If you’re running a facility, you would want to get the most out of the building’s physical assets and infrastructure for as long as possible. To achieve this goal, effective and properly structured facility maintenance is essential.
There’s a lot to facility maintenance but your success primarily centers around how well you can manage your maintenance teams and simplify your workflows. Once you evaluate the performance of your maintenance through maintenance KPIs, you would know what’s working and what’s not.
Before diving deeper, let’s start by understanding facility maintenance, its types, examples, and benefits.
What is facility maintenance?
Facility maintenance is a process that ensures facilities and their assets are kept in optimal condition. The primary objective of facility maintenance is to reduce unscheduled downtime of assets within a facility. This maintenance comprises both preventive and corrective measures that help facilities function optimally.
Preventive maintenance focuses on preventing equipment failure whereas corrective, unplanned maintenance, or reactive maintenance revolves around addressing and resolving problems once they occur. By following proper maintenance planning steps and adopting maintenance strategies, you can run the operations of your facilities smoothly.
In today’s modern maintenance operations, organizations can implement facility maintenance software to ensure their facilities and assets perform optimally.
Facility maintenance examples
The most common examples of facility maintenance activities include:
- Maintenance of equipment inside the building, such as HVAC, certain office equipment and furniture, and building-specific equipment (for instance, medical equipment used in hospitals)
- Maintenance of all building systems, such as lighting, plumbing, electrical systems, elevators, and fire safety. With correct and timely maintenance, you can prevent your facilities from fire hazards.
- Maintenance of the building’s infrastructure itself, such as doors and windows (including their locks), both interior and exterior painting, flooring, and ceiling work
- Upkeep of the nearby areas of the building that involves maintenance of grounds, pest control, snow removal, parking areas, and landscaping.
All maintenance tasks performed inside and outside commercial buildings to ensure safety, aesthetics, and most importantly, functionality fall under facility maintenance. It is often used interchangeably with building maintenance; however, there’s a slight difference.
What is building maintenance?
Building maintenance is a subset of facility maintenance. It entails keeping a building in good working condition while also ensuring it stays in an optimal state. Building management includes maintenance activities such as cleaning, repairing, and upkeep of buildings and their nearby grounds. Building maintenance workers are also responsible for adhering to all safety protocols.
How is facility maintenance different from other types of maintenance management?
In the US, the term ‘facility maintenance’ is often mistaken for industrial maintenance and property maintenance. However, these are different practices and are not treated the same.
So far, the definition we have discussed for facility maintenance revolves around commercial buildings. Now let’s discuss other types of facility maintenance: property and industrial maintenance.
Property maintenance vs industrial maintenance
Maintenance activities performed for residential buildings are referred to as property maintenance whereas those performed for a facility built for industrial use or manufacturing are referred to as industrial maintenance.
The differences between the three types of maintenance arise from the specific purpose of each building.
Types of buildings that use facility maintenance
Several types of buildings rely on facility maintenance, including:
- Educational institutions such as schools and universities
- Healthcare facilities such as hospitals and clinics
- Workplace environments such as offices
- Dining facilities such as restaurants and cafe shops rely on restaurant equipment maintenance
- Accommodation facilities such as hotels and resorts
- Religious sites such as mosques and churches
- Entertainment venues such as stadiums and concert halls
Types of facility maintenance workers
Facility maintenance workers comprise two main types: facility managers and maintenance technicians.
Facility managers
The facility manager ensures that a building remains clean, safe, and useful for its intended purposes. Their duties include creating cleaning schedules for the janitorial staff, testing fire safety systems, creating and scheduling maintenance for capital assets, and delegating work orders to technicians. To organize all these tasks, facility managers use maintenance management software such as CMMS.
Maintenance technicians
Maintenance technicians focus on conducting building inspections and executing preventive maintenance and repairs on capital assets and HVAC systems. Usually, technicians hold HVAC certifications.
Other facility maintenance workers include janitors or custodians, landscapers or groundskeepers, and security personnel. While janitors look after the cleaning and maintenance of the interior of a building, the landscapers or groundskeepers are responsible for taking care of the outside areas surrounding the building such as gardens and lawns.
The security personnel are responsible for ensuring the safety and security of the building, which may include patrolling the property and monitoring the security cameras.
What are the facility management categories?
There are different categories for facility management, which are as follows:
EHS: Environment, health, and safety
Facility management teams are responsible for identifying, evaluating, and managing environmental and safety-related issues. Failure to properly ensure standard SOPs can lead to poor facility conditions, potentially resulting in injury, sickness, and lawsuits.
Fire safety
Facility managers take all possible precautionary measures to prevent building fires due to high levels of potential harm to building occupants, properties, and business operations. Teams are required to regularly test all fire safety equipment, log inspections, and maintain detailed records of compliance.
Security
Facility management departments also look after maintaining the security technology and hardware. Sometimes, they are also responsible for overseeing the coordination of door guards as part of security maintenance.
Preventive maintenance
Facility management teams conduct periodic inspections to enhance asset lifespans, reduce downtimes, and comply with statutory obligations. They use a CMMS system to schedule and track recurring work orders. Modern CMMS systems are designed to be user-friendly, and cost-effective, and are optimized for easy smartphone use. All of this leads to effective asset maintenance for your assets.
Cleaning
The importance of cleaning routines and sanitation cannot be stressed enough. Based on the type of facility, cleaning routines may include vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping floors; sanitizing bathrooms; replenishing occupant supplies; cleaning commonly used surfaces; and more. The cleaning staff performs these procedures either daily, weekly, or monthly.
Operational tasks
Facility management departments are ultimately responsible for keeping buildings running daily. They have to be readily available to address issues faced by building occupants as they arise. Depending on the type of facility, managers may have to receive requests ranging from changing the light bulbs to handling noise complaints; from fixing jammed photocopiers to cleaning up messes and fixing complex machinery that impacts worker productivity.
Business continuity planning
Facilities are required to maintain business continuity plans that detail the specific actions to take in case of major issues. In situations where an organization needs to relocate temporarily, the facility management team should be responsible for shifting the business to its temporary recovery location.
Space allocation
Due to organizational growth, human resources-backed decisions, and business strategies, facility layouts may often change. Facility managers must comply with legal requirements for office layouts, which usually include minimum space required per employee, adequate lighting, fire safety protocols, safety signage, proper ventilation, appropriate temperature settings, and basic amenities such as drinking water, soap, and toilet paper.
Why is facility maintenance needed?
Facility maintenance is essential as it enables businesses to perform their operations smoothly without disruptions. With effective facility maintenance, organizations can enhance the asset and facility lifespan and reduce the risk of accidents or injuries caused by poorly maintained assets.
What are the benefits of facility maintenance?
The benefits of facility maintenance are as follows:
Reduced maintenance cost
Proactively repairing and maintaining your assets before they fail is more cost-effective than repairing unexpected breakdowns.
Enhanced production efficiency
Regular maintenance of assets reduces downtime, hence increasing production efficiency, output, and profitability.
Increased asset lifespan
Frequent maintenance of assets prevents wear and tear, increasing asset lifespan and minimizing maintenance costs on part replacements and new machinery. Implementing GPS tracking for heavy equipment alongside regular maintenance can help increase the efficiency and lifespan of the equipment.
Fewer unscheduled shutdowns
Preventive maintenance and scheduled maintenance enables your team to avoid costly downtime by scheduling routine servicing and repairs. This leads to improved employee morale, as they experience fewer disruptions and problems with malfunctioning equipment by regularly maintaining assets.
Final thoughts
As we gather our final thoughts, it would be fair to say that with the combined efforts of its people and processes, facility maintenance plays a crucial role in ensuring your buildings run smoothly, covering everything from the infrastructure to the assets and equipment inside and outside them.
Facility managers organize the schedules and the team, whereas technicians complete both preventive and reactive work orders. For all the operations to run smoothly, facility maintenance teams need modern facility maintenance management systems such as EZO CMMS software.
This CMMS maintenance software was built with a single purpose—to help facility managers and maintenance teams optimize their maintenance activities. The purpose is only attainable with a detailed understanding of every aspect of your maintenance operations, including assets, work orders, maintenance schedules, spare parts inventory, and vendors.
