When facilities are planned, a tremendous amount of effort goes into designing the look, the feel, and the functionality of the space. There are under-the-hood questions, such as “What sort of plumbing and electrical systems does this building need over the potential 50+ year lifespan of the facility? How many people will use each space, and how many restrooms will be required? How high will we need to pump the water in order to maintain pressure on the upper floors? There are also customer-facing decisions, such as what type of flush valves, faucets, and partitions would best serve this specific audience. The answers to all of these questions become the standard building specifications.
1. Commercial Quality Material
2. The Time and Cost of Maintenance
3. The Consistency of the Customer Experience
Plumbing maintenance and repair professionals know that commercial quality goods have a higher sticker price than residential plumbing, but it may not always be clear why. The secret is that commercial-quality plumbing is designed to handle high-volume usage and be easily repaired, not replaced.
Commercial plumbing is intended to take a much more robust beating than your typical residential plumbing, which may only get used a handful of times daily. Commercial restrooms are designed to be used nearly constantly for years at a time with maximum up-time. In commercial restrooms, you will find heavy-duty quality materials, such as solid cast-brass flush valves and faucets, with minimal plastic parts. You will also find added functionality, like touchless operating toilets, urinals, sinks, hand dryers, and towel dispensers. Some restrooms are uniquely equipped to meet specific use requirements, for example, toilets capable of carrying 1000lbs or mirrors that can’t be broken. If that’s what your facility calls for, these are all specialized commercial-grade plumbing solutions.
Because the applications are so much more specific and demanding, they require a heavier grade of material, more advanced engineering and design, and typically a higher initial cost. The good news is that commercial-grade material is also designed to be repaired using readily available, reasonably priced parts that can be sourced locally from specialty suppliers like The Part Works. Combine better-quality materials with affordable repair parts, and the facility will enjoy cost savings over the life of the installation. Literally, Time is Money.
In the words of Mike McLeod, Field Technical Specialist for The Part Works, “When the maintenance team has a building standard for plumbing fixtures and parts, they can keep repair parts in stock, so they don't have downtime. When there is no building standard, then
For most facility maintenance teams, labor is the biggest cost, dwarfing the cost of materials by 10:1 in many cases. While it may seem prudent to spend time shopping for better prices or cheaper products, smart facility managers will ask whether the short-term material savings equal more than the costs of:
In some cases, you may find that the short-term material cost savings does outweigh the short-term labor cost. Maybe you saved $100, and it only took 20 minutes to find an alternative solution. But does that solution require major retrofitting, opening walls, moving piping, or power? Is it sufficiently industrial quality to sustain years of use in a demanding environment, or will you be replacing it again in 6 months? Usually, cheaper is exactly what it sounds like, and it will require significant extra time to repair and replace.
The biggest unknown with the time/cost of maintenance is the major, growing shortage of qualified plumbing professionals. By moving away from the original building spec, you compel your maintenance team to learn new, varied repair protocols, which can dramatically increase facility downtime as your team learns new products. Not only will they be slower at each unfamiliar repair, but you will also find your stock room ballooning with repair parts for multiple mismatching products and face even longer downtime ordering them.
By far, the most substantial hidden cost in sourcing your materials is the loss of support from knowledgeable outside technical specialists. At The Part Works, as at many other local distributors, we send out our technical specialists to help facilities find the right solution in person as quickly as possible. We do the product research, the sourcing, and the local warehousing of commercial quality goods so that you don’t have to.
Finally, customer experience is essential to the success of facilities teams in all applications. If you work for a commercial real estate team and you manage buildings that others lease, those customers expect a professional, functioning, and aesthetically pleasing space where all of the equipment matches and provides a consistent user experience. If you manage a hospital, your customer is the patient, their family, and the healthcare staff. They expect properly equipped facilities that meet high demand and specialized use requirements. And if you are the maintenance supervisor for a school district, your customers are the families and communities whose tax dollars fund clean, functional facilities. By maintaining consistent, high-quality, situationally appropriate plumbing, you can manage the customer experience, ensuring as much up-time as possible. In the future, this level of exceptional customer experience will support capital funding requests for needed improvements and expansion.