You’re always on the hook to find ways to stretch your facility’s maintenance budget, and that means making short-term budget cuts. Most often the reflex solution to squeeze in other budget items is to cut building maintenance projects that aren’t super pressing now — like your regular preventative roofing maintenance. After all, if the roof isn’t leaking, it can wait, right?
But even though those roofing maintenance projects don’t seem vital right this second, pushing them off can have a serious impact on your long-term budget. That’s why having a preventative maintenance program for your roof is so important for your company’s bottom line.
Why Preventative Roof Maintenance Makes Major Financial Sense
Access to limited resources means more and more facilities teams are expected to focus on critical systems, such as safety infrastructure or uninterruptible power in data centers, which means less critical equipment is failing faster, according to Building Magazine. “Assets that people often don’t associate with preventive maintenance are things like roofs, facades and parking lots that aren’t dynamic mechanical equipment,” Jim Whittaker, engineering services lead at JLL, told Building Magazine. “That kind of preventive maintenance can have a big impact because things like roofing systems and pavement are very expensive, and not fixing things and doing routine maintenance can really accelerate the deterioration and create a lot more expensive damage down the line.”
Think of your facility’s roof like a car: if you never changed your oil or rotated your tires, your car would break down much faster than if you had maintained it on a regular schedule. You’d have to suffer through paying for major repairs or buy a new car much sooner than you’d planned, and that’s a much bigger expense than a few oil changes. The same goes for your facility’s roof; performing regular roof maintenance will keep you from having to replace your roof sooner than you need to, and that’s much better for your budget in the long run.
And the numbers back up the case for prevention. The Roof Asset Management Program (RAMP), an effort of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, has been managing the roofing repairs and replacements for six sites across the country under one contract since 2005. The program emphasizes strategic, proactive repairs intended to extend roof life, and to date has:
- Saved $7 million in construction costs
- Added $19.3 million in value to the roofing portfolios of these facilities through life-extending repairs
- Increased average remaining life of roof inventory by 25 percent
Prevention Is Easier Than It Seems
Programs like North American Roofing’s StarCare Asset Management Program make it much more affordable for businesses just like yours to maximize the return on your new roof. With StarCare, you can forecast your maintenance budget and use the online service portal to request services when you need them. North American Roofing’s expert team has an extensive capacity to maintain hundreds of facilities nationwide in a short time, helping you extend the life of your current roofing system.
They say a pound of prevention is worth an ounce of cure. But when it comes to major systems like your roof, prevention adds up to major dollars in your facility’s budget. And that is worth the investment.