How to control costs in hospitality, with a preventative maintenance checklist
During challenging trading times, controlling maintenance costs is absolutely imperative, particularly when the responsibility of running the day-to-day business is your main concern. Making the wrong decision in contractor selection, whether to repair or replace an asset, and other oversights with regards to maintenance issues, could be leaking money from your bottom line.
Businesses often see maintenance and repair costs as a fixed cost and not a controlled cost. Maintenance spend can be controlled with better knowledge of site equipment and consistent preventative maintenance monitoring. Tracking maintenance metrics is the best way to make informed business decisions while allowing operators more time to track other daily business needs. A CAFM platform gives you better oversight and control of maintenance and contractor management, avoiding unnecessary equipment downtime and ultimately controlling costs.
For the hospitality sector, operators need the correct strategy in place to successfully reduce maintenance costs. Read the checklist below, to see what key areas you could be focusing on:
Asset management
Equipment breaks down. That is an unfortunate fact of life and can greatly impact your business. You can lose efficiency, pay more in operating costs, and miss key customer service interactions. When a heavily used asset stops working it can impact everything else on site. Employees need to work around the issue, and you need to wait for the contractor to fix the problem.
Critically emergency maintenance expenses can significantly increase expenditure leaving you with a reduced bottom line. Needless to say, it is much more cost effective to perform appropriate scheduled maintenance rather than pay for full equipment repair or replacements when reactive failures occur. Furthermore, in order to limit trading disruption, planned maintenance should be scheduled strategically to avoid peak trading periods. Lastly it is important to also monitor equipment under warranty to avoid unnecessary expenditure.
As a general rule of thumb, an asset should be replaced once you’ve invested 75% of its overall value in repairs, although this is probably more like 50% in food service, where health and safety in the kitchen workplace is so important. The question to ask is could you realistically say, with confidence, how much you are spending on your assets?
Subcontractor management
There can be no denying that working with the right contractors is essential for the day-to-day operations of hospitality businesses. But to aid a smooth relationship with your contractors, you need to ensure that you’re able to supply all the relevant information required for them to complete the work, first-time, as any oversight in this area could result in an overcharge on invoices, cause equipment breakdowns or risk food safety due to improper or poor maintenance.
In addition, contractors who do not have the relevant licenses and permits can leave businesses exposed from a legal standpoint. Therefore, you need to ensure that the work contractors are doing onsite is monitored correctly, that it is done in an expedient fashion and that you have live information to hand as to the cost of the work, with robust and timely authorisation protocols in place.
Data analytics and invoice processing
Modern data platforms can provide crucial analysis tools to keep track of what is being spent and where, and this live data is critical for any business looking to reduce repair and maintenance spend. With data insights, operators can easily pick up on trends, create spend targets and authorisation protocols, and also forecast future FM spend. Successful cost-saving strategies include ensuring that you are getting the best rates from your contactor base, scheduling more planned maintenance to reduce overall repair costs, and replacing assets that are no longer viable economically to maintain. Furthermore, automating invoice processing via a CAFM platform is another strategy to reduce overall FM spend.
The key point to take away is that maintenance costs can be controlled as oppose to simply being fixed. Maintenance spend can be controlled with consistent monitoring, but that level of scrutiny can be very difficult when the responsibility of the day-to-day operations are your primary concern. A CAFM platform, like Access Maintain, helps you to properly track repair costs, push maintenance regimes from reactive to planned, and avoid equipment downtime and costly emergency maintenance. It will also allow operators to manage their contractor base effectively. These cost reductions can potentially save a significant amount from your bottom line and significantly improve profit margins.
Wherever your business operates in the UK and regardless of you having 5-5000 locations – Access Maintain offers you a tangible facilities management solution that is proven to work for other retail, hotel, restaurant, pubs, bars and care home operators.
More companies than ever before are choosing Access Maintain to deliver for them – either supporting your current in-house team or using our fully managed solution.
