Does your company maintain outdoor areas that are open to the public like parkways, gardens, and break areas? While they may seem ubiquitous, these areas are an important part of your business’s image, and maintaining them properly is essential. People will feel comfortable visiting your company if the grounds are neat, clean, and well-kept, and if they aren’t they will notice, giving them a negative impression of not just the surroundings, but the business within!
So, maintaining a great grounds area is a priority for any business, and you are going to have to invest in the proper equipment to keep them up! You will need to find high-quality street sweeping equipment for sale as well as mowers, tote carts, and tree trimmers to help your groundskeepers do their job properly! Having the right gear is a great place to start on making sure your grounds are top quality so they can put an attractive face on your company’s location.
Grounds maintenance is something of an art and a science, it’s the process of maintaining outdoor areas as well as planted indoor areas. The daily duties of your groundskeeping team may include planting, fertilizing, and watering trees, shrubbery, grass and flowers, controlling pests, mowing lawns, and sweeping sidewalks. It is always the goal of grounds maintenance to maintain the property’s value and keep the landscaped areas functional and pleasant to be in.
Professional groundskeepers utilize four main types of maintenance on the areas that are entrusted to their watchful and diligent care:
Planned Maintenance – This is a maintenance strategy that makes use of regularly scheduled maintenance tasks that are intended to reduce costs and ensure the smooth operations of all the care and cleaning activities. A day’s planned maintenance might include a scheduled administration of fertilizer, watering the plants, oil changes in the grounds equipment, and the regular sharpening of mower blades.
Corrective Maintenance – This maintenance strategy happens in response to any unplanned problem that emerges on the grounds with a focus on quickly repairing an asset, and returning it to its proper state. Some typical examples of corrective maintenance might include changing the blade of a lawn mower after hitting a rock, fixing irrigation pipes that are leaking or have burst, or charging a dead battery in a maintenance vehicle.
Condition-Based Maintenance – This type of maintenance strategy is used to monitor the performance of equipment during sensor alerts and inspections, focusing on servicing critical ground equipment proactively once any sign of anticipated failure has been identified. Ground condition-based maintenance might consist of replacing an irrigation system’s water pump once a decrease in water pressure has been discovered, and trimming back shrubbery that is likely to soon encroach on walkways.
Predictive Maintenance – This is a highly prepared approach to preventive maintenance that utilizes sensors and parses advanced algorithms in order to predict potential grounds maintenance needs and equipment breakdowns. It focuses on identifying problems before they have a chance to occur. One great example of grounds predictive maintenance is the groundskeeping staff making use of weather-detecting sensors to anticipate rain to adjust their automated watering schedules.
Keeping a company’s grounds in tip-top condition year-round is a major undertaking!
