What is reactive maintenance?
Reactive maintenance is any work that has been marked as urgent for immediate attention, it could be planned or unplanned work. In the area of facilities management this could be something like the basement water pump of a busy office building – you’ve noticed that for the last month that it hasn’t been working as well as it should be, it is even starting to make those typical “clunking” noises, it has now sprung a leak, so the matter now becomes that of an emergency – so you book in a serviceman for urgent repairs. In the meanwhile, that pump is out of action, which unless there is a backup asset to perform its function, this could spell trouble for that particular busy office building.
Reactive asset maintenance is common
Some businesses do operate this way. It may be because they don’t have an appropriate schedule of maintenance set up for their assets. Or maybe they have the schedule set up but not the budget. Or maybe the budget is sufficient, but the schedule is very “ad-hoc” and not very user-friendly. When maintenance is reactive it can really frustrate not only the facilities management team but also the tenants and workers within the facilities. It greatly affects productivity due to the majority of the work being unplanned and can also affect job safety of employees.
Businesses need to be proactive with asset maintenance
Your business asset management system plays a major role in supporting proactive maintenance schedules and increasing the reliability of your assets. The first step is to establish a sound effective preventative maintenance or predictive maintenance schedule for the facilities you are managing. You don’t want to have to rely on manuals for equipment and staff experience – as equipment and staff can change regularly. We should emphasize condition monitoring technologies and data analysis such as Mainpac’s Asset Intelligence. With proactive predictive maintenance and early identification of any issues, staff can prevent unplanned breakdowns and any further damages. By planning your needed repairs and maintenance on assets the organization will save costs on less downtime and increased productivity.
Staff training and mobility
Train your facilities management staff to take note summaries each day in their area of operation. If anything looks like it may need maintenance sooner rather than later, that should be recorded in a daily register, photos taken and a note put in your asset management system. Solutions to the issues can be proposed and schedules can be updated. This is a situation where Mainpac’s Mobility module is convenient, because maintenance staff will have their tablet device on hand, and notes and photos can be taken, attached to work orders and uploaded then and there, ready to be synced to the system.
Using data Intelligence to create maintenance schedules
It’s one thing to use current organizational procedures and staff feedback, but when there are technologies available that can enable businesses to draw key insights from different data sources in order to enrich decision-making in heightened efficiency this is something to be considered to reduce reactive maintenance. Programs such as Mainpac Asset Intelligence connects day-to-day operational information with visual forecasting to see the impact of scenarios and models. This allows facility managers to competently plan maintenance schedules based on risk drivers such as age, condition decline, and overall performance analysis. The application consists of reliability engineering to monitor asset conditions and failure through reliability-based and preventative maintenance. Managers are able to revise operations and maintenance planning to review service quality, maintenance compliance, and asset availability.
Conclusion
Keeping your assets reliable and in good working order is imperative in the facilities management industry and reducing reactive maintenance in facilities management is not such an impossible attainment. With a great enterprise asset management system such as Mainpac, you can configure the program to suit the scale of your business and the types of facility assets you are maintaining. If you would like more information on our business solutions one of our friendly consultants would be more than happy to assist.
