Here we are with our third post on the two biggest hurdles to getting started on a Preventative Maintenance (PM) program for your portfolio. Not sure how I turned a post that has the number two in its title into a multi-part blog mini-series, but I hope that it is adding value nonetheless.
So far in this series, we have talked about Hurdle #1: gathering a consistent and defensible inventory of equipment, and we started on Hurdle #2: understanding the PM tasks that will be built into your PM program. Part 2 focused on gathering a comprehensive list of PM tasks and developing the “ideal” scenario where you are doing everything that you could/should be doing and presenting that scenario. Since most of us don’t live in an ideal world of unlimited resources, this post is going to start to look at how you build a program that is realistic based on your current resources (staff and money) that you can use as Version 1.0 of your Program.
The first step we recommend here is to develop a list of available resources that you have to do PMs. This starts with inventorying all the available staff and third party contractors that you have doing maintenance work on your equipment. For internal staff, you need to estimate the percentage of their time that you feel will be available to do PM, and how much time will be dedicated to Reactive Maintenance (RM). If you have historic data available that differentiates between PM and RM tasks, this can be backed up by data. If you don’t (and many organizations we talked to don’t), then you have to make a bit of an educated guess.
If you have multiple resources available of a specific discipline, you can decide to split time for all resources between PM and RM or assign some resources exclusively to RM and others to PM. It is really up to you based on your needs and your team.
With regards to third party contracts, you can start to take a more active role in defining the PM contracts that you have with your partners. Instead of just putting out a tender for an HVAC or Elevator PM program, you can define specifically what tasks you want done, on what frequency and on specific pieces of equipment in your tender documents. This way you can easily do an apples-to-apples comparison between bids, instead of having to decipher what each bidder is proposing to do for their fee.
Once you have an understanding of the amount of time that you have available to do PMs, you can begin to determine specifically what you are going to get your staff to do. We call this process sandboxing. You can run a bunch of different scenarios of what tasks your staff will be doing on which pieces of equipment.
The first thing that you need to look at are the tasks required by law for your area and building types. You need to make sure that you have sufficient resources to complete all of the mandatory tasks. Also, as it relates to these tasks, make sure you have a good system to document their completion (typically in a work order system) so that if you ever do get audited, you have proof of compliance at hand. This isn’t specifically related to building your program, just a piece of advice based on seeing some clients get into a bit of hot water.
Once you have assigned all of the mandatory tasks, there are a lot of different criteria that you can use as you build your different sandbox scenarios including:
- Focus on specific equipment types, based on criticality or other priorities;
- Focus on newer equipment that still has lots of useful life left;
- Focus on equipment within specific assets, again based on criticality or other priorities;
- The Peanut Butter Approach – spread your available resources evenly across the entire portfolio; and
- Many others.
Even with using one or more of the criteria above, there are often many different scenarios that you can build in your sandbox. Once you have decided which approach you want to go with, for now, then you have to begin to populate your Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) with the work orders so they can be assigned and dispatched to your staff, which is where the rubber hits the road for your PM program.
Before we wrap up this mini-series, I have one more post next week that will talk about how to evolve your PM program over time so you can build a road map to go from Version 1.0 towards the ideal state that we talked about in Post #2.