Many property owners continue not to adopt the best practice of preventive maintenance because they are unaware of its long-term cost benefits. Property owners who have adopted preventive maintenance have achieved major savings by keeping their real estate and equipment assets in good condition thus reducing the chances of breakdowns and their costly consequences.
In general, preventive maintenance keeps real estate and equipment assets running smoothly. Recurring scheduled preventive maintenance is the key to avoiding major issues with many of the facility’s critical assets like lifts, HVAC, plumbing, fire protection, and other expensive systems. The cost of failure of critical assets could be quite expensive since emergency services not only cost more than regularly scheduled maintenance but the cost of disruption and hardship caused to the tenants and users of those facilities could be very high. In addition, the cost of bad publicity, legal liabilities, and reputation distortion that will be encountered by the property owner could far exceed the incurred maintenance cost.
In our last article “Managing, Tracking, Monitoring, Evaluating and Reporting Status of Work Orders for Real Estate and Equipment Assets”, we have detailed how project management information systems (PMIS) like PMWeb help in managing work orders for reactive maintenance to fix reported problems. In addition, we have briefly detailed the usage of checklists to ensure that performed work orders are complete and cover all items that need to be performed. Further, we have explained how to set recurring scheduled work orders to enforce preventive maintenance.
For the proper adoption of preventive maintenance, the property owner needs to create preventive maintenance checklists that will apply to the different categories and types of real estate and equipment assets that the property owner has. For some equipment assets like HVAC for example, there might be different checklists for the preventive maintenance to be done in Spring/Summer and the one to be done in Fall/Winter. The checklist will include the tasks that need to be performed, task type, resource skills needed to perform the task, notes, and whether this task must be carried out or optional. Those checklists represent the property owner’s knowledge and previous experience in maintaining such real estate and equipment assets.
Assuming that the property owner wants to implement preventive maintenance for the HVAC assets. Using the PMWeb work order module, two work orders will be created for each HVAC asset that the property owner has across all locations for which they need to be maintained. The first work order will be for Spring/Summer while the second work order will be for Fall/Winter. Each work order will be linked to the relevant HVAC asset which has been captured in the real estate and equipment assets directory.
This will be followed by adding the relevant preventive checklists to the work order. The Spring/Summer preventive checklist will be added to the HVAC Spring/Summer Preventive Maintenance work order while the Fall/Winter preventive checklist will be added to the HVAC Fall/Winter Preventive Maintenance work order. Having those checklists as part of the preventive maintenance work order is also of great importance when the property owner is outsourcing the assets management process as the checklist will be completed by the maintenance company to confirm that those tasks had been completed and on which date each was completed.
The last step will be to create recurring scheduled preventive maintenance work orders. Using the preventive tab, the user needs to select the frequency of the preventive work order which could be once, daily, weekly, monthly, or at selected intervals. This will be followed by the time on w the work order is to be performed, which could be the day of the week and when this will end. When all those values are given, the user will select the generate work orders command to have all these preventive work orders automatically generated and listed as Linked Work Orders. This will enable the property owner to execute those work orders on their planned dates.
Should there be a requirement to have a hard copy of each preventive maintenance work order to fulfill the requirements for formal communication for completed works, a PMWeb report writer can be used to create the output form in the desired layout or simply take advantage of the ready to use the work order form. Of course, a register report can be also created to capture the details of all work orders including preventive maintenance.
About the Author
Bassam Samman, PMP, PSP, EVP, GPM is a Senior Project Management Consultant with more than 35-year service record providing project management and controls services to over 100 projects with a total value of over 1US $5 Billion. Those projects included Commercial, Residential, Education, and Healthcare Buildings and Infrastructure, Entertainment and Shopping Malls, Oil and Gas Plants and Refineries, Telecommunication, and Information Technology projects. He is thoroughly experienced in complete project management including project management control systems, computerized project control software, claims analysis/prevention, risk analysis/management (contingency planning), design, supervision, training, and business development.
Bassam is a frequent speaker on topics relating to Project Management, Strategic Project Management, and Project Management Personal Skills. Over the past 35 years, he has lectured at more than 350 events and courses at different locations in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and South America. He has written more than 250 articles on project management and project management information systems that were featured in international and regional magazines and newspapers. He is a co-founder of the Project Management Institute- Arabian Gulf Chapter (PMI-AGC) and has served on its board of directors for more than 6 years. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (PMI), a certified Planning and Scheduling Professional (PSP), an Earned Value Professional (EVP) from the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE), and a Green Project Management (GPM).
Bassam holds a Master’s in Engineering Administration (Construction Management) with Faculty Commendation, from George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA, Bachelor in Civil Engineering – from Kuwait University, Kuwait, and has attended many executive management programs at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA, and London Business School, London, UK.