What is Facility Maintenance?
Facility maintenance involves the comprehensive management and upkeep of buildings, equipment, and infrastructure to ensure optimal performance and safety. By implementing proactive maintenance strategies and utilizing advanced facility management software, businesses can enhance operational efficiency, extend the lifespan of assets, and reduce overall costs. Regular maintenance activities not only improve the functionality and reliability of facilities but also contribute to a safer and more productive work environment.
The goal of facility maintenance is to keep the entire facility running efficiently and effectively to ensure optimal production and workplace safety. The building and its assets need to be kept clean and in optimal working condition, and facility maintenance provides the means to do that. Physical assets such as machines, vehicles, and forklifts will also gradually deteriorate without regularly scheduled upkeep. A properly managed facilities maintenance plan impacts almost every physical part of a business.
This article will explore the scope and impact of facilities and maintenance on properties, assets, and people. By developing and executing a plan that promotes machine longevity and reduces capital costs with facility management software, you can help unlock your operation’s full potential.
What is Building Maintenance?
Building maintenance is a subset of facility maintenance focused on the upkeep of the structural and operational aspects of buildings. It includes tasks such as:
- Routine Inspections: Regular checks of the building’s infrastructure to identify and address any issues early.
- Repairs: Fixing damaged components, such as plumbing leaks, broken windows, or malfunctioning HVAC systems.
- Cleaning: Ensuring that all areas of the building are clean and sanitary, including restrooms, common areas, and workspaces.
- Safety Checks: Conducting safety inspections to comply with health and safety regulations, including fire alarm systems and emergency exits.
- Preventive Maintenance: Performing scheduled maintenance activities to prevent major issues from occurring, such as servicing HVAC systems and elevators.
- Energy Management: Monitoring and managing energy use to improve efficiency and reduce costs, including lighting, heating, and cooling systems.
Building maintenance is essential for ensuring the longevity of the building, the safety of its occupants, and the efficient operation of its systems.
Where is Facility Maintenance Used?
Facility maintenance is used in a broad range of buildings, plants, and industrial facilities. HVAC systems are a primary focus in facility maintenance, requiring regular tasks such as filter replacements, duct cleaning, and checking for refrigerant leaks. Proper maintenance of HVAC systems ensures optimal air quality and temperature control, reduces energy consumption, and prevents system failures.
Electrical systems also demand significant attention, encompassing the inspection and repair of wiring, circuit breakers, and lighting fixtures. Regular checks for faulty connections, replacing worn-out components, and ensuring compliance with electrical codes prevent hazards and reduce downtime due to power outages.
Plumbing systems are another crucial area, involving the inspection of pipes, fixtures, and drainage systems. Addressing leaks, blockages, and water pressure issues ensures reliable water supply and waste management while preventing water damage and maintaining sanitation standards.
Fire safety systems require meticulous maintenance, including regular checks and servicing of fire alarms, sprinklers, extinguishers, and emergency exits. These tasks are critical for protecting lives and property by ensuring fire safety systems are operational and compliant with safety regulations.
Building automation systems, which control functions like lighting, HVAC, and security, also need regular updates, sensor calibrations, and troubleshooting. This enhances operational efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and improves overall building management.
Additionally, building maintenance on components like roofs, walls, windows, and doors prevents damage and extends the building’s lifespan. Regular inspections and repairs of these elements ensure the building’s integrity, prevent leaks and drafts, and maintain aesthetic and functional standards.
Buildings that Use Facility Maintenance
Commercial Buildings
- Description: Offices, retail stores, and shopping centers require regular facility maintenance to ensure a safe and comfortable environment for employees and customers.
- Example: Regular HVAC system checks, lighting maintenance, and janitorial services.
Educational Institutions
- Description: Schools, colleges, and universities need facility maintenance to keep classrooms, laboratories, and common areas in good condition.
- Example: Maintenance of heating systems, plumbing, and cleanliness of classrooms and auditoriums.
Healthcare Facilities
- Description: Hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes require meticulous maintenance to meet health standards and ensure patient safety.
- Example: Sterilization of medical equipment, maintenance of ventilation systems, and ensuring the cleanliness of patient rooms and common areas.
Industrial Sites
- Description: Factories, warehouses, and plants rely on facility maintenance to keep equipment functioning and maintain workplace safety.
- Example: Regular inspections and servicing of machinery, maintaining electrical systems, and ensuring workplace cleanliness.
Hospitality Venues
- Description: Hotels, resorts, and restaurants need facility maintenance to provide excellent service and maintain guest satisfaction.
- Example: Upkeep of guest rooms, kitchen equipment maintenance, and regular cleaning of common areas.
Types of Facility Maintenance
There are four main types of facility maintenance. Facility maintenance managers may choose to use a combination of strategies, selecting the best facility maintenance strategy for each area of the company.
Reactive Facility Maintenance
This maintenance strategy, also known as run-to-failure, addresses issues only as they arise — for example, repairing an asset only after it fails.
Reactive maintenance may work well in certain situations throughout the facility. For example, it usually makes more sense to only replace a lightbulb when it stops functioning rather than replacing it on a schedule. Even for some machines, there may be parts that can completely wear out before replacement because they are easy to replace and their failure won’t cause damage to other components or stop processes.
This type of facility maintenance works well in certain cases as part of an overall facility maintenance strategy, but when used across the facility, it can be costly and time-consuming. Emergency repairs, unplanned overtime, and a lack of planning for spare parts all contribute to the high costs associated with this method.
Corrective Facility Maintenance
Corrective facility maintenance includes both planned and unplanned maintenance. Similar to reactive maintenance, this type of facility maintenance addresses issues as they arise, but it also addresses issues that are discovered during inspections and other repairs. For instance, if during a routine belt replacement, a technician notices a fan is also wearing out, the technician may replace both.
This can help mitigate some costs associated with reactive maintenance by allowing technicians to spend more time proactively addressing potential issues.
Preventive Facility Maintenance
Preventive facilities maintenance is sometimes also called time-based maintenance. With this maintenance strategy, there is a set schedule for performing tasks. Based on the calendar, certain tasks may be performed daily, weekly, monthly, etc. For example, lubricating a machine once a week, or changing an air filter every month.
Preventive maintenance may also be performed on mechanical assets based on usage. For example, maintenance may be carried out on a forklift after a certain number of hours of use or on a machine after it produces a certain number of components.
This type of facility maintenance is proactive. It can help prevent equipment failures and reduce the number of costly repairs a facility experiences. However, even the best preventive maintenance program doesn’t address all the potential issues that can arise across a facility.
Predictive Facility Maintenance
Predictive facility maintenance uses a series of sensors and analytics to monitor assets’ performance, vibrations, and temperature. When the sensors receive readings outside of an asset’s normal parameters, Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) sends out alerts, allowing technicians to schedule maintenance and mitigate the problem before an unexpected breakdown occurs.
Predictive maintenance is the most cost-effective type of maintenance for many assets. While preventive maintenance attempts to guess when a machine needs to be serviced, predictive maintenance ensures a machine receives service exactly when it needs it, instead of before it’s required or after it fails.
Examples of Facility Maintenance
Many business properties count on the above facility maintenance strategies to continue operations and evaluate asset performance. However, facility maintenance can look quite different for different businesses.
Healthcare Facilities
The primary focus of healthcare facility maintenance is patient care and staff safety. It includes upkeep at clinics, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, including managing environmental hazards and machines that patients rely on for diagnosis and healthcare. Concerns such as eliminating the spread of disease, complying with governmental regulations, and protecting information can also impact facility maintenance.
Facility managers are responsible for writing policies, overseeing new construction, monitoring patient room sanitation, and inspecting emergency water/gas systems.
Laboratory Facilities
Laboratories face immense pressure to release new products, and they exhaust a large percentage of their budget on research and development. Seemingly minor setbacks like a missing record can cause significant research delays, so facilities maintenance managers must be proactive about their preventive maintenance strategy to pass regulatory inspections, such as those based on chemical safety standards.
Monitoring lab components, such as fume hoods or chemical containment processes, is necessary for laboratory facility maintenance. Facility maintenance staff may also need to closely monitor inventory levels to ensure adequate research supplies are available so work can continue.
Maintenance Management for Warehouses and Distribution Centers
Warehouse facility maintenance focuses on maximizing order fulfillment and minimizing avoidable downtime. It involves maintaining assets such as forklifts and crates, as well as fixed assets like heavy-duty shelving. It can also include maintaining a clean and safe working environment for the workers who pick and pack items. Clean, organized spaces simplify order fulfillment and ensure end users can receive the correct item in excellent condition at the time they expect it.
Additionally, goods such as food may need to be stored at certain temperatures, so maintaining the correct environment for the product is another major part of warehouse maintenance. When warehouse facilities are not well maintained, it can lead to inventory damage, inefficiency, dissatisfied customers, or even injured workers.
Facility Maintenance Management for Properties
Many commercial buildings, such as hotels, restaurants, schools, and offices, need some form of maintenance — for example, repairing electrical appliances or cleaning up the nearby landscape. Facility maintenance for properties covers many aspects, including working towards energy conservation, the comfort of occupants, and maintaining the value of real estate in general.
Types of Facility Maintenance Workers
Facility maintenance isn’t possible without the many types of workers who support all the necessary tasks involved. Businesses may have different types and numbers of workers based on their needs. In some companies, just one or two people may handle all the facility maintenance themselves, wearing multiple hats throughout every working day to keep the facility running successfully.
Here are some examples of the most common roles in facility maintenance:
Facility Maintenance Managers: These employees are sometimes also called Facility Maintenance Planners. They oversee maintenance scheduling across the facility or, sometimes, one specific area of operation. They also schedule work orders and oversee their completion.
Maintenance Engineers: Engineers optimize machinery and equipment throughout the facility. They ensure assets run optimally and help create or adjust maintenance schedules as needed.
Maintenance Technicians: These workers perform most of the day-to-day work throughout the facility. They may undertake complicated technical repairs or provide services like cleaning, painting, or other work.
Benefits of Facilities Maintenance
Facility maintenance offers numerous benefits that contribute to the overall efficiency and safety of buildings:
- Increased Lifespan of Assets: Regular maintenance extends the life of building components and systems, delaying the need for costly replacements.
- Enhanced Safety: Routine inspections and repairs ensure that buildings comply with safety standards, reducing the risk of accidents and injuries.
- Improved Efficiency: Well-maintained systems operate more efficiently, reducing energy consumption and operational costs.
- Cost Savings: Preventive maintenance can prevent major breakdowns and costly emergency repairs, leading to long-term savings.
- Better Occupant Satisfaction: Clean, safe, and well-maintained facilities improve the comfort and satisfaction of occupants, whether they are employees, customers, patients, or guests.
- Regulatory Compliance: Adhering to maintenance schedules helps ensure compliance with health, safety, and environmental regulations, avoiding potential fines and legal issues.
Common Facilities Maintenance Challenges
Facility maintenance, while essential, comes with its own set of challenges:
- Budget Constraints: Allocating sufficient funds for comprehensive maintenance programs can be difficult, often leading to deferred maintenance and increased long-term costs.
- Aging Infrastructure: Older buildings may require more frequent and costly repairs, complicating maintenance efforts and budgets.
- Skilled Labor Shortage: Finding and retaining skilled maintenance personnel can be challenging, impacting the quality and efficiency of maintenance activities.
- Technological Integration: Implementing and managing advanced maintenance technologies, such as Building Management Systems (BMS) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, requires significant investment and expertise.
- Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring continuous compliance with evolving health, safety, and environmental regulations demands constant vigilance and adaptation.
- Unexpected Breakdowns: Despite preventive measures, unexpected equipment failures can occur, disrupting operations and necessitating immediate attention.
- Resource Management: Efficiently managing and deploying maintenance resources, including tools, materials, and personnel, is crucial for effective facility maintenance.
Facility Maintenance Techniques and Common Tools
It’s an enormous job to manage all the maintenance that facilities need to run optimally. Fortunately, facility maintenance managers have many tools they can use to help them manage all the tasks associated with their role.
Asset management systems help facility maintenance managers and staff organize their assets and processes. This information used to be stored mostly on paper, but more and more companies are turning to software to hold information about every asset throughout the company. Such software can also manage maintenance schedules, analyze records, and even be integrated with other software, such as accounting software, to help more effectively manage asset lifecycles.
While spreadsheets are commonly used for inventory management, shifting to specialized spare parts and inventory management systems can be a major improvement. These systems ensure essential parts are always on hand, notify users when it’s time to reorder, and even connect parts store rooms across multiple sites, simplifying part sharing between locations for hard-to-find or rarely used parts.
How to Optimize Facility Maintenance Management Operations
In most cases, the quality of a facility maintenance program depends on how well you can coordinate each department and use maintenance techniques to protect your tangible assets. Maintenance management software helps keep your plant going by providing complete oversight of the facility, helping reduce equipment downtime. Once implemented, a CMMS will also increase transparency across your team’s workflows and automate the systems that drive productivity.
Building up your maintenance management is an excellent way to establish asset criticality, prolong the life of equipment, operate within your budget, and commit to a maintenance routine. To keep up with all the interconnected parts, facility maintenance management software will help you schedule workloads according to the number of technicians and spare parts you have.
Facility Maintenance Management with a CMMS
With a CMMS, you can largely automate plant-wide activities, reducing overhead costs, improving consistency, saving time on documentation, and raising overall productivity.
A CMMS can provide businesses with a single source of truth for facility maintenance across the organization. Instead of information being siloed in individual calendars, paper records, and spreadsheets, the CMMS holds all the documentation, scheduling, work orders, and more in a centralized location. —
A CMMS simplifies facility maintenance management for organizations both big and small — and it can be the key to effective facility maintenance management.