Campus Preventive and Deferred Maintenance Reality Check: How Accurate is Your Equipment Inventory?

Campus buildings are constantly changing so maintenance teams chase a moving target about knowing where equipment and shutoffs are in the field. Teams, many relying on their memories, struggle to document these.

Dirk Schoup, formerly with the University of Pennsylvania, believes that when looking at the cost of preventive maintenance vs. deferred maintenance, preventive maintenance provides his team with a greater opportunity to forecast additional needs such as future repairs, changes in materials, schedule adjustments, and aid in mitigating the risks of failure or breakdowns.

“If we go even further and look at predictive maintenance, it allows us to create a much more comprehensive assessment of asset trends in performance, efficiency, reliability, application, and even relevance because of the time we spent with the asset,” he said. “If you are going to apply a deferred maintenance methodology it is critical that you are positioned to act immediately in case of equipment failure.”

Preventive maintenance, if properly executed, allows teams to thoroughly plan each task, assess safety concerns, and mitigate risks. Deferred maintenance can position teams into a reactive maintenance situation, which can create the stress of time pressure causing them to narrow their focus and potentially overlook a hidden danger that could create a safety risk.

According to a Vanson Bourne study, 82% of companies have experienced at least one unplanned downtime outage over the past three years, with the average number of outages being two.

The study revealed high levels of asset ignorance across organizations, with 70% or more of companies, lacking full awareness of when equipment is due for maintenance, upgrade, or replacement.

Equipment maintenance is a huge responsibility for facilities managers (FMs) who are fiscally responsible for company funds. They’re tasked with being frugal and resourceful with assets on hand while providing a safe, healthy facility and work environment for employees and their community.

Managing Equipment: Knowing What You Have

There’s value in using a mobile device to field-verify what equipment is on your campus; how to effectively inventory your equipment by type, location, condition; and how to access equipment maintenance information using QR codes.

Technology can help FMs track which equipment needs maintenance and the efficiency of technicians in the field.

The veteran team member who you’ve relied on for years might be gone in a couple of weeks, a few months, or a year, being drawn to another organization offering a better salary and/or better benefits or retiring from the workforce.

You don’t want to be in a position where you can’t answer equipment questions because that was always another person’s area of expertise.

Technology can help FMs track which equipment needs maintenance and the efficiency of technicians in the field.

Daniel Olthaus from Miami University uses maintenance planning and a GPS tracking system to schedule, monitor, and evaluate the logistics and efficiency of their technicians. They hold weekly meetings with managers and planners, and their scheduler reviews the past week’s productivity to adjust for the upcoming week. Olthaus believes preventive maintenance should be scheduled for completion just like any other work request.

“If an organization has the mentality that preventive maintenance comes secondary to other work, they are falling into the trap that preventive maintenance isn’t important. They will always have a backlog that will result in more reactive work being generated,” he said.

There’s also tremendous importance to having instant access from the field via mobile devices to manuals and maintenance logs for improved equipment maintenance. It’s difficult to be efficient with your time when you’re searching all over your campus for equipment.

Onboarding Natural Talent

Part of the challenge right now in providing equipment maintenance are labor shortages and training new hires to get up to speed on all the equipment they’ll have to deal with on the job.
During the onboarding process, Ronald Harkins from the Abington School District, looks for a natural talent not a talker. Harkins has observed that some individuals can communicate an understanding but not test well.

Olthaus has found that if he tracks the onboarding process and reaches out to individuals responsible for the onboarding, he can nudge the process along faster. He and his team schedule orientation and required HR training to be completed on the employee’s first day. They also have an onboarding checklist that the supervisor completes with the employee.

Jerry Eldridge, the Facilities Director at OC Fair & Event Center, inventories assets on an Excel spreadsheet, including age, manufacturer, serial number, filter sizes. They also have a property asset map that identifies locations of HVAC equipment, light towers, and generators.

Repair vs Replacement

“Does the ROI on the repair really outweigh the replacement when you factor in the time spent on management, staff hours, planning, preparing bids, job walks, and getting the equipment repaired? Sometimes I find myself rooting for complete failure of a unit,” he said.

Here are some critical questions to ask your maintenance team:

• How accurate is your equipment database?
• Is the process of updating any changes to your equipment database easy for your field teams to make?
• Do you know where each piece of equipment is located?
• Do you know what rooms they serve?
• How many have been changed out in the past 5 years?
• Were they updated in your equipment list?
• What is the equipment’s lifecycle, and how does that impact the safe operations of that piece of equipment?
• Do you have the right technology to keep an accurate, field-verified, equipment inventory?

A properly implemented and executed preventive maintenance program can reduce operating costs and improve system and equipment reliability and performance. Such programs can help a facilities maintenance department optimize its resources, both labor and materials while reducing failures and improving operational efficiency.

But the most important aspect of any program is the people. Hiring the right staff, training them, empowering them, and building a culture of continuous improvement is the most cost-effective way to eliminate or reduce failures. Bottom-line, people make the difference.

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Jack Rubinger is the Marketing Content Writer at ARC Facilities. He can be reached at [email protected].