What is Preventative Maintenance and what is Facilities Services role?
The Campus Operations reorganization plan involves moving Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) staff and responsibilities from the central shops to the zones. This will increase the overall scope of work for the zones and make them responsible for nearly all of the systems in their zone. This is an important step. The zones will need to make sure their staff understand these new systems, assets and the associated PM plans. Cross-training between zones and within current zone staff will be critical. Zones will also need to capitalize on efficiencies of location to maximize PM routing of staff throughout the zone. Considerable planning will need to take place to make sure the right people are in the right place at the right time so all PM can be performed effectively, efficiently, and asset reliability can be maximized.
Preventive Maintenance is an essential part of any building operations organization. Traditionally, Facilities Services (FS) has been primarily a reactive organization. FS has made great strides over the past year to increase PM efforts, but a more organized and systematic approach is necessary to ensure full asset accountability. More importantly, a cultural change is necessary in FS to convert from the current ‘reactive / corrective’ mindset to one of ‘proactive / continuous improvement’. Industry-standard estimates an effective preventive maintenance program saves between 4 and 20 times the cost of reactive/corrective maintenance.
A PM program is only as good as the staff and leadership participating in it – a team approach is necessary. This is why changing the overall culture in FS/Campus Operations is critical. Currently, there is not an ‘incident review’ plan in place. An effective incident review program should document: What asset failed? How did it fail? What other assets were affected by this failure? What campus activities or operations were affected by this failure/downtime? What are the (estimated and actual) repair costs? And most importantly, what can we learn from this? – How do we implement change to drastically minimize the probability of recurrence in this and any other similar situations across campus? I feel confident that with this great organization we can move forward in this direction and be successful.
Vince Avila, Director of Facilities Services
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