Building maintenance refers to maintenance activities performed on residential and commercial properties. It includes all efforts to ensure the continued functionality of these properties and includes activities such as cleaning, painting, and plumbing work.
Building maintenance also includes managing the building’s systems. These include electrical system maintenance, fire alarm testing, HVAC system servicing, waste management and disposal, snow removal, and landscaping. There are countless other examples. Anything that goes into maintaining the safety and functionality of a building falls into the category of building maintenance.
“Building system maintenance is essential because it guarantees the safety and comfort of people and equipment inside the building. In addition, from a business standpoint, regular maintenance can save property owners money and contribute to increased property value.”
ThomasNet
Building maintenance work is essential for many reasons. First, it’s necessary to ensure the comfort and safety of building occupants. This is the case whether you’re dealing with residential or commercial properties. Sure, employees are only in offices for a limited amount of time daily, but an uncomfortable work environment can affect productivity. Successful maintenance of facilities helps prevent breakdowns, ensure comfort, and eliminate safety hazards.
Types of Building Maintenance
As we established above, many tasks fall under building maintenance services. Primary types of building maintenance include the following:
Routine Building Maintenance
This refers to the types of maintenance activities carried out on a regular or recurring basis. They aim to prevent general decay, system downtime, or general wear and tear to preserve building functionality and integrity. Whether or not there is a risk of a breakdown or degradation, facilities teams need to ensure they perform routine maintenance activities.
Routine building maintenance includes regular work like cleaning common areas, clearing out gutters, disposing of waste, changing air filters and lights, maintaining energy efficiency, and repainting. Other actions can include janitorial work, cleaning bathrooms, fire alarm testing, and sidewalk and parking lot clearing. Property owners and managers will usually schedule these according to daily, weekly, or monthly intervals, or based on the seasons. Apart from general upkeep, some regular maintenance activities are building-specific, such as landscaping and window washing.
Preventive Building Maintenance
Like routine maintenance, preventive maintenance activities aim to prevent general decay or wear and tear but also focus on avoiding specific damages or failures. It includes efforts to maintain the structural integrity of the building and particular assets within the building. Examples include activities–such as clearing gutters and cutting trees–to preserve the functionality of features that protect from disasters like snowstorms, floods, and fires.
Preventive maintenance can often be the difference between a quick resolution to a problem and costly repairs if maintenance goes unscheduled. Something as simple as a firehose not working when it’s assumed to be can mean that a small fire escalates into something more damaging. In general, creating a robust preventive maintenance plan is the way to go. It’s always more cost-effective to perform upkeep than to wait for failure or damage to occur and incur higher emergency maintenance costs.
Corrective Building Maintenance
While preventing faults is the best approach, you’ll sometimes have to deal with issues arising despite your best attempts. This is where corrective maintenance activities come into play. Corrective maintenance involves any tasks performed to fix a problem and restore the functionality of a building.
With a corrective maintenance plan, when something goes wrong, you know how to get it back up and running as soon as possible. For example, while you want to service your elevators routinely, you should have a set procedure for contacting a maintenance technician if they go out of service anyway.
“Depending on its design, quality of materials and workmanship, function, and location, buildings deteriorate at different rates and require different levels of attention. . . For maintenance to be most effective, it should be organized through a program of cyclical maintenance. . . . this includes daily routines, and works upwards to periodic programs of weekly, monthly, semi-annual, annual routines.”
Designing Buildings
Optimize Your Building Maintenance with a CMMS
Whether you’re a building owner looking to plan or execute routine, preventive, or corrective maintenance, a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can make your facility management significantly more straightforward. Here’s how:
Automates Preventive Maintenance
A CMMS works by automating your maintenance processes. On the one hand, your pen-and-paper system may be working for you. But a CMMS does more than simply replace the process of filling out charts by hand.
Instead of creating maintenance schedules and then finding ways to communicate them to the maintenance department, you can simplify the process with a CMMS. The right CMMS will allow maintenance supervisors to create and digitize work orders for routine maintenance activities and schedule them to repeat at chosen intervals.
You can also assign these work orders to staff directly from the CMMS, send them notifications, and track their progress. You can do this for routine or specific preventive maintenance tasks, which helps ensure you catch problems before they seriously impact a building’s condition.
Facilitates Corrective Maintenance
As with most things, even the best-laid maintenance plans hit roadblocks. So while you should ensure you have a robust preventive maintenance strategy for your building, you should also prepare to deal with problems as they arise. In the event of a crisis at a property, a CMMS can help execute a corrective maintenance plan.
You can create work orders and assign them instantly. By storing your standard operating procedures on a CMMS, your maintenance teams can refer to the step-by-step instructions from the location of the work. This is particularly useful in emergencies when every second counts.
Ensures Compliance
Both residential and commercial buildings are subject to various regulatory laws and legislation. These may vary from place to place and also depends on the nature of activities within the buildings. A CMMS can help you automate and keep track of your compliance workflows. If you ever get a visit from, say, an OSHA regulator, you’ll have access to all your information in one place.
Standardizes Processes
A CMMS can help you create standards for your facility maintenance processes. For example, while the building and its requirements might be constant, maintenance staff might not be. As a manager, you might need to change staff assignments. Also, building maintenance workers might leave, and you need to onboard replacements.
With a CMMS, you can create and store standard operating procedures and maintenance checklists. This way, you can maintain one approach to tasks no matter who is working.
Get MaintainX to Facilitate Your Building Maintenance
MaintainX is a CMMS system that helps automate the maintenance of buildings, big and small, commercial and residential. With automated work orders and a mobile application, MaintainX allows you to streamline your processes. Also, As the only work order software with chat, MaintainX facilitates real-time communication and collaboration among your maintenance team.
Using MaintainX for building maintenance management ensures you maintain a record of your work and create an audit trail as you proceed.
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Caroline Eisner
Caroline Eisner is a writer and editor with experience across the profit and nonprofit sectors, government, education, and financial organizations. She has held leadership positions in K16 institutions and has led large-scale digital projects, interactive websites, and a business writing consultancy.
