Background

For years the York Facilities Management Team recognized that it needed to increase its teams’ focus on Preventative Maintenance (PM) to reduce the costs and disruption associated with its Demand Maintenance needs. However, numerous internal false starts over the years were generally the result of a lack of capacity to build the initial momentum required to develop a sophisticated program. Finally in 2018, with support from its Board, York had the approved resources to partner with Roth IAMS to develop its PM program.

Process

The first stage of the program was to select what equipment would be inventoried and tagged, as well as what specific information would be collected for the equipment. The creation of York’s desired dataset laid the foundation for the entire program. Working closely with York, Roth IAMS tailored our data collection tools so that exports would be easily it import into Maximo, based on York’s unique configuration.

With a detailed desired dataset, and hand-held tools (SLAM Equip) configured to gather the data, Roth IAMS set out complete inventory of over 100 buildings, totalling over 10 Million sq. ft. of buildings. Resilient asset tags, with unique barcodes were applied to each piece of equipment to make them easy to locate, and hard to remove. Over the course of the next 18 months the Roth IAMS team applied over 18,000 unique asset tags.

Using a detailed PM task list (enabled by SLAM Prevent), developed by Roth IAMS, the equipment inventory data was matched with specific PM tasks including description, frequency, recommended staff, estimated duration and a list of associated consumables. Tens of thousands of individual tasks associated with the tagged equipment were uploaded into Maximo to allow for the activation of the PM program.

Outcome

Finally in possession of a detailed and accurate inventory of its equipment, York has been able to create an accurate inventory within its Maximo CMMS system. This inventory not only supports York’s PM program, but it also makes tracking Demand Maintenance more effective as the work orders can now be assigned to specific pieces of equipment.

Using the PM task provided by Roth IAMS, York is now creating and dispatching PM work orders across both of its Toronto-area campuses. Following the initial inventory, Roth IAMS also provided training to York staff on how to update the dataset when equipment was replaced to ensure the dataset remains current over time.

York continued to collaborate with Roth IAMS to provide guidance and insight into the development of SLAM Prevent, the PM planning sandbox software that allows clients to match its internal and third party resources to a tailored PM plan.