Misconceptions About Preventive Maintenance

For the last six years, I have had numerous conversations with both commercial real estate owners and managers. When I ask them how many work orders they perform on a monthly basis, they can quickly recite a number, either from a spreadsheet or some rudimentary system that track those reactive service requests. When I ask about their preventive maintenance, however, I get a completely different response.

First, there is a little silence, as if they are looking for some help in the audience to answer. When the response comes, it definitely comes in a variety of ways: “we don’t track the numbers, but we do get it done”, “we use index cards” (I have heard this one a number times.), “we rely on our technician’s memory” (my first question in response here is, “Do you have a lot of turnover with your techs?”) Finally, many will understand that preventive maintenance is certainly the pain point they always thought it was or that there might be some serious underlying issue on the horizon they are just discovering, and they need to put something in place immediately.

Perhaps some of the issues may overlap, but the importance of conducting preventive maintenance and having solid preventive maintenance program affects everyone in the organization: The owner, the property manager, the asset manager, and the technician. As all of these parties know, preventive maintenance is a schedule of planned maintenance actions aimed at the prevention of breakdowns and failures.

A properly designed plan and system will preserve and enhance equipment reliability by setting up properly scheduled inspections, tracking wear and tear, run hours (where necessary), and replacing worn components before they actually fail. At the same time clear records need to be kept on all inspections and work performed as this will allow for better predictability of potential breakdowns, thus allowing for and need parts replacement or work to be performed prior to an actual breakdown occurring.

There are a number of misconceptions about preventive maintenance. One is that instituting such a program is costly. Most people believe that it costs more for regularly scheduled downtime and maintenance than it would to continue to operate equipment until repair is absolutely necessary. Though one might argue this could be true on some level, one should compare not only the immediate costs but the long-term benefits and savings associated with preventive maintenance.

Without preventive maintenance, for example, costs for lost production time from unscheduled equipment breakdown will be incurred, and that work will undoubtedly take up more time than the maintenance. Also, preventive maintenance will increase the effective life span on assets thus resulting in savings from not having to make unnecessary capital expenditures, either in the form of replacement parts or the entire piece of equipment.

Long-term benefits of preventive maintenance include:

• Improved system reliability, including energy consumption
• Decreased cost of replacement
• Decreased system downtime
• Better inventory management

Even with all the usual stakeholders participating in this discussion and recognizing the importance in putting in a place a preventive maintenance system there is still the need to convince many that there will be a real return on investment on such an implementation. For more discussion on finding a bankable ROI with PM, go to http://www.mybuildingsuccess.com.