After last week’s short interlude which allowed me to climb up on my soapbox and speak to Deferred Capital Renewal and Maintenance (DCRM), we are back for Part 2 of our post on the two biggest hurdles to getting started on a comprehensive Preventative Maintenance (PM) plan.

In the first post, I focused on Hurdle #1, the collection of consistent and defensible equipment inventory.  Now we are going to move on to Hurdle #2 which is knowing what PM tasks you are going to build into your PM program.

The first challenge associated with linking PM tasks to specific equipment is knowing what you could/should be doing as it relates to PM tasks.  There are a number of different sources of potential PM tasks.  Many manufacturers have specific recommendations for PM tasks.  There are also several sources of industry standard recommendations, like R.S. Means and others.  However, given the complexity of the different systems within buildings, the task of putting together a list from scratch can be a heavy lift.

When we are working with teams that are getting started on building a PM Plan, we actually recommend that organizations begin by determining what the ideal state for their PM program will be.  The first step in that visioning is to determine what equipment types will be included in the plan.  There are literally hundreds of different types of equipment that can be part of a PM program.  However, each organization needs to determine what makes the most sense for their team.

There are a few key elements to PM tasks that are foundational and should always be considered:

1. The discipline/skill of the individual that should do the task;
2. The recommended frequency of the task;
3. The estimated duration of the task;
4. Consumables required for the task.

There are other things that you can build into a task, including requirement for Lock-Out/Tag-Out, requirement to take equipment offline and others.  You and your team may have other criteria that you want to build into your PM task list.  Remember, it is your program, not some generic program that you are building.

Once you have a comprehensive list of equipment, it is time to gather the appropriate PM task lists.  Once that is complete, then you can build out the “Ideal Scenario” for PM by estimating the resources that would be required to do all of the recommended tasks on all of your equipment.  In nearly all cases, teams don’t have enough resources to do everything that is recommended.  However, it is good to run this scenario so that your stakeholders and senior executives can get a handle on the effort that would be required to do “everything”.

To draw a comparison to Capital Planning, the “best case scenario” (doing all of the recommended PM tasks on each piece of equipment) for your PM program is kind of like your FCI funding scenarios.  How much money would be needed to address all of our DCRM?    Understanding the maximum amount of resources required sets the bar for what could be done in the absence of the limits that we have placed on us.  It can make the eventual ask easier to absorb, since it is often much less that the “ideal case”, just like in Capital Planning.

Next week, we will shift our focus to moving beyond the ideal case and into building a realistic program based on where you are starting from with the available resources you have at your disposal.