Preventive Maintenance is Bottom-Line Essential
Expert Views on Implementing Valuable Assessment Tool
Preventing premature failure of mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems could be defined simply as an effort built on three parts common sense, one part good data. Ask the professionals skilled in taking the long view about how to keep high-priority MEP systems and equipment running well and they'll tell you, the methods may vary, but well-informed preventive maintenance is the key in any facility where safety and productivity matter.
Effective strategies for preventive maintenance today must weigh growing demand on MEP systems—from older equipment to the newest installation—against the need to make or keep an operation profitable. The scenario argues for a commitment to keeping component systems in working order. Preventive maintenance becomes a management philosophy and business tool, a basis for allocating critical resources of time and money.
Yet how does the principle of preventive maintenance as a bottom-line essential work in practice? This article asks three experienced facility management and engineering professionals for their views.
Paul Ring, a Vice President of Facilities Management at engineering and construction firm CH2M HILL headquartered in Denver, Wisconsin-based Consulting Engineer James Whiteside, and Howard (Mike) Day, Director of Facilities for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia, discuss how maintenance decision-makers can improve outcomes and keep costs in line.
Make Preventive Maintenance Integral to Building and Plant Operations
Jim Whiteside views preventive maintenance almost as a state of mind. Involved in the planning and execution of system start-ups, facility commissioning, and the relocation of major companies during his corporate career, Jim now consults with clients from his base in Madison, Wisconsin. "I've found there's no direct cost involved in preventive maintenance. Rather, the investment is in how you organize and manage a department, how you maximize the availability of a plant or facility."
Done right, Jim says preventive maintenance is one cornerstone of a four-tier program that also includes repair work, staff training, and service calls. Savings happen when facility managers develop the right mix of these visible and invisible maintenance components, a mix that keeps essential equipment working at capacity. "Preventive maintenance is not a cure-all," notes Jim, who also writes on this and related topics for trade journals. "It works best as part of a program where you apply resources—even limited resources—where they'll have the greatest effect on productivity, profits, and safety."
Paul Ring calls it reliability centered maintenance, or RCM. He regularly consults on best practices in preventive maintenance with government and industry clients worldwide for CH2M HILL, an engineering, construction, and operations firm that provides outsourced operations and maintenance services. He defines prevention as a primary component of maintenance. "And it's done, not to increase efficiency, but to keep systems running reliably, safely, and with integrity."
Paul explains the basis of RCM is "understand your equipment—know what must be monitored closely and what can be allowed to fail with few if any consequences." He adds that managers cannot make good maintenance decisions in a void. They need good design and performance data about every system to avoid deterioration, damage, or worse.
Keeping mission-critical systems functioning in complex medical research facilities puts reliability in a new category, says Mike Day. Mike recently directed the move into a major new 550,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art scientific research facility at the Hughes campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Twenty technicians work full time on maintenance management at the new Janelia Farm research facility. "My role and the role of my group is to ensure that the equipment in the facility meets or exceeds its expected life cycle, that there are no major breakdowns. Anything that could adversely affect the science is a must to maintain."
Mike says knowing precisely how centrifugal chillers, pumps, electrical switchgears, and myriad other systems function is paramount. Equally important, he insists his crew understand how various MEP systems and equipment support the research going on in the facility. "That knowledge means we give appropriate time and attention to maintaining the things where failure would put us out of business."
Create Hierarchy of Prevention
Jim divides systems and equipment into categories by degree, starting at the top with primary systems that include equipment like electrical service entrances, boiler, and chiller plants. Items of secondary concern could be energy transport equipment like motor control centers, pumps, and air-handling units. He defines the tertiary level as minimal-impact, point-of-use systems like VAV boxes and thermostats. Availability of primary systems affects an entire facility. Well-functioning secondary systems affect operations to a significant but lesser degree. And tertiary systems, working or not, affect only a handful of people.
Delineating things in this way allows maintenance managers to associate resources with priorities and focus their prevention efforts. It also validates the argument for letting some systems run to failure, relying instead on a building management system to monitor when and why.
Mike adds that creating a hierarchy of preventive maintenance forces facility managers to compare the true cost of replacing or maintaining. "I look back now at a research facility that came on line in 1990, for example, and can see the positive result of a consistent preventive maintenance program. The primary equipment and systems look and run the same today as they did 16 years ago—no breakdowns, no shut downs."
Computer-managed maintenance systems, or CMMS, support a tiered-maintenance approach, Paul suggests. Tools like CMMS let facility managers plan a program based on reasoned calculation rather than reactive response. He says such "predictive maintenance" adds measurement to the planning process. With CMMS, technicians efficiently monitor the status of commonplace systems or equipment, differentiating them from more sophisticated systems requiring exceptional hands-on attention. Paul notes this balance of effort guards against burning up high-end resources on routine fixes.
Develop, Use Resources Wisely
All three experts emphasize that preventive maintenance done right demands wise use of every resource. These include trained technicians, effective monitoring equipment, and the time and money to do things right.
Training, they agree, should underpin any preventive maintenance philosophy. It is a tangible tool that helps guarantee a program achieves its ends, produces results. Technicians familiar with facility systems and equipment—and how all of it factors into the business mission—are the mainstay of a strong preventive maintenance program.
At Hughes, Mike Day builds his program on members of the in-house maintenance team knowing the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, but also having an innate understanding of closely calibrated laboratory equipment used to preserve samples or run experiments. And he does not rely solely on seasoned technicians to service and maintain critical systems. "There is no time to lose in making sure newer technicians learn everything," he says. "Training should be a given in any preventive maintenance program where the goals are continuity, consistency, and system longevity."
Such efforts reveal the fact that system technology is ahead of the skill level of many people training now. Echoing observations made by Paul Ring and Jim Whiteside, Mike says a major challenge of facility management today is accelerating the quality of technical education to meet the demands of the marketplace. As a generation of experienced maintenance engineers and technicians retires over the next decade, there may be a shortage of qualified people to step in and manage increasingly complex systems.
All three affirm that raising the profile of preventive maintenance as bottom-line essential may help reverse this trend, especially in large facilities where staying operational so closely equates to staying in business. Tomorrow's facility managers and engineers must be prepared to keep tomorrow's systems and equipment humming—without excuse or skipping a beat.
Another tool Jim sees as critical to resource allocation at every level is time management. "Whether your resources are plentiful or few, allocating time wisely really matters—it trains you to use all resources in a better way." As effective preventive maintenance puts non-productive time to strategic use, it also adds value to the organization and raises the status of those who develop and implement the program.
Think Big Even if Small
Given the challenge of implementing an effective preventive maintenance program in places like acute-care hospitals, research facilities, or high-tech manufacturing plants, what hope is there for doing so in smaller, less-complex facilities like neighborhood schools, office buildings, or shopping malls? Jim says big or small, the basics are the same. Planning and preventive maintenance belong in every program no matter the size or scope of a facility. And there are ways.
Small facilities often rely on a skeleton crew of multi-disciplined technicians to keep them running. The maintenance point-person for a school or office building must manage the basics of the MEP systems and equipment, tapping outside professionals when necessary. Large facilities naturally afford more inside resources to run a preventive maintenance program. They also sometimes outsource select maintenance activities.
CH2M HILL is a leading supplier of outsourced operations and maintenance expertise and facilities management services to a wide range of clients. Paul Ring says outsourcing fills a critical gap in the present maintenance mix. "Preventive maintenance is not yet seen as central to operations for many companies. Until it is budgeted as a core competency, going outside for expertise is both valuable and necessary."
Once companies adopt the core-competency model, he notes, the role of outsourcing may change, but it will remain relevant to a complete maintenance program.
Jim Whiteside offers one caution about outsourcing: Avoid the temptation to use it as a substitute assessment tool for a preventive maintenance program. "Contracting with skilled technicians makes budget sense where specialized skills or equipment are concerned," he says. "But if you are responsible for the overall condition and availability of the physical plant, condition assessments provide a fundamental source of information you need to make strategic maintenance decisions. Why delegate this to a third party?"
Sell It: Prevention Under Scrutiny
Good preventive maintenance operates out of sight. It is the art and science of the negative—no visible signs of failure, no problems, no downtime. What is apparent in many organizations is a pressure to quantify the worth of prevention versus routine repair-and-replacement.
From a modest program combining minimal prevention with routine minor repairs to a comprehensive maintenance approach that sweeps all before it, there is indeed a price to pay for staying effectively operational. Literature on the topic suggests maintenance managers often find a break-even point in their program where money spent on prevention exceeds the cost of repair and replacement. It can be difficult to define that point and establish an ideal that satisfies the return on investment.
Gathering hard data on maintenance activities is one solution. "Justifying the cost of prevention is exactly where having a well-informed plan in place makes so much sense," says Paul. "It's your basis for setting priorities, being efficient, assigning tasks appropriately. And measuring the results." Even a simple preventive maintenance plan measures life-cycle expectations and operational efficiencies enough to tie the program to the budget bottom line.
The "unforgiving" 80/20 rule is another aspect of data collecting. Jim says that since experience shows that 80 percent of facility problems typically stem from 20 percent of systems and equipment—the primary ones—managers can analyze the operational integrity and profit protection in that sector and, likewise, the impact of failure.
Mike points out that facilities large and small face budget constraints. He says in his experience, accepting the mindset of "no money, no way" defeats creative solutions, or even elementary ones. "Lots of basic preventive maintenance can be done at little cost. Just cleaning and lubricating equipment, changing filters regularly keeps things in running order."
Jim describes this as "following the CARE routine" when designing preventive maintenance tasks. CARE translates as a reminder to "clean, adjust, repair, examine" facility systems and equipment. "Use the predictability inherent in preventive maintenance, and it's possible to control costs."
Building in-house expertise works as a savings at Hughes, according to Mike. "Because it demands a knowledge of our systems, it gives us more control and makes it easier to allocate resources." The size of the program also justifies owning a portable infrared scanner and other specialized testing tools that streamline the monitoring process. Consolidating maintenance resources across a complex of buildings creates quantifiable efficiencies of scale, he says, and helps the facility owner afford a resource-rich preventive maintenance program.
Maintain What We Build
For facility managers, the ideal new facility is one designed and built to support prevention of premature failure as a cornerstone of a maintenance program. Paul says that the idea behind doing a constructability analysis, the tool used in the last 20 years to investigate whether it is possible to build a building according to a specified design, could be expanded to answer the question: Can we maintain what we build?
It comes back to making maintenance a top priority organizationally. Adding a maintainability review during the design phase, Paul says, is part of managing the overall life-cycle cost of the facility.
Rarely done, it appears the concept of planning ahead for a maintenance-efficient facility, doing things like minimizing the number of maintenance points, is gaining traction. Maintenance experts brought in at the design stage can make the case for installing larger equipment but less of it, see where it is logical to create system redundancies, and identify which systems or equipment require frequent attention and must be accessible to technicians.
Paul notes there is a big demarcation point separating building budgets from maintenance and facility life-cycle budgets, and that remains a barrier. Still, the experts see a trend toward more sophisticated, experienced facility managers. It offers hope that a new wave of highly skilled professionals will exert more influence over both planning and implementation of effective preventive maintenance programs.
Set High Standards
Is a preventive maintenance program essential to the bottom line? Is it a defensible investment? If tightly integrated with facility goals and managed with integrity, the experts say yes. They see such programs as a chance to set high standards and tie quality maintenance to keeping a hospital complex, a factory, a high-tech research campus, or other facility running at optimal safety and efficiency.
Maintenance professionals interested in a strategic exploration of preventive maintenance concepts for MEP systems and equipment gain insights from Jim Whiteside, Paul Ring, Mike Day and other top experts at workshops on the topic offered by the Department of Engineering Professional Development (EPD) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
For details on future preventive maintenance workshop sessions, contact program directors Raymond Matulionis at 608-263-3372 or Harold Olsen at 608-262-2403. Learn more by visiting our Courses. Or call 800-462-0876.
Written by Mary Maher
This article is based upon work supported by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Engineering Professional Development. It is for general information and distribution. It is not intended to provide specific solutions or advice for specific circumstances, which should be sought from appropriate professionals.