At Gallant, our Preventative Maintenance Services means we’re periodically checking on and maintaining your site’s assets, structure and equipment. Yet, there can be a mental disconnect for some organizations who may feel like they’re spending money for something that’s not broken.
The idea behind Preventative Maintenance Services is that your business’ up-front investment will greatly decrease the chances of a breakdown. These maintenance programs can include servicing your HVAC as well as coolers and refrigeration systems, hydro-jetting plumbing lines, cleaning out hoods and grease traps and thermal imaging electrical systems to find any inefficient and potentially dangerous hot spots (just to name a few examples). Ultimately, these services keep your facilities well-maintained and open for business.
How, specifically, have our programs created value for our clients? A couple of examples:
• One of our restaurant grocery clients recently had us take over their program. The first thing we did for them was setup a Preventative Maintenance program for their grease trap systems. We were able to standardize the service schedules, scope and pricing across their portfolio of sites. The end result was that they saved over $10K in the first year because we were able to standardize their pricing and lower the frequency in some sites due to the data we collected. We also were able to bring their citations on grease trap systems down to zero in the first year.
• Another grocery client of ours asked us to conduct thermal imaging scans on a portion of their sites. We scanned a cluster of sites for them and found issues with lines in 50% of their sites. Two of those sites had critical issues and we were able to catch and repair them before their systems went down or a fire started in the sites.
There is a temptation to roll the dice…take a chance…see if your organization can get by as is…With that in mind, here are 10 big picture reasons why we recommend you put the dice away and make a sound investment in your operations.
1) Effectively Manage Operating Expenses
You know what’s easy to plan for? A manageable annual budget for maintaining your equipment and systems. You know what’s hard to plan for? That equipment breaking down with no warning long before its expected end-of-life. These types of emergencies cost anywhere from several tens of thousands to upwards of $100K to replace. Whether for one location, a region or your sites across the nation, our services program eliminates that surprise and enables you to budget your operating expenses more effectively.
2) Increase The Lifespan Of Your Assets, Structure & Equipment
By performing regular servicing, we’ll keep your systems purring along in peak condition. Just as importantly, we can find, diagnose and fix issues along the way. Take your HVAC system: if we find a hole in one of its coils, we can replace that at a reasonable cost. But, if that coil goes unrepaired (simply because you didn’t know about it), your whole system could eventually break down and then you would incur a huge out-of-pocket expense, well before expected end-of-life. Even worse, with supply chain issues still plaguing the industry, the lead time for unplanned replacements are currently very, very long.
3) Find The Small Problem Before It Becomes A Big Problem
Building on the coil issue from above, when one of the large systems operating in your building – HVAC, plumbing, electrical, kitchen equipment, etc. – goes down, it can take a lot more down with it. Think of the damage flooding or fire could do. Now, can you imagine if a customer or team member was injured? Our Preventative Maintenance Services is meant to avert these types of major catastrophes.
4) Avoid Citations And Licensing Issues
You certainly want to avoid fines, but even more importantly, you never want to hear the local fire department, city inspector or some other official say, “You need to fix this or we’re shutting you down.” We’ve heard from clients that ran into these issues before they were working with us. Now that we manage the regular maintenance of their inspected systems (such as ovens, hood vents, backflows, sprinklers, fire alarms and extinguishers), they have passed inspections easily and removed uncertainty and worry from their daily operations.
5) Protect Your Inventory
Do you sell products (foods, drinks or medicine) or use ingredients that need to be kept refrigerated? If your cooler, freezer or fridge goes out, you, in turn, could be out a lot of money both fixing the unit AND replacing the stock lost to spoilage. Along the same lines, fire or flooding can destroy inventory. By keeping your systems well-maintained, we can help prevent mass inventory losses.
6) Ensure A Positive Customer (And Team Member) Experience
Again, building on the above, if a customer comes to your business and walks out unable to purchase what they want because the product was destroyed, they will think twice about returning in the future. Similarly, if they walk in and have a poor experience (HVAC’s out, bathroom/plumbing issues, kitchen’s down, facilities are looking run-down), they won’t be back, and they might spread the word about their impression. (Happy customers are your best public relations ambassadors, after all.) So, in addition to the cost of repairs, you can now add the forfeited lifetime value of all the customers you lost while operations weren’t fully functional. Not to mention, it just so happens that employees prefer to work in comfortable environments as well. This is why the returns on a well-maintained facility are so much greater than the preventative maintenance costs involved.
7) Gather Data On Your Assets
Asset management is one of those activities organizations always want to perform, but often can’t find the time or resources to execute. But, when we’re regularly coming in to check and maintain your assets, we’re capturing that important data. We track what equipment you have, unit ages, remaining life expectancies, maintenance schedules and more. That way you know what to expect from your equipment and can plan accordingly.
8) Plan For Downtime, Instead Of Being Forced Into It
Eventually, even a well-maintained piece of equipment will need to be replaced. By monitoring your systems and tracking life expectancies, we’ll know when that time is coming. That will enable your ops team to make informed decisions and plan out when the work can be done so that operations are the least disrupted. There’s a huge advantage to planned versus unplanned disruptions.
9) Ensure The Right People Are Maintaining Your Systems, Everywhere
We have set processes for maintaining systems and partners across the country following those processes. So, you can be assured that a) the service person walking into your site is a vetted professional and b) that every facility of yours we service – whether one location, a region or across the country – will be maintained in a dependably consistent manner. That makes it easier for you to plan across your fleet of locations and provide a dependably consistent customer experience.
10) Remove Responsibilities From Your Workload
You may look at Preventative Maintenance Services and think this is “just another thing to add on my plate.” Not so. We’re actually removing tasks. It’s our job to manage when services within individual sites are needed, and we’ll reach out to coordinate. Plus, think of all the headaches that have just been eliminated based on the previous nine advantages!
11) Bonus: Save Big Vs. An Internal Program
We promised 10 reasons, but here is one more (and it’s a big one). By partnering with us, you can obtain a holistic preventative maintenance program for your facility for a fraction of what it would cost your business to set up its own similar program in-house. How much less expensive? In our benchmarking, we typically find that our programs are 3-4X less than it would cost a client to manage the program in-house. How is that possible? By freeing up the valuable time of your staff and maintaining relationships in our network of vendor-partners, we can ensure you the right service at the right time and the right price without vetting or haggling.
Really, the only task that’s left for you is to contact us and schedule a time to discuss how we can bring these services to your operations.
