When something breaks down it can have a major impact on your operations, and in some cases put you, your employees, and your customers in harm's way. The best way to avoid these outcomes is to stay on top of regular maintenance tasks, such as cleaning, inspection, and minor repairs and renovations. Let’s dig deeper into the importance of preventative (or preventive) maintenance.

Keeping Everyone Safe

If you own or operate a business, safety should be your number one priority. While there's no way to prevent all possibilities of someone getting hurt in your facility, investing in preventative maintenance significantly reduces the risk of such accidents. Keeping your floors clean, maintaining the integrity of your machinery, updating your line striping, managing trash and debris removal, changing out light bulbs, recalibrating fire safety systems -- all of these efforts and more contribute to a safer, healthier workplace.

Saving Time and Money

In the short run, preventative maintenance might seem like a major money drain. While it’s true that proper preventative maintenance can take up significant resources (i.e. daily office cleaning), you have to weigh this against the time and money it may take to fix a major problem. As previously mentioned, when equipment and/or systems finally go on the fritz, it can throw a wrench in your entire business and cost a fortune in repairs and replacements. In the long run, keeping up your maintenance efforts will likely save you time and money, preventing those major crises from occurring.

Optimizing Operational Efficiency

This point stems from the previous one -- preventative maintenance is a key component of overall operational efficiency. The best way to keep your business running on schedule and meeting deadlines is to ensure that all systems are in good shape. Operational efficiency doesn’t just involve machines and computer systems, either. You must also make sure your people are able to perform their roles without major interruptions. Your janitorial maintenance teams have a key role to play here, keeping areas clean and sanitary, ensuring that plumbing systems continue to function, and more.

Retaining Your Reputation

Preventative maintenance has a public-facing role to play as well. For instance, investing in snow removal services during the winter conveys to your customers that you care about your own property as well as their safety and accessibility. The same goes for all forms of preventative maintenance. Customers and visitors notice when a business is lacking in cleanliness, organization, and functionality. Even a flickering light bulb or outdated sign can send the wrong message to your audience.

Continually Complying

Lastly, keeping up with building maintenance is a matter of legal concern. Though the details differ from one industry to the next, all commercial entities must abide by certain codes, guidelines, and regulations to continue operating and/or avoid fines and fees. Preventative maintenance protocols help ensure that businesses remain in compliance with all relevant rules.

The adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” sums up the importance of preventative maintenance quite well. By taking consistent care of your employees and assets, you stave off the larger looming threats to your organization and keep the enterprise moving efficiently. At The Budd Group, we offer full-service, customizable maintenance programs to clients across all industries. Whether you need an on-call partner or in-house provider, our maintenance teams are here for you. To learn more about all that The Budd Group can do for your business, call us today at 800-221-8158, or send us an email at Solutions@BuddGroup.com!