As a franchise owner, you don’t want maintenance to take all your time and attention. It’s more profitable and frankly more fun to focus on operations, growing your business, marketing – anything that pertains to making your business more successful. But it’s easy for maintenance headaches to become an enormous time vampire, monopolizing your attention and budget. In many cases, these issues can be traced back to poor communication and unprofessional vendors.

One of the biggest hurdles of franchise maintenance is grease trap cleaning and waste oil collection. A poorly managed grease trap has the potential to negatively affect your business operations and compromise the state of your commercial kitchen. If you don’t have an efficient system or if your vendor is unreliable, it can lead to cleaning violations and fines.

Waste oil problems can be equally problematic, with issues with improper waste oil disposal or collection creating a dangerous health hazard that can increase your risk of slip and fall accidents or fires.

If you find that you’re spending way too much of your workday managing routine maintenance services, you can streamline the process and save yourself the stress by:

Standardizing Procedures

Develop comprehensive maintenance protocols, including routine checklists to identify potential signs of issues that prevent you and your staff from efficiently using time. You should also have standardized safety procedures to ensure your employees are always up to date on responsible waste oil disposal, FOG mitigation and proper fryer cleaning and maintenance.

Scheduling Preventive Maintenance

It’s always preferable to not have to reactively seek out maintenance and repair services. Organizing a preventative maintenance schedule with routine inspections so a professional can service appliances and address potential problems ahead of time can save you time, money and future stress. While emergencies may still happen, preventative maintenance will make them significantly less common.

Upgrading Appliances

Higher-end appliances can make maintenance easier and less frequent. For example, an integrated oil management system (iOMS) can automatically transfer waste fryer oil into oil containers without your employees ever needing to manually empty and precariously cart the oil outside to bins. This type of system drastically reduces the risk of dangerous spills that create slipping and fire hazards. In addition to reducing the risk of accidents, it also saves significant time and allows your employees to focus on their job duties rather than potentially hazardous cleanup.

Fostering Clear Communication

Ensure there’s clear communication between you, your staff and your maintenance vendors so concerns can be addressed promptly and reduce the risk of delays in communication exacerbating what was a minor issue into a major one. One way to do this is by implementing a centralized maintenance management system that can condense every aspect of commercial kitchen maintenance – reporting issues, work orders, preventative maintenance and other maintenance activities – into one system, streamlining the entire process.

Centralizing Supply Chain Management

Establishing partnerships with a few reliable maintenance vendors – like HVAC servicing, pest control and grease trap cleaning – can help minimize disruption to your daily operations without compromising on high-quality service. 

Continuously Improving

Even a seemingly perfect system may have room for improvement. Staying apprised of new technologies or industry practices could give you insight into ways you may be able to enhance your business’s maintenance practices.

How to Choose the Right Vendors for Your Business

Selecting qualified and trusted vendors can be crucial to keeping your franchise safe, clean and efficient. Ensure your providers have the necessary certifications and permits to verify their reliability. Georgia requires that those transporting FOGs for disposal are registered with the state – if your vendor doesn’t have a registration number, it could put you in trouble with the state, resulting in hefty fines and penalties.

You should also assess the capacity and versatility of your vendor. Instead of hiring numerous vendors, finding one that can provide a variety of services can save you time and labor. For example, Southern Green Industries is licensed and permitted to clean and maintain grease traps, transport the resulting waste and pick up and recycle waste fryer oil. 

Finally, verify that your vendors have insurance. If they’re uninsured and one of their workers is injured while servicing your facility, they may sue you for compensation.

At Southern Green Industries, everyone on our team is licensed, insured and experienced in providing comprehensive grease trap cleaning and fryer oil waste disposal services. We’ll handle every aspect of grease trap cleaning and fryer oil recycling for you – from pumping and maintaining your grease trap to submitting the necessary manifests in multiple formats to inspectors and state regulators so you don’t have to.

We Make Keeping Your Franchise Clean, Functional and Compliant With FOG Laws Easier

Hire a reliable grease trap cleaning and waste fryer oil recycling service provider that’s been servicing Georgia businesses for over 15 years. Call (404) 419-6887 to learn more about our commercial services and receive a free quote today.