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Ensuring Proper Maintenance in the Workplace

Montgomery County Equipment and Maintenance Operations Center in Gaithersburg Maryland by Jeffrey Sauers of Commercial Photographics

Maintenance and engineering divisions are always essential for any company and they are obviously the unsung heroes in business settings. Unfortunately, there is very little appreciation for these professional, although both are essential to make everything in working order inside the workplace. Daily wear and tear inside the workplace can be substantial, especially in larger offices. In reality, the maintenance and engineering can operate as a cost-saving center, by ensuring that equipments depreciate slower and can be used for longer period of time. By the end of the year, this will be reflected by lower expenses because companies don’t need to purchase too many types of equipment.

By prioritizing on maintenance and engineering divisions, companies can save money and progressively improve their profitability. Unfortunately, maintenance can be placed as a lower priority, due to tight budgets. If maintenance is postponed, new problems will start to emerge. Many businesses have been folded because rising costs and they could actually be saved by ensuring that equipments can work smoothly and run longer. Profits will be diminished when we need to purchase more and more equipments. Things won’t work well for our companies if preventive maintenance is forgotten. There should be checklist of things that may need regular lubrication, inspections, adjustments and repairs. An annual preventive maintenance program can be needed and this will ensure that everything will work better and costly replacements can be prevented. As an example, we could identify expensive items that can be costly to replace and we need to focus on maintaining and fixing them.

Business owners will need to deal with the aging problems of their properties. After a couple of decades, any workplace will eventually show some significant wear and tear issues. In general, renovation is much cheaper the demolishing and rebuilding a workplace. It should be much easier to make our workplace to look like new again. Preventative maintenance may realize savings by reducing water usage. In many workplaces, water leakage in toilet and sinks could represent huge costs. To help heat water, offices could use the solar energy. Although the initial investment may seem to be expensive, business owners will immediately see significant reduction in electricity bills.

With good energy management program, we should be able to increase employee motivation, improve equipment performance, reduce energy consumption, forecast energy and replacement costs; and promote good habits internally. In general, business owners should ask employees to help in conserving energy by using computers, copiers and other equipments properly. Manufacturer’s recommendation for routine inspection and maintenance should be followed closely. There should be an adequate supervision to make sure that everyone is familiar with the maintenance procedures. Good maintenance should also help to save lives during emergency situation, as an example during fire accidents. Pull alarms, extinguishers, fire alarms, smoke detectors and sprinkler systems can be assessed regularly to make sure that they are working. There should be enough budget allocated for maintenance and repair process, depending on our requirements.