November and December are typically when organizations across numerous industries bring leaders together for annual facilities management budget planning. All manner of data, objectives, challenges, and opportunities are considered during this process — all with the aim of settling on a budget for the following year.
For organizations with anywhere from 50 to 500 locations, budget planning is understandably complex. Each of these locations, in addition to corporate facilities, has multiple assets that vary in terms of age, performance, maintenance needs, and energy demands. It’s important to factor these details along with other goals into your overall budget. Additionally, the execution of work also influences budgets — as in, is your team responsible for working with service vendors, or are you working with an aggregator?
Even if your facilities management budget planning process is already complete, it’s important to remember that budgets don’t like to stay pinned down. You’ll always have surprises — unexpected costs, unplanned maintenance, critical replacements, etc. However, what matters is that you implement processes, systems, and partners that help you stay as far ahead of the curve as possible. Here, we’ll detail a few recommendations to help you do exactly that.
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Recommendations for Proactively Reinforcing Your Facilities Management Budget
1. Invest the Time to Build a Detailed HVAC Asset List
Do you have a complete list of every single asset across all of your locations? If not, consider building one or working with an aggregator partner. For the latter, the aggregator will review all your HVAC assets across your footprint early on — and potentially other asset types such as lighting systems — to build a comprehensive list.
This database will show model numbers, serial numbers, asset histories, documentation, maintenance records, and more. This helps you identify which assets need maintenance and at what frequency. It also helps identify assets that could be proactively replaced (more on this shortly). The advantage is that you’ll be significantly more precise when it comes to figuring out maintenance and acquisition costs for the following year.
2. Setting Aside CapEx Money to Proactively Replace Old Units
Every building throughout your footprint was built at a different time. The same follows for the assets in those facilities. Some are older, some are newer. And if you have hundreds of sites, you likely have a batch of assets that are at replacement stage or rapidly approaching it. Rather than wait for them to break down and cause disruptions, consider proactively replacing them — and doing so from CapEx funds.
With CapEx asset replacement, new HVAC units and other assets are paid for up front, and all in one go, using corporate funds for every location where they’re needed. If you were to use OpEx funds, location themselves could become resource constrained. This way, the assets are replaced before they become problematic for each location, replacement costs can be amortized, and each location remains up and running in the new year.
3. Re-evaluate Your Facility Maintenance Service KPIs
What are you tracking when it comes to facility maintenance? If you’re operating with a straightforward break–fix mentality, you likely have no idea what the true cost of maintenance is — not just because maintenance is rarely occurring but also because you haven’t identified any cost savings through it. Also, who are you working with for maintenance? Are the service technicians from your commercial service vendors creating more expense by not getting the job done correctly the first time, resulting in excess call-backs? Remember, you can’t improve what you aren’t measuring.
4. Is Maintenance Being Managed by Individual Locations?
Even if you have a core facility management team, it may be the case that due to capacity limitations or time constraints, individual locations are having to address emergencies, replacements, and ongoing maintenance on their own. And if you don’t have a corporate facility management team, you can bet that’s the case. Consider working toward centralizing facility maintenance for all of your locations. The good news is that you don’t necessarily have to build a corporate facility management team. You can simply work with an aggregator who will handle all of this on your behalf.
Implement These Facilities Maintenance Budget Planning Solutions for a Better Year
As an aggregator, CLS Facility Services manages your facility asset maintenance program on your behalf. No more administrative hassles or frustrations, just a proactive partner that keeps all of your most critical assets running smoothly.
We achieve that through a strong relationship with you that’s based on service excellence and trust as well as long-term partnerships with commercial service vendors throughout our nationwide network. We have an average relationship length of 14.5 years with these vendors, so you know you’re getting only the best technicians when we assign them to your program.
When you partner with us for facility asset maintenance, you get a dedicated team — an account manager, billing contact, estimating specialist, and more — who manage your account with precision. And, our team members have an average tenure of more than 14 years with our organization, so you know that you’re working with experienced experts.
As facilities maintenance budget planning experts, we partner with you for annual budget planning to ensure you’re able to maximize every dollar you spend on maintaining your infrastructure — from proactive replacements and maintenance strategies to maximizing rebates and warranties. Connect with us below to make the year ahead one of your best.