The Busy Season Has Arrived for HVAC Asset Management
With temperatures outdoors already starting to rise, the challenges of the winter months are thankfully behind us. However, as a facility leader you know that warmer weather brings its own challenges. Higher temperatures means more demand on rooftop units and separate air conditioning and furnace systems, which in turn leads to a number of subsequent difficulties:
- Key components of HVAC assets experience more wear and can break down
- Entire HVAC systems can shut down — causing closures and sales losses
- Repairs and replacements take time and lead to unplanned expenses
- Higher demand for cooling leads to consistently higher energy costs
- Damaged customer experiences, unsafe working conditions, and more
Tackling this proactively is not necessarily simple or straightforward, and your approach will likely be governed by your situation, resources, and organizational footprint. For example, if you have 25 locations throughout a single region, you’ll likely have a handful of local partners that you can lean on for HVAC asset management, and the workload on you and your team may not be excessive.
However, if you’re a national organization with a couple hundred (or more) locations, that’s a different workload altogether. You’ll need more partners to support different locations. There will be significantly more estimates, invoices, and other documentation to manage. And of course, you’d need to have a team large enough to handle that workload — or a technology solution advanced enough to streamline it.
Don’t Let Your Locations Fall Behind
But whether you have a smaller footprint or a large one, the fact remains that this is the time when other organizations are ramping up their HVAC asset management work plans. They’re scheduling maintenance, investing in new equipment and installation, and tackling building updates due to the warmer weather. If you’re not already working on your plans for the year, you might find yourself further down on service vendors’ schedules.
To make progress on your HVAC asset management goals, you’re going to need a proactive solution for staying on top of asset maintenance and replacements. It’s not just about “keeping up,” though — understanding historic asset performance and other information will reveal opportunities for your organization to save money. For example:
- If you have a complete list of all of your HVAC assets with related data, you can use that information to determine where older assets may need to be replaced based on the average lifespan of certain models and types.
- Additionally, data related to service calls and technician performance for HVAC assets can identify regions, specific locations, and certain asset categories where vendors aren’t providing the level of service needed.
But the challenge remains: how can you be this proactive on asset management, ensure your organization is getting the attention it needs from vendors, and make the best use of current resources — simultaneously? It is most certainly no simple task, which is why it’s recommended to work with a facility management aggregator.
Why Working with a Facility Management Aggregator Makes Sense for HVAC Asset Management
- Nationwide support from proven vendors — Wherever you have locations, a facility management aggregator will be able to provide support across numerous disciplines, not just HVAC maintenance. The location of each facility is carefully considered as it pertains to asset maintenance as well, as local factors play a role in how assets perform and the type of maintenance needed.
- Quality service vendors work on your assets — When you work with an aggregator, each of the commercial service vendors engaged to work on your assets has been carefully vetted to ensure they’re a quality organization with high standards for service. At CLS specifically, our vendor partnerships have an average tenure of more than 12 years — giving you confidence that you’re working with highly qualified and capable technicians.
- Reduced administrative workload — A significant advantage of working with an aggregator for HVAC asset management is, as we’ve hinted at above, a massive workload reduction for you and your team. With your program managed on your behalf, your team is able to focus on higher value or more strategic priorities.
- Proactive asset maintenance — The foundational benefit of working with an aggregator is that all HVAC assets across your footprint are proactively maintained on a schedule and frequency that is a) ideal for those asset types and b) best for your organization. This mitigates unplanned downtime, breakdowns, and more. And, all maintenance is based on uniform scopes of work — keeping maintenance and costs consistent across all locations and work orders.
- Centralized asset history and information — A significant value-add provided by an aggregator is that a list of all HVAC assets is built, maintained, and made accessible to you online. It contains all model numbers, manufacture dates, serial numbers, performance data, related documentation, and more. This is a huge advantage in that it helps you and your aggregator partner make more strategic decisions about assets that need to be prioritized.
- CapEx budget planning — Last but certainly not least, an aggregator also serves as your partner in facility management strategic planning as well as annual budget planning. At CLS, our CapEx facility management budgeting support helps organizations make strategic investments from CapEx resources to proactively avoid breakdowns and unexpected repairs on aging assets — as opposed to ignoring them and relying on OpEx resources from individual locations.
Work with CLS for Your HVAC Maintenance Needs
With more than 50 years of experience in facility asset management, our team understands your challenges — and what’s needed to overcome them. We offer a full range of HVAC solutions, from preventive maintenance programs to asset installation and more. And of course, HVAC is just part of our overall capabilities. We also support customers with LED retrofits, electrical maintenance, signage maintenance, plumbing solutions, energy management, fire-life safety, and more.
If you’ve been looking to switch from reactive to proactive with your HVAC asset management, it’s time to take action and work with an aggregator partner that can help. Connect with us today to learn more about our solutions.