HVAC Planned Maintenance (Top 10 Benefits and Workflows) | FieldInsight

What is planned maintenance?

Have you ever sat down and thought about how a planned maintenance system could be benefiting your business? Well now is the time to incorporate a great planned maintenance strategy into your commercial HVAC business so you can reduce equipment downtime, increase profitability, and boost production.

The bottom line of planned maintenance is exactly that, it is planned of time. Planned maintenance refers to an allotted time for a job where servicing, cleaning and improvements are performed on an asset or equipment. This means that you can build your company’s systems and software automation to assist in your maintenance and balance your workflow. You ideally want to advance your team’s skill sets to provide a reliable and trusted maintenance service for your customers (with minimal admin effort on your behalf).

What are the benefits of a maintenance plan?

With a maintenance plan, you can great more accountability and reliability within your workflow. With scheduled maintenance you can effectively build your SOP for delivery to ensure your assets have better performance.

A plan can lower the maintenance costs by avoiding defects and upkeeping services. Emergency maintenance tasks can be more time consuming and costly due to the interruption in your schedule, and more demanding equipment failures.

Regular preventive maintenance will boost the lifespan and performance of assets. With equipment inspections you can focus on preventive measures to avoid larger technical problems due to simple wear and tear. Imagine if you noticed a heavy machinery asset needed a new carrier roller or belt and you could schedule maintenance time with your customer to shut down the machine and order replacement parts. This avoids that panicked phone call from your customer about a machine breaking down and the substantial amounts of time spent diagnosing the problem, ordering parts, and interrupting your own schedule. A proactive maintenance approach can save you time and boost efficiency.

Maintenance managers will also find that there is improved customer satisfaction with planned maintenance programs. Your customers will have a smaller chance of unplanned breakdowns and you can create a strong brand image for your business with great onsite maintenance work.

Regular and routine maintenance tasks will help improve safety measures by ensuring that all safety precautions are followed. For both critical assets and non-critical assets, it’s vital that you adhere to safety regulations to avoid risks from frayed wiring to oil spills. Careful planning can reduce unplanned downtime and help maintain assets on site.

When you have the power to effectively document your procedures and can train your team to execute them with higher outcomes, you will see continuous improvement in performance and profitability.

Building a planned maintenance program for your team

1. Have asset priority

Decide what assets or equipment need priority for your maintenance scheduling. Critical assets should have first place on your list.

Also consider your return and replacement costs. Is the asset worth the regular maintenance, or would it be more time and cost efficient to replace it?

2. Consult your manufacturer

Your asset management will be organised around your manufacturer’s recommendations for maintenance tasks. They will also recommend the correct period for your maintenance tasks such as monthly, quarterly, or annually and which parts need replacing.

3. Fall back on your history

As a field service business, you have serviced and maintained assets in the past, you probably have mountains of paperwork detailing defects and maintenance logs. Take a note from your past jobs to best identify causes of wear and tear, troublesome parts, and the best maintenance tasks you can perform to keep your assets in working order.

What is the difference between reactive maintenance and preventive maintenance?

What do you plan to do in your company, a reactive or a preventative maintenance plan? The difference in your answer could save you large amounts of admin time and a few headaches.

A Reactive plan:

This type of preventative maintenance plan is all about waiting until there is a problem before you do anything about it. You might get a call in the middle of your busy day because a fault has been detected on a unit and it’s stopped working, or it’s smoking, or noisy, or leaking, or on fire, not cooling, not heating, smells funny or melting and now you need to fix it ASAP.

The Preventive plan:

This is all about scheduling for prevention and finding any issues before they cause problems down the line. When assets are regularly maintained and checked to be running smoothly, gradual degradation through natural wear is recorded and mitigated before major problems present themselves.

When you have asset KPIs and solid scheduled maintenance tasks, you don’t have to dread the day your customer calls up with a smoking AC unit (You will have the peace of mind, knowing all your assets have been regularly maintained).

Why is planned maintenance important?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – Imagine what a relief it would be, if you didn’t have to worry about your AC burning out in the middle of summer because your trusty HVAC team has already completed annual servicing.
Putting in place field service actions for your planned maintenance tasks can empower your team and even out your unbalanced workflow throughout the year.

An important factor in scheduled maintenance tasks with an asset management system is the clarity you gain over your workflow. Maintenance planning helps reduce errors and wasted time that can be the death of productivity. When you can direct your time with ease towards productivity and planned maintenance activities, you can spend your time on what really matters, knowing your admin time is vastly reduced.

Key skill sets your team needs to run an effective planned maintenance system

Without the right skills in your team, it can be hard to keep an organised schedule and get the work done with a high-quality service. It is necessary to have the right training and skills in your team for successful planned maintenance.

When you train your team in the right scheduled maintenance protocols and tasks, you will have a clearer understanding of what in house skills you have and any areas you might need to work on.

With field asset management in your planned maintenance, you can have visibility in your workflow. With the right management, ideally you will have people in roles that will be well suited to them. This isn’t always an obvious decision, and you might find one person may be wearing a few “hats” and be both an excellent salesperson and scheduler. When you determine where everyone fits in nicely in your team, you will find their talents will enhance your planned maintenance schedule and make your work more efficient.

The first step in perfecting your planned maintenance schedule, is in the systems that you chose to assist your team. No one particularly loves double data entry so finding the right fitting field service software is important in perfecting your preventive maintenance schedule. With a flexible software, planned maintenance will seem like second nature and minimises double data entry and long admin hours. Having systems that perform with ease will improve morale amongst your team, making those chores everyone put off, seem like a breeze.

See the Ultimate Guide to Preventative maintenance program for further details on planned maintenance management.

The Benefits with FieldInsight

The best way to integrate a planned maintenance system into your HVAC company, sits with the systems you chose to use in your workflow. With an automated software, you will find you have dramatically improved workplace costs and scheduled maintenance will feel like second nature, not a chore.

Features & Corresponding Benefit

• Keeping track of your customer’s assets 

You won’t miss the servicing you are committed to do

• Building your Asset Service Checklists

Create repeatable and high-quality reports

• Creating a maintenance schedule 

Cut down 90% of the planning time for a contract

• Allocate a team to complete the service tests for assets

One click allocation (almost sounds too good to be true)

• Create reports to collate and present information to your customers for audit, insurance, and liability 

One click asset service report and generation with images/test results/data

• Managing contracts 

Centralised information at your fingertips

• Building quotes and estimates for work 

Highly traceable quote follow up procedures for more wins for your team

• Keeping track of poor/good performing assets

Get more work done with higher ROI

• Having a high standard of traceability across assets and tests 

Deliver higher quality for your customers

• Providing a system to improve workplace safety in your team 

Ensure you are compliant, and your team have the best system in place

With FieldInsight.com you get scheduled maintenance and asset management that will reduce big time and cost wasters in your workflow.
FieldInsight is a real time automated software that sets the example for the HVAC industry for quality service. Wouldn’t you rather have a planned maintenance system in place that will benefit your workflow?
Book a Demo today and see what FieldInsight can do for your scheduled maintenance.