What's the best way to identify critical maintenance and repair needs in your facility?

Safety first, always ensure that the equipment is safe for operation. A risk assessment should guide you, what or how much losses are you prepared to absorb or the company. What can you do immediately to counter the event and recover from the event. If you notice all of the above requires an in depth knowledge of the operation or a very fluid availability of information to allow for actions.

In my experience all plant needs a clear commissioning process in the first place, then you wouldn’t be in the position you are in as being advised to assess your facility. However we operate old plant and equipment around the world, then as any maintenance manager would do is to assess their plant. Making sure that this covers all areas of plant safety, environmental compliance and all safety systems are working correctly. Then you can start to look at plant reliability, having a visual and regular inspections in place while you sort out the specifics for unreliability. You have to have the basics in place before you can move forward and improve reliability. Develop safe systems of work.

Conduct a thorough facility condition assessment, involving experienced professionals and diagnostic tools, to identify critical maintenance needs. Regular inspections, data analysis, and collaboration with maintenance staff are crucial for a proactive approach in prioritizing and addressing critical repairs in the facility.

Para identificar las necesidades criticas de mantenimiento y reparación de las instalaciones, es necesario conocer el estado de cada una de las mismas y este aspecto depende del monitoreo del deterioro de una variable o parametro predeterminado como valor limite admisible. Asi mismo, la tendencia de fallas, es otro aspecto relevante para determinar las necesidades reales de mantenimiento de equipos y facilidades. Inspecciones detalladas, aplicación de ensayos no destructivos y la ejecución de mantenimiento detectivo, tambien son aspectos relevantes que contribuyen a la determinación de las necesidades.

In my experience regularly scheduled inspections executed for HVAC, drainage systems, overhead and personal doors, cranes and major equipment like in an industrial shop environment is a minimum. In my experience having building operators on staff available for repairs as employees or contractors for quick responses helps keep business activities going as well as the keeping the building in good condition. A digital service request tool is very helpful, even crucial, for many environments available to employees of the building to allow anyone to enter a service repair ticket as they see a problem and the building services team can then prioritize their repairs from there and communicate actions taken back to the repair requester.

Prioritizing maintenance is key for facility efficiency. By assessing impact, urgency, and feasibility, you can categorize needs effectively. High-priority issues, like safety hazards, take precedence, ensuring optimal resource allocation for a well-maintained facility. #MaintenanceStrategies #FacilityManagement

It's not uncommon to see where many facility managers will put off certain maintenance and upkeep due to staffing or financial priorities. This is a huge mistake to do so and all parties involved suffer. When problems do occur (As they inevitably will) everyone is scrambling trying to react. Likewise, facility personnel can sometimes forget that service providers have MANY customers. Taking a good look around the facility and at all the installed equipment and asking the question for each piece, "How long could we stand for this equipment to be offline for seamless operations?" is a top-shelf proactive approach to planning the maintenance activities within a plant.

Getting your maintenance teams on board early in the review and get their expertise on how to do it quickly and efficiently to get better results. Work a plan of multi disciplined teams that can carry out all tasks associated with the works from plant stop to restart. Get buy in from them and give them the empowerment to get things done, on time and within budget. Look at contracting out specific tasks that have greatest drain on your resources so it will free up their valuable time, show you are determined about making a difference and bringing all teams onside together. Set clear targets for the teams to improve reliability and performance, document what you have done and don’t forget to celebrate the successes with your teams

In my opinion, as a first step FM need to identify things/areas that are directly hitting the business. Make a thorough checklist of these identified items/areas along with the PPM schedule. Every facility has its own needs that FM has to identify before developing a checklist and schedule. Mark them as High priority. Keep an eye on it and make surprise audits to make sure zero tolerance on it.

All too often, I see where it makes much more financial sense for a facility to lean on vendors for certain maintenance. With shrinking talent pools and high demands for skilled tradesmen many organizations are better suited to depend on service companies to perform their routine and emergency service. Often for a fraction of a skilled HVAC technician's annual salary, businesses can have factory-trained, quality, professional service performed on a regular basis within their facilities. Additionally, they gain rapport with their provider for quick response in emergencies and unplanned failures. Partnering with qualified service providers is among the best practices for being on top of a facility's required maintenance.