Luckily, in this day and age, there are numerous building maintenance management software solutions available both on-premises and on the cloud. The most widely used software for this problem is called a computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS.

Using a CMMS for your building maintenance management software is a great way to gain control over your monthly and bi-weekly tasks, plant maintenance schedule and much more. This type of software really can make a difference when it comes to the safety and reliability of your property, but why exactly is this?

What Is Building Maintenance Management?

Building maintenance management involves coordinating maintenance activities for structural assets of a building with the goal of minimizing downtime, controlling costs, and extending asset lifespan.

Building maintenance management is essential for many industries including:

• Hotel / Hospitality
• Property Management
• Industrial Manufacturing Facilities
• Retail Buildings / Malls
• Office Buildings
• Warehouses
• Schools / Universities

Essentially, any industry with large, expensive assets should have a building maintenance management program in place to protect important assets such as:

• HVAC
• Boilers
• Chillers
• Fire Alarm Systems
• Computer Systems
• Elevators
• Kitchen Equipment

Building maintenance also includes non mechanical work orders such as:

• Housekeeping
• Wall Paint
• Floors and Carpets
• Emergency and Navigational Signs
• Ceiling Leaks

By having a plan in place to inspect and maintain all of these assets, a business owner is protecting their most important assets and minimizing the risk of equipment failure disrupting business operations or causing injury.

Why Is Building Maintenance Management Software Important?

While maintenance is manual work, your team still needs to be using building maintenance management software. Doing so elevates your program to maximize safety, security, quality, longevity and peace of mind. This saves thousands of dollars per year and provides confidence that unexpected downtime and repair costs are minimized.

🦺 Safety

The primary reason for building maintenance management is to keep staff and customers safe at all times. Slippery surfaces, inadequate lighting, sharp edges, ineffective alarms, and unorganized processes are some of the many safety concerns that building maintenance must correct.

Beyond the value of providing safety, building maintenance provides protection against lawsuit risk resulting from an on-premise injury. These types of lawsuits are long, expensive and time consuming. Preventing just one incident pays for the entire maintenance team and more.

👮 Security

Well-maintained buildings are also much less likely to be vandalized, especially if the grounds are well-kept, security lighting is in place, and the overall impression of the building is that people are actively maintaining the property.

Furthermore, proper maintenance on CCTV and alarm systems ensures that your building will have the proper security and evidence to take next steps in the event of a breach.

⭐ Quality

Digital building maintenance management enables protection against employee turnover and lazy workers by providing trackable SOPs and checklists with photo attachments. New employees can easily follow along with pre-existing processes and problematic employees can be required to prove work quality with photo evidence.

Building maintenance management software also allows for improved effectiveness and efficiency of mechanical assets by providing proper maintenance, both preventive and reactive. This ensures that the output of the machine is consistent with brand standards and no unexpected failures occur during business operations.

⏳ Longevity

Building maintenance management software helps to extend the longevity of your facility and assets by providing data on asset health throughout the entire lifetime. This helps managers to identify changes in performance that may be indicative of mechanical error. By catching and correcting issues early and often, the equipment runs at peak performance much longer. This helps businesses to save big on investment in replacement equipment and unexpected repairs.

🧠 Peace of Mind

A properly maintained building can be trusted to perform when needed, providing managers with much needed stress reduction in peak seasons. Using programs such as a CMMS reduces clutter, long paper trails, and the anxiety of manually doing everything. With a CMMS, you have live data on your entire facility, with the ability to easily assign inspections and work orders to correct anything that raises a concern.

Also Read: 3 Ways to Make a Preventive Maintenance Schedule

What can Building Maintenance Management Software Do?

🛠️ Work Order Management

A computerized maintenance management system provides managers with the ability to digitize and streamline work order management. A CMMS provides an automated way to track work orders, manage projects and control scheduling while providing detailed information on equipment performance such as machine health reports. This leads to:

• Increased speed of communication through instant mobile communication and work order assignment.
• Increased clarity of communication through the ability to attach images and SOPs to every work order.
• Increased data collection and analysis by tracking and quantifying work processes
• Increased oversight with live progress tracking and reporting, as well as mobile collaboration.

📅 Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is a critical part of any organization’s asset management strategy. It helps ensure that equipment and machinery are in good working order and less likely to fail, which can lead to costly downtime and increased warranty claims. A CMMS is a software tool that helps organizations manage their preventive maintenance programs.

While Preventive maintenance is the key to avoiding costly equipment breakdowns, it can be difficult to keep track of everything. A CMMS digitizes preventive maintenance calendars allowing managers to ditch binders and excel spreadsheets for a more efficient and effective alternative.

Use recurring work orders to schedule preventive maintenance on any asset, at any time cadence. Attach SOPs, checklists and logs to each work order to ensure proper data collection. Use push notifications on mobile devices to ensure nothing gets overlooked or missed.

🔎 Inspections and Audits

Building maintenance management software helps streamline inspections and safety audits so that businesses are confident that nothing is being overlooked. These systems make it easy to build custom templates for checklists, SOPs, logs, forms, and inspections so that efforts are standardized and consistent. Clearly communicate issues you spot with images to guide next steps. Many CMMS systems allow managers to create work orders to correct failed items and provide detailed, time-stamped reports on completed inspection steps.

With a digital system, every inspection is recorded and saved for management review and compliance audits. With a CMMS, a building can provide documentation of all inspections and maintenance services to prove complete transparency and due diligence to avoid costly fines.

🧼 Cleaning

Extensive cleaning operations are needed to maintain the buildings’ health and hygiene codes. In the post-COVID era, it is essential for businesses and facility managers to provide a safe environment to live and work. Work orders such as cleaning and sanitation can be completed with help of a building maintenance management software to ensure standards are upheld and record of work completed is documented.

📊 Data & Analytics

Data and analytics are directly related to the success of building maintenance programs. If you have no information to prepare for the future, how can you do it? Using pen and paper, and even Excel spreadsheets leads to poor and inaccurate data collection. This causes slow and unconfident decision making with little ability to measure the effectiveness of the change. With a building maintenance management software, managers can easily organize and export reports to share with their teams and superiors.

‍

4 Best Building Maintenance Management Software To Use In 2023

Here’s a quick but brief rundown of some of the best software recommendations for you to consider.

1.  Xenia

Xenia is a light-weight CMMS, built especially for ease of use on the frontline. The software is excellent on both desktop and mobile, providing essential solutions to different aspects of building maintenance management.

Building maintenance managers can manage work orders, schedule preventive maintenance activities, conduct inspections, standardize processes, create reports and more. Moreover, Xenia has a massive publicly accessible template library stocked with checklists, inspections, SOPs, logs and forms to jump start any building maintenance management program.

Xenia is a highly versatile system that provides the most important features at less than half of the cost of other CMMS options.

Key Features:

• Lightweight CMMS powering work orders, PMs, Inspections, Audits, and Safety Compliance
• Ready-to-use checklist and inspections library (customizable in-app) and easy-to-use builder
• Task Management with integrated checklists, SOPs, and chats to power teamwork and accountability
• Easy to organize and export reports in both PDF and CSV
• Employee directory with individual chats, groups, and company-wide announcements
• Custom location and team configuration to assign work to specific facility areas or departments
• Fast onboarding and ease of use

Pricing:

• Xenia is available for $15 per user per month.
• Annual plans are further discounted to $10 per user per month

2.  MaintainX

MaintainX offers all the functionality of Xenia’s platform, plus some additional functionality such as asset management and parts inventory modules, vendors, purchase orders, and improved data analysis dashboards. The platform is great on both desktop and mobile and offers refined features to power complex operations.

But then again, you get what you pay for. With MaintainX, the low-tier paid plans have a limited number of features with low usage limits designed to be hit soon after getting started with the software. For example, the $10 per user per month plan of MaintainX limits usage to 3 template attachments to work orders per month.

Most of the competitive advantages that MaintainX has over Xenia are found in the $40 per user per month plan. When looking at other CMMS options in the space, you will see that $40 is a typical entry level price point. If you have the budget for this option and need a more robust platform, MaintainX is a great choice. However, we recommend testing out other similarly priced competitors before going all in.

Key Features:

• Work order management
• Preventive maintenance calendars
• Asset management
• Parts inventory and cost tracking
• Advanced analytics
• Maintenance and inspections audit management
• Collaboration through in-app messaging system

Pricing:

• $10 per user per month for Essential Package ($8.83 Annual)
• $39 per user per month for Premium Package ($32.50 Annual)
• Enterprise - Contact for pricing

3.  UpKeep

Upkeep is a cloud-based solution that streamlines the asset maintenance and management process for mid-sized, and large-scale businesses. It is a robust and powerful platform that can provide a detailed view of asset health driven by live sensors and robust dashboards.

Compared to MaintainX and Xenia, Upkeep is a more powerful but more expensive tool for maintenance management. The entry level plan is similar to the premium MaintainX plan, but the user interface is very different on both desktop and mobile. The data analytics dashboard interface is very different, with MaintainX being more user friendly and Upkeep being more customizable (if you are tech savvy enough to build analytics reports).

What separates Upkeep is their ability to have IoT sensors and build workflows based on triggers such as meter readings to provide true predictive maintenance. Essentially your machinery can tell the system when something is wrong and Upkeep can trigger a work order immediately and autonomously. Upkeep’s professional plan ($75 per user per month) is provides access to IoT sensors and the work order request portal.  

Key Features:

• Preventive maintenance and Work order management
• Interactive reports and dashboards
• Barcode scanners and automated meter readings
• Equipment breakdown reports
• Location based asset monitoring and tracking feature
• Materials management and cost tracking

Pricing:

• Upkeep Starter available for $45 per user, per month
• Professional Plan is available for $75 per user, per month

4.  Fiix

Fiix is a CMMS platform developed by Rockwell Automation to handle asset management, work orders, preventive maintenance, parts, and supplies inventory. Their platform makes it easy to analyze each asset and see a complete bill of materials, work orders assigned and completed as well as meter reading logs.

Fiix uses AI to analyze maintenance data for finding trends and issues quickly to help plan, purchase, and manage parts and equipment all in the platform. Moreover, this CMMS has SOC 2 Type 2 data security compliance and guarantees 99.5% equipment uptime.

For teams handling many assets with hundreds of data points, Fiix is a great solution. But similarly to Upkeep, to access these features, businesses need to elect the $75 per user per month plan.

Key Features:

• Preventive maintenance with nested scheduling
• Multi-asset work orders
• Asset and parts management
• E-signature support (enterprise)
• Pass / Fail Inspections

Pricing:

• Free plan available with limited feature set
• Fiix Basic starts at $45 per user per month
• Fiix Professional starts at $75 per user per month

Conclusion

Building maintenance management is an ongoing process. However, with a little bit of scheduled maintenance activities and inspection audits through robust software, you can be assured of keeping things running smoothly.

If you have further questions about how to use a CMMS or propagate your building maintenance work orders through CMMS tools, feel free to contact us. We’d be more than happy to assist you.

Good luck!

‍