How to Manage Facilities Maintenance: Building a Comprehensive Strategy

Efficient facility maintenance is the cornerstone of operational success in any enterprise. For service managers in the facilities management sector, a comprehensive strategy is not just crucial, but it also empowers you to manage resources, maintain infrastructure, and enhance service delivery. This blog will guide you through building a robust facilities maintenance strategy that maximises efficiency, minimises downtime, and ultimately leads to adopting an all-in-one facilities management software that handles every maintenance aspect, putting you in control of your facility's operations.

Assessing Current Maintenance Processes

If you’re trying to assess your current maintenance approach to identify ways to improve, you need to know what to look at. Your starting point should be calculating your key performance indicators for your maintenance activity.

Generally, facilities management focuses on several key metrics. They are:

• Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP): Measures the proportion of maintenance activities that are planned versus unplanned.
• Maintenance Cost as a Percentage of Replacement Asset Value (RAV): evaluates the cost-effectiveness of the maintenance strategy by comparing maintenance expenses to the total value of the equipment being maintained.
• Scheduled Maintenance Ratio (SMR)
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): Measures the average time between breakdowns.
• Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): Tracks the average time to repair equipment.
• Mean Time to Failure (MTTF): The average time a non-repairable asset operates before it fails.
• Maintenance Compliance Rates: Ensures that maintenance tasks are completed as scheduled.
• Preventive Maintenance (PM) Compliance: Measures how well the maintenance team adheres to the preventive maintenance schedule.

This is just a tiny example of the metrics needed to assess your maintenance processes effectively and determine how to manage your facility's maintenance needs. If you’re looking at this list and are confused about how you got this information, don’t worry-you are not alone. Most facility managers are not able to track this information, which is why we’re here to help.

How to Begin Tracking Your Maintenance Performance

On a basic level, tracking your maintenance performance is done by three simple steps:

1. Conduct Audits: Regularly review your maintenance operations to identify inefficiencies.
2. Analyse Maintenance Logs: Look for patterns in breakdowns or recurring issues.
3. Gather Insights: Engage with staff and stakeholders to understand their perspectives on current processes.

In practice, if your maintenance logs, work orders, and asset histories combine non-digital or individual systems, it can be very difficult to calculate all the metrics you need to track to manage your facility's maintenance properly.

Ideally, you want to use centralised software like CMMS, which will enable you to store all your relevant data on jobs, assets, and work orders in a single place. The CMMS will also help you calculate the metrics you need to benchmark your performance.

If you don’t have a CMMS, you can still work this information out, but we strongly advise you to investigate getting one. It will help you monitor your performance, automate your job scheduling, give you easy access to asset histories, and improve your overall efficiency.

Don’t believe us? Just look at what QHSE has to say about the impact that CMMS systems can have, such as a 59.5% increase in equipment effectiveness, a 58.5% reduction in asset downtime and a 57.5% enhancement in productivity.

Tracking Your Metrics Over Time

Once you have completed your assessment of your current performance, it’s time to move on to the other aspects that are core to managing your facility's maintenance. The first of these is tracking your metrics over time.

This should be your focus because only through continuous monitoring and analysis of maintenance activities can you identify the areas for improvement and let you make data-driven decisions on handling issues your maintenance approach is facing.

Looking After Your Assets

One of facility managers' most significant challenges is managing assets and their performance. While all the above metrics are great for identifying assets' performance, improving performance requires a different approach.

To fully understand what’s happening with your assets, you need to be able to:

• Track asset locations and status in real-time
• Generate detailed reports so you can make data-driven decisions
• Have Asset details and histories available to your team members in the field
• Have access to relevant compliance checklists
• Be able to access Asset histories by scanning a QR code

Being able to do all this means you need access to asset maintenance software (ideally in the same system as your CMMS). Once you have this in place, you can start to make the final shift you need for a fully comprehensive facilities maintenance approach.

Moving to a Proactive Maintenance Approach

The key element to having a comprehensive facility management strategy is being able to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach. Reactive maintenance is defined as responding to issues as they arise, while a proactive, more commonly known as a preventative approach, allows you to prevent problems from happening in the first place and improve efficiency as a result.

Developing a Preventive Maintenance Plan

Developing a preventative maintenance plan may sound scary, but the core actions are relatively simple.

The first step is to ensure you have a complete list of all the assets you are responsible for maintaining. With asset maintenance software, this list will already be uploaded into the system, but you can also develop it manually. Once that list is in place, you’ll need to identify how often each asset should receive maintenance work. This can be done for best practices and compliance purposes.

With the above information, you’ll know exactly how often each asset needs maintenance work done and what is required. You can then begin to build out work schedules for each asset over an extended period ( think months and even potentially years in advance). With a CMMS system, this is easy to handle, and you'll be able even to schedule which team members are responsible for the job in advance, ensuring that core jobs receive top priority.

With this in place, you’ll have successfully switched from reactive to preventative maintenance and will be able to reap the rewards.

In conclusion, a robust facilities maintenance strategy is vital for operational success. By assessing your current maintenance processes, tracking key performance metrics, and adopting proactive maintenance approaches, you can significantly enhance your facility's efficiency, minimise downtime, and optimise resource management. Centralised software like a CMMS can streamline these efforts, providing comprehensive data management, automating scheduling, and improving overall productivity.

Embrace the future of facilities management by transitioning to a proactive maintenance plan. Equip your team with the tools needed to stay ahead of maintenance issues and ensure the longevity and reliability of your assets. If you're ready to transform your maintenance strategy and take control of your facility’s operations, it's time to explore Joblogic.

Book a demo with Joblogic today and discover how our all-in-one facilities management software can revolutionise your maintenance processes, boost efficiency, and drive your facility's success.