Facilities planning is both art and science.
Just consider the diverse locations within your portfolio—no two are exactly alike, even if they’re just down the street from each other. Building quirks, environmental factors, customer traffic, and countless other variables make each of your locations totally unique.
These factors can impact repair frequency, cost, facilities planning, capital allotments, and more. And in turn, how you handle these considerations will have significant effects on long-term brand perception. Your customers will notice the difference in location upkeep.
That’s why it’s so important to have a smart plan for facilities success in 2022. By applying a more tailored, data-driven approach to each of your locations, you’ll be better equipped to control costs, maintain consistency, and deliver greater value to your customers.
Here’s some starting points for success:
Customer traffic: Especially at your more popular customer destinations, the impact of customer foot traffic on a maintenance budget cannot be ignored. Customer interactions place strain on the cleanliness and integrity of floors, restroom facilities, point of sale units, coolers and refrigerators, rack displays, and anything else that regularly comes into direct contact with customers. So capture traffic data and plan selectively to have the greatest maintenance impact.
Asset conditions: Just as no two locations can be expected to be under exactly the same environmental conditions even if they’re relatively nearby, no two locations will have exactly the same asset and equipment conditions. Gathering equipment data for all locations within a region will help you predict and plan for future maintenance needs, including whether your assets are best served by continued repairs or all-out replacement. The right decision could mean significant savings.
Geography: Along with the ground on which it stands, any given location is constantly changing according to environmental factors. Beyond structural concerns related to the relationships of building materials and the earth below, even the trees around a building and the orientation of your building along the path of the sun can have significant long-term effects on indoor temperature, humidity, sun exposure, and so on. In turn, these factors will impact electricity usage, types of asset repairs, and the frequency of those repairs throughout the life of your lease.
Weather: The influence of weather patterns on facilities maintenance is considerable. Intense wind exposure gradually wears away at sealants around windows and entryways—and over time, air leakage will put additional strain on HVAC systems, causing both energy use rates and reactive maintenance costs to increase. Near the oceans, salt water vapor gradually corrodes even the inner surfaces of outdoor equipment like HVAC units, door and window hardware, and even sidewalks and structural walls. And in snowy regions, floor care service frequency will be increased as customers and associates track moisture in the form of snow, along with sidewalk salt and other chemicals generally harmful to most surfaces.
Are you paying attention to how these complex factors play a role in your facilities program? Successfully capturing and making use of data on each of these topics will help you deliver even more value to your customers throughout 2022. But it can be overwhelming, especially if you’re doing it on your own. Why not get in touch with a trusted partner? Drop us a line at weknowFM@smsassist.com.
