How to Deploy a Preventative Maintenance Strategy for your Buildings

If you’re responsible for keeping building facilities in tip-top shape, no doubt you’re facing increasing pressure to reduce costs all while ensuring uptime and occupant comfort and safety. Understanding equipment life cycle and having a comprehensive maintenance strategy in place are key to maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of your facilities’ mechanical systems and reducing your organization’s risk for costly repairs. Before we dive into how to deploy a comprehensive facility maintenance strategy, let’s first review the three main categories of maintenance strategies: reactive, preventative, and predictive.

Reactive Maintenance

Sometimes referred to as fix-on-fail, reactive maintenance occurs when something breaks. So, it’s not really a ‘strategy’ at all. (It’s more like driving your car until a belt fails.) And while going this route may be appealing to those concerned with upfront costs, the long-term impacts of a reactive maintenance strategy are far more damaging. Why? Unless your facility has replacement parts for every possible piece of equipment — and technicians on staff who can work on them 24/7 — you’re likely to experience significant downtime and costly repair, especially with today’s supply chain challenges. 

Preventative Maintenance

The intent of a preventive maintenance strategy is to prevent costly equipment failure before it occurs. This is achieved by inspecting and servicing equipment on a calendar- or usage-based schedule, according to manufacturer recommendations. (To keep with the car analogy, it’s like checking your tire pressure and having regularly scheduled oil changes.) 

• Calendar-based maintenance is the most common type of preventive maintenance; depending on the type of asset, it can be deployed weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. 

• Usage-based maintenance relies on meter readings that tell maintenance staff when specified measurements have been reached. 

Benefits of employing a preventative maintenance plan include:

• Less downtime and closures

• Longer equipment life expectancy

• Less time spent working on equipment outside regularly scheduled hours

• Equipment that operates more efficiently

• Reduced risk of accidents and safety violations

• Lower utility costs

There are disadvantages as well: higher up-front costs, greater labor intensity, and the potential for over-maintenance. In fact, according to ARC Advisory Group’s Enterprise Asset Management and Field Service Management Market Study, as much as half of every dollar you spend on preventive maintenance could be wasted on allocating labor and parts to mechanical assets that are not in immediate need of maintenance. That’s why it’s important to weigh and balance failure prevention activities, which we will show you how to do later in this post.

Steps to Deploying a Preventative Maintenance Strategy

STEP ONE: TAKE INVENTORY

The first step is to develop a cloud-based spreadsheet that includes a full inventory of your equipment and any tools or resources available to assist your maintenance staff. (There is software available that can do this as well, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll use Google Sheets, which can be accessed by your entire maintenance staff in real-time.)

[DOWNLOAD OUR SAMPLE EQUIPMENT INVENTORY SPREADSHEET]

Within this Google Sheet, you’ll also want to populate information about your staff and their roles and specialties. Being able to communicate how your staff is able (or unable) to execute the full preventative maintenance needs of your facilities is crucial to determining what gaps you will need to fill with service agreements or training. It’s also a great way for staff nearing retirement to pass along knowledge so that remaining staff can benefit from their wisdom and experience.

STEP TWO: PRIORITIZE MAINTENANCE NEEDS 

Once you’ve finished compiling your inventory, it’s time to conduct a criticality analysis. A criticality analysis is a weighted matrix you will use to prioritize maintenance planning. It’s based on an asset’s level of criticality and preventative maintenance needs. 

First, rate the seriousness of an event based on the factors below (1 being least serious):

• Health and safety implications of the failure of equipment

• Downtime to repair equipment  

• The energy it takes to repair equipment

• Cost to repair equipment

Next, weigh the criticality of individual preventative maintenance tasks for each piece of equipment, which can be found in your O&M manual. (Below is an example of preventative maintenance tasks for an air handler.)

• Change air filter

• Clean fan blades

• Verify fan RPM

• Tighten bearing collar set

• Set screw on fan shaft

• Test and tighten damper

• Linkages

• Clean dampers

• Lubricate damper connections

• Clean condenser & evaporator coils

• Check refrigerant level

• Clean condensate pan

• Replace worn belts

• Align and resheave belts

• Vacuum and clean unit