Why Hotels Need to Use Asset Management Software

Due to cut throat competition, aging assets, and unpredictable market environments, many hotels and hospitality establishments are now facing many financial hardships. Hotel owners do not always realize that by utilizing a preventive maintenance system, they can easily realize financial relief by avoiding unwanted cash drains.

They can do this by employing CMMS that delivers benefits such as helping managers schedule preventive maintenance to control capital expenditures, enhancing energy efficiency, and reducing labor costs.

CMMS for Hotel Maintenance

As is the case everywhere, all types of assets usually require routine maintenance in the course of their life cycles. This is because as assets mature (through tear and wear), maintenance requests will inevitably increase.

Such aging assets require adjustments, lubrication, replacement parts, cleaning, and repainting. This is known as preventive maintenance, and its goal is to prolong the life of the asset.

For smaller hotel properties, there are fewer asset maintenance tasks when compared to bigger hotel establishments. Many hotel establishments tend to defer or ignore preventive maintenance. This happens when the hotel in question has not planned for its personnel to carry out any maintenance routines that may arise. Some hotels wrongly presume that they will save money by making such arrangements.

In many cases, this is a clear sign of a struggling hotel. Problems like these will arise when the hotel executives fail to recognize that poorly kept assets (kitchen equipment, roof structures, boilers etc.) often breakdown when there is no proper maintenance schedule.

It is well known that poorly maintained assets are not energy efficient. Unnecessary higher energy bills and the extra wear and tear on assets that are running too long can be avoided. This also applies to all assets within a hotel, from office equipment to in-house laundry services. It can be remedied through the adjustment of maintenance operations in order to become more flexible and efficient by using a hotel CMMS.

How a Hotel CMMS Works

A CMMS system is intended to ensure that all hotel assets will be effortlessly scheduled for both inspections and preventive maintenance. It functions by developing a centralized, automated data bank of all hotel assets. This data source allows all maintenance tasks such as priority work requests, and task order completion to be easily planned and monitored.

By synchronizing the workflow and computerizing the work ordering procedures, a lot can be achieved with minimal resources. Additionally, when hotel assets are subject to routine maintenance and inspection they will need less power to operate. The main thing here is that the equipment will cost much less to run and last longer thus saving the hotel from replacing assets faster than really needed.

Great Flexibility in Hotel Operations

From what I learned in my hospitality course, labor costs have a direct impact on the financial health of many hotels. In order to reduce unplanned maintenance incidences that result in extra labor and/or overtime costs, the hotel can implement a CMMSsystem to schedule all preventive tasks and work orders.

This means that time spent during the execution of urgent tasks is greatly reduced, and better maintenance freedom allows more tasks to be completed with the same resources. This way the hotel is able to control both overtime and maintenance costs. Other financial rewards achieved as a result of implementing a hotel asset management system include:

• Faster reaction time to guest concerns: This is due to improved schedule effectiveness.
• Improved capital budgeting as the¬†CMMS¬†system monitors all assets maintenance record/history, thus putting the management in a better position to calculate replacement periods.
• Liability resulting from negligence claims can be minimized as all records of maintenance history will show sound maintenance and inspection practices.

Hotel asset management system is vital to any hotel that wants to remain relevant. For hotels that don’t use preventive maintenance applications, they will continue to struggle while those at the forefront of this technology will continue to realize better profit margins and work productivity in these times of cut throat competition and market uncertainties.