Management was modernized to bring disciplines in building science and business strategy, contributing a good value to an organization.

Moreover, some of the most common elements of modern Facility Management are:

Other best practices include:

How Can Building Maintenance Costs Be Reduced?

Building Maintenance Tools

Tools and Equipment – floor scrubber, insulated hand tools, multiple-use snips, power drill, wet-dry vac, infrared leak detector for both energy detection and moisture.

Cleaning supplies – cleaning and chemical products, waste equipment, janitorial supplies, cleaning equipment, toiletries, uniforms, linens, and recycling tools.

Cleaning dispensers and compounds – non-motorized trash receptacles and cleaning equipment, paper products. Also, motorized floor cleaning equipment.

Real property inventory – a system responsible for maintaining an inventory of the assets of a company along with essential manual and guides on how to manage them

Computer-aided facility management – utilizing information technology for streamlining the processes of facility management, including the addition of software, computerized systems, and of course, training.

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