The All-Seasons Facilities Playbook: Preparing Facilities and Assets for Winter, Spring, and Beyond

This article provides an all-seasons facilities playbook, based on Ecotrak’s recent webinar with partner Chain Store Maintenance, to help you prepare facilities and assets for winter, spring, and beyond.

Why Seasonal Planning Matters

Facilities professionals know that in operations, if you aren’t planning ahead, you are liable to end up with problems. Whether for equipment or seasonal facility maintenance, reactive planning leads to higher long-term costs, unexpected downtime, and even safety and risk hazards.

Proactive seasonal planning empowers operators to instead tackle maintenance challenges strategically in ways like:

• Identifying core facility needs ahead of time, before emergencies or unexpected events happen

• Selecting the best vendor to service your facilities, rather than choosing a vendor based solely on availability

• Making holistic decisions about seasonal contracts, scheduling services ahead of time instead of repeated one-off emergency costs

• Planning for seasonal overlap on a location or regional basis, transitioning strategically between services (such as mowing and snow removal) instead of paying for separate seasonalities

• Creating a streamlined facilities vendor process to reduce risk and ensure long-term cost savings

Winter Readiness

When creating your winter readiness plan, first evaluate how winter weather impacts your safety and operations. A proactive service plan can help you prepare effectively for snow and ice hazards, slippery conditions, and increased risk of vehicle accidents or slip and falls on the property.

Within winter readiness, facility management professionals often face issues such as snow and ice removal, HVAC performance, and frozen pipes.

As you start to plan for service in these areas, negotiate proactively. For example, snow removal costs can be between 20-40% higher when contracted either late or after the season starts. Planning ahead also allows you to secure the best vendor to perform the service, rather than a “second-choice” vendor that has availability during peak season.

To support your operations, draft your request for proposal (RFP) with as much detail as possible about what effective wintertime service looks like. This may mean documenting service level details, such as times of service priority, location structures, and property maps. For organizations with locations in “outlier” areas that may not regularly receive snow, consider adding terms guaranteeing service per occurrence (rather than scheduled regularly), in the event of atypical snow accumulation.

Spring Transition

As winter transitions to spring, facility management professionals may need to tackle additional tasks such as irrigation system checks, debris cleanup, landscaping, and hardscape repairs.

Springtime usually brings weather challenges. Landscaping operations may kick into high gear with mulching, pruning, and vegetation installation, but late snowstorms, rain, or dry springs can derail vegetation schedules.

To proactively prepare, aim to award RFPs to landscape vendors as soon as possible. Your springtime facilities management needs may be competing against other locations with similar start dates. Advance planning 3-6 months before the spring season can help ensure you secure your top vendor, and give them enough time to procure equipment and arrange staffing.

Interior Assets & HVAC

The health of your HVAC equipment is especially important during seasonal changes, making HVAC preventative maintenance an important part of seasonal planning.

Industry analysis shows that without regular maintenance, HVAC devices and systems can fail closer to 12-15 years in age. Spending time to proactively maintain the system can extend the life to 20-25 years or more, protecting your investments in expensive equipment.

An investment in HVAC preventive maintenance (PM), even without an immediate financial return, can help systems run better, last longer, and cost less to maintain over the long-term. PM may include cleaning the unit, replacing consumable parts like filters and belts, and inspecting the unit for wear and tear that leads to equipment breakdowns.

General industry best practice is scheduling quarterly maintenance, with two intensive services, and two services swapping out filters, performing basic cleaning, and inspecting for issues.

Separately, ensuring your employees understand how the HVAC system operates can help avoid the system overworking unnecessarily. Consider limiting access to thermostat and providing training for location management around troubleshooting and emergency management systems.

And finally, emergency repair work for HVAC systems can be expensive, even as this equipment is critical to guest and employee comfort. Instead of waiting until failure point and spending extra expense on emergency replacement, tracking the best repair vs replace threshold allows your organization to invest money in a new unit proactively.

Seasonal Checklists & Planning Timelines

Here are a few final tips and tricks for your seasonal planning checklists:

• Clearly define everything about the scope of work you outline in your RFP, including:

  • Maps for each property, defining boundaries and service areas

  • Full location list, with any service differences defined

  • Any additions or removals to scope, based on lessons learned from previous years

  • Any dark stores with a separate or limited service scope

  • Space for future locations, locking in pricing even if contract isn’t awarded, to streamline onboarding when ready

• Review contracts to find opportunities to save money with multi-year discounts, or identify services that can be made per occurrence or seasonal

• Dedicate time to discuss feedback and recommendations with your vendor partner, empowering both sides of the partnership to operate effectively

• Always be on the lookout for new vendors throughout the year, to broaden your options during RFP season

Timing is key for seasonal maintenance. Proactive RFPs allow you to potentially bundle services and negotiate better mobilization fees. Early vetting and selection also allows for better planning and transition, ensuring that you've got the right team in place ahead of any seasonal issues.

Choosing the Right Partners

As you navigate vendor choices and RFPs to find the best service provider for your facilities, keep a few questions in mind:

• Can this vendor handle the scope and appropriately perform the work?

• How will this vendor communicate when arriving to sites?

• What is their emergency response protocol? Is there a knowledgeable team that can be contacted directly, even if after hours?

• How do they staff — self performed, subcontracted, a hybrid?

• What is exactly included in a quoted price, and what services are considered separate billings (perhaps in the fine print)?

• For new vendors, how is the initial service transition set up, and what is required of your operations team?

For more information about facilities management in all seasons, check out the full webinar here, co-hosted by Ecotrak and Chain Store Maintenance with Matt Singer (CEO, Ecotrak), Del Bunker (VP of Business Development & Qualifying Agent, Chain Store Maintenance), and Dana Russell (VP Exterior Operations, Chain Store Maintenance).