Maintenance issues

Maintenance plans and information

Effective planned maintenance is only possible where relevant information about buildings, components and services plant (including condition) is known.

Decision making about when and what to maintain depends on relevant and up to date information. There are many ways of obtaining and holding this information.

Time-frame

An important step in planning to maintain a building is to decide on a time-frame within which to plan. The period will vary with the building type, organisation and business plan.

  • For a historic building a very long-term view may be appropriate, certainly 50-100 years, if not longer.
  • Residential buildings in the public sector or held by registered landlords seem to consider periods up to 100 years, often linked to mortgage periods.
  • Buildings procured through PFI and PPP routes tend to have stipulated maintenance periods ranging from 20+ years, invariably with a 5-year run-off period.
  • Commercial and office buildings, which are subject to the vagaries of fashion and market forces, may not warrant a long-term plan. Shorter periods (say, of 20 years) may be sufficient for maintenance planning purposes.

The maintenance plan

A maintenance plan is essentially determination of what you intend doing to a building and its components, when you intend doing it and how much it is going to cost. This is most conveniently done in table/graph form and includes:

  • a life of components;
  • a list of maintenance operations;
  • a time when the work is planned; and
  • a cost of works.

Information required for the maintenance plan

Information for a maintenance plan may be taken from a condition survey, inspections or from desk study. The level of detail should be appropriate to the buildings and the planned maintenance regime. Where building stock and built assets are diverse, information may be required for each building - including all the key components based on surveys.

Where buildings are similar or new, a desk study based on plans, describing one archetype building, may be satisfactory - quantities are multiplied by a factor representing the complete portfolio.

Information required would be:

  • building information: name, location, description;
  • component information: component or assembly description including principal material or function, location, quantity, expected life, condition;
  • planned maintenance activities: description, planned frequency; and
  • cost information: estimated cost of carrying out the works at today's prices.

The basic information for a maintenance plan is readily obtained from knowledge of the built asset. Component life manuals and price books may be consulted for expected service lives and maintenance costs.

Benefits of the maintenance plan

As a planning tool the maintenance plan can be used to tell:

  • how much money you will need to set aside today to pay for future work;
  • when you will need to spend the money;
  • when you will need to start planning the work; and
  • how much the work will cost.

The maintenance plan also provides a benchmark against which to judge performance.

Using the maintenance plan

In practice the maintenance plan is a guide which starts a process to determine planned maintenance work based on financial or planning periods.

For example:

  • Boiler replacements may be due. A condition survey or report from an annual service should be used to confirm if the boiler condition or reliability has deteriorated or is likely to deteriorate such that replacement is required.
  • If the condition is acceptable and is likely to remain so until the next inspection period, no action needs to be taken the maintenance plan should be adjusted.
  • If replacement is required, a detailed survey may be carried out to enable a specification and schedule of works to be put out to tender.

Once the work is completed the maintenance plan is marked to show that the works have been carried out.

Grouping planned maintenance work

The raw maintenance plan will usually exhibit wide variations in the peaks and troughs of expenditure in each year. Because it makes financial sense to eliminate these wide variations the maintenance manager will sometimes either postpone or advance work operations. This operation is sometimes referred to as 'smoothing'.

Fabric building components generally tend to fail gradually and the effect of their failure is usually low risk and low cost so smoothing is more likely for fabric components.

Grouping work operations together also takes advantage of benefits of scale and the ability to share access arrangements, thus providing better value than if each operation was carried out separately.

Life cycle costs

The maintenance plan may also be part of, or form the basis of, life cycle cost models increasingly being used by organisations. This enables planned maintenance costs of fabric and services components to be considered in a broader context of all the costs associated with the building - in particular, energy costs.

Benchmarking

The planned maintenance plan enables benchmarking to show that built assets are:

  • meeting the needs of the organisation;
  • meeting or reducing life cycle costs;
  • extending the life of assets; and
  • meeting condition and health and safety standards.