There are so many buildings.
No, seriously, lots of buildings.
But have you ever stopped to wonder about its nitty-gritty details? The amount of work that goes into its everyday functioning? How does staff prevent and repair the damage?
All of this falls under the topic of facility maintenance.
Facility maintenance increases the lifespan of a building through capital assets and commercial appliance servicing, along with the areas inside and outside a building.
Examples of capital assets include machinery, equipment, and expensive electronics. Commercial appliances include boilers, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC).
Facility maintenance services are done through facility management software. This software usually integrates with computerized maintenance management systems and enterprise asset management (EAM) software to perform facility maintenance.
Building systems must also perform emergency repairs, servicing, carpentry work, hallways, staircases, and parking lots.
While industrial maintenance is used in manufacturing plants and property maintenance is used in residential buildings, facility maintenance applies to commercial buildings. Building maintenance is the only application closely related to equipment maintenance.
Facility maintenance can be categorized into four groups, whether proactive or reactive. All types of maintenance save money and increase the longevity of assets and building utilities.
Preventive facility maintenance is a routine maintenance planning approach. It’s a proactive way to plan maintenance activities that extend the life of equipment and facilities. It reduces potential downtimes and reactive maintenance to a large extent.
Planned maintenance makes failures less likely and saves time and costs. One example of a preventive maintenance program is regularly scheduled air conditioner maintenance. Monthly servicing ensures that it runs perfectly.
Deferred maintenance is not a maintenance activity; rather, it is the maintenance that should have been performed. If necessary repairs or fixes get deferred until failure, the result is more expenditures. If deferred, low-cost services can double or even triple their actual cost.
Predictive maintenance uses advanced tools to evaluate asset performance in real time. The internet of things (IoT) allows different assets and systems to connect and work together to provide insights on which require servicing and which don’t.
Predictive maintenance examples are sensors, oil analysis, and thermal imaging.
For example, air conditioners can be fitted with a leak detection sensor that sends warnings to get it serviced before an actual leak occurs.
This is the most common type of maintenance while creating a facility maintenance plan. It refers to typical repair work such as drainage problems, light fuses, roofing issues, or HVAC systems.
Corrective maintenance is a daily part of facility operations whenever something fails or doesn’t work as it should. It’s a reactive form of maintenance, and its downside is that teams don’t get to perform maintenance in a proactive manner. It impacts both time and cost.
Facility maintenance workers help boost productivity and cut costs.
Their work involves organizing proactive, reactive, and preventive maintenance work orders and staying on top of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO).
Facility maintenance workers report to a manager responsible for setting up and scheduling inspections for assets and equipment. This could also include unscheduled breakdowns, during which they would take note of the problem, evaluate work order management, and create standard operating procedures for the department to follow.
There are three facility maintenance workers: the facility manager, the property manager, and the maintenance technician.
A facility manager ensures the well-being of the employees and overlooks employee benefit policies within the office premises. They are responsible for workplace administration, employee productivity, and safety. In residences, the facility manager supervises the welfare of residents of an area while enforcing beneficial policies.
A facility manager must create proper janitor schedules, test fire safety protocols, and systems, provide emergency services, and assign technician work requests. The manager’s role covers multiple aspects to improve every area of liveability within a building regarding function and safety.
Facility managers perform two sets of roles: strategic and operational:
Some other responsibilities of a facility manager include:
A property manager is a professional who supervises real-estate properties for potential investments or agencies. Property managers might work for private firms or freelance as real-estate agents responsible for rentals, showings, and open houses.
Owners appoint property managers as caretakers to oversee daily operations in their absence. It is their duty to maintain the property to retain its nominal value in the market. Some other responsibilities of a property manager include:
While the facility manager ensures that a building is clean, safe, and useful, the technician is responsible for conducting building walkthroughs and performing preventive maintenance and repairs on important assets and HVAC units. Technicians usually have an HVAC certification.
A maintenance technician works closely with the facility manager to see that equipment doesn’t have defects and that repairs are done on time. This person can be tasked with something simple like changing a light bulb to calibrating complex ventilation machines.
You’d be surprised by the applications of facility maintenance management. Ranging from commercial buildings to hospitals, facility maintenance has a lot of real-world uses.
Ensuring a safe and sound environment around your facility is key. In some cases, the facility maintenance operations of a property might be outsourced to a third-party enterprise that levies an additional charge for its vendor services. It doesn’t matter what the procedure is, facility maintenance is crucial in keeping a property clean, beautiful, and organized.
Here are a few ways you can streamline your facility maintenance operations at your facility:
Facility maintenance and facility management are usually interchangeably used, but differences do exist between the two.
Facility maintenance is an aspect of facility management that focuses on inspecting assets, machinery, tools, and utilities. The facility managers of a building make use of facility maintenance through planning, managing daily operations, and regular equipment audits.
Facility management, on the other hand, encompasses the former. Facility managers need to oversee the maintenance of the entire building, put together and manage an entire maintenance team, optimize office space, and keep track of inventories. They need to be on top of any task that involves a building’s functionality.
Examples of facility management are:
Facility maintenance examples are:
Facility maintenance provides many advantages to buildings and commercial spaces alike. Some of these are:
While highly advantageous, facility maintenance does have some setbacks. Here are a few of them:
Facility maintenance jobs don’t require a full degree. Instead, a person can undergo a domain-specific certification program as a facility maintenance professional. It’s also a versatile career option if you have a bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, facility, or information management.
You can invest in some of these certification options to differentiate yourself from the crowd in the facility management domain.
For a building to function well, facility maintenance is absolutely necessary. While it does have some disadvantages, such as cost, it applies to buildings of all sizes and industries, such as hospitals, real estate, and educational institutions. When done right, facility maintenance contributes to the longevity of assets and other equipment.
Track, manage and streamline your with proprietary expenses seamlessly by learning more about property management.