If you are a facility maintenance professional or facility manager, you may have already experienced this scenario: Your team has built a maintenance program over the years with enough workers and equipment to take care of both long-term maintenance and unplanned events, such as that leaking toilet in a second floor bathroom and a robust preventive maintenance program. Things seem to be going fine.
Then company executives unexpectedly announce maintenance budget cuts. You lose some of your best, most experienced maintenance workers, as well as your budget for replacing building systems that are at the end of their lifecycle. If you’re lucky, you may still have enough employees to take care of the leaky toilet, but preventive maintenance programsand lifecycle maintenance to boilers and other facility systems that you have scheduled are no longer funded.
Well, you think, those things will just have to wait. But a year or two lateror even longeryou are still waiting for budgets to be restored, and your reduced staffspends more time than ever reacting to service calls and less or no time on preventive maintenance. If this scenario sounds familiar, you are not alone. Even before the current major recession struck, company executives and business managers at thousands of organizations found an easy target for cutting in the facilities budget.
“Today’s quest for near-term profits oft en leads to downsized head count,” Don Nyman and Joel Levitt noted in their new book, Maintenance Planning, Coordination & Scheduling (Industrial Press, 2010). “As a result, thinly-staffed maintenance departments are all too common today. The maintenance labor resources that remain are consumed largely by asset failures that demand their immediate response.”
To put it another way, preventive and predictive maintenance programs throughout the country have become reactive maintenance programs. “The first thing many organizations cut in tough times is their maintenance budget,” said Doug Kincaid, an industrial engineer who is president and general manager of AME Inc., a maintenance consulting firm in Virginia Beach, Va. “Poorly conceived or unnecessarily drastic maintenance budget cuts are short-sighted for any organization, but it is particularly ironic that universities are quick to cut budgets for maintenance. “Universities with endowments manage the portfolio of funds to make sure they do not lose value. Yet when it comes to one of university’s most significant investments in its portfolio of assetsthe campus buildings and groundsuniversity administrations have no hesitation cutting the budget for maintenance, even though those cuts might end up costing them much more over the long term, reduce the value of the assets, and potentially the ability to support the mission.”
In addition to his work as a university director of facilities management, Richard Payant, CFM, CPE, is writing a doctoral dissertation for his PhD in business administration concerning the negative impact of deferring maintenance on recruiting students and faculty. Having examined the maintenance programs at a number of other universities, he found that “if university buildings are not properly maintained, sooner or later the university will lose the quality of [the] students and faculty it is hoping to attract.” He said this was true for “universities across the country.” When university maintenance programs are deferred for a period of years, the result can lead to a spiral effect of lower morale among maintenance employees that eventually increases turnover and decreases productivity of maintenance workers. Of course, it should be noted that in some cases, budget cuts can actually achieve their desired effect of saving the organization money, but it requires work and planning. “[Companies] may hope that budget pressure will cause the maintenance force to “work harder” or do what it takes,'” said Doc Palmer in his book, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook (MacGraw-Hill, 1999). “Nonetheless, to make improvements to the efficiency of a maintenance operation, one must know the details of the system Maintenance planning is a major strategy to improve maintenance efficiency with regard to unproductive maintenance time.”
Maintenance Planning: Worth the Effort?
The longer maintenance is deferred, the more system failures occur as maintenance departments focus on emergency and service calls on an ad hoc basis. The questions becomes this: how do you convince your organization’s chief executives (the “C-Suite”) that sticking to a maintenance plan that addresses both long and short term facility needs will actually lower the maintenance costs over the long term? In a smaller organization, one simple way to educate upper management about the importance of sticking to a long-term maintenance plan is to go through checklists, such as the ones provided in Maintenance Planning, Coordination & Scheduling.
These checklists enumerate the benefi ts of proactive maintenance, such as: reduced downtime (for building systems, such as heating and cooling); reduced number size and scale of repairs; increased equipment availability; increased safety and decreased liability; increased asset life, and much more.
By listing the benefits of maintenance programs, you can help executives understand the full impact of their decision to cut the maintenance program. In many organizations, you’ll need to do much more convincing. The challenge is to sell maintenance to a corporate executive who may never have picked up a wrench in his or her life. In order to educate them about the need for a well-craft ed and properly funded maintenance planyou may need to lay some statistics from an expert on them. When you’re selling your maintenance plan to the C-Suite, try a statistic like this one: “On larger jobs you can save 3-5 hours of execution time for every hour of advanced planning,” Joel Levitt noted in The Handbook of Maintenance Management (Industrial Press, 2nd edition). The book notes that proper planning can mean workers spend 65 percent of their workday accomplishing assigned tasks, while those at a poorly planned worksite spend only 35 percent of their time at those tasks.
Add to some other factors: potential liability, preservation of the organization’s fixed assets, employee safety and regulatory complianceand you’re a lot more likely to get a dialogue going between yourself and the financial executives at your organization than if you presented a maintenance plan with only tasks and schedule. “If you want your maintenance budget restored,” said one consultant, “you have to hit the corporate bean counters’ with your best shot. And for them the best shot’ is always the bottom line.” Larger organizations, with bigger budgets, may even want to consider hiring a maintenance consultant who can create a detailed analysis not only of the cost of deferred maintenance, but also develop priorities to help determine where maintenance resources should best be spent. Budgets are much larger, and the numbers of building assets are also much larger, so you can’t just depend on dropping a few well-chosen phrases to get the conversation started. You need a comprehensive plan that spells out lifecycle costs and the impacts to expect by not funding the plan.
“In some Federal agencies with limited budgets, we’ve found that they distribute costs evenly across their facility portfolios without regard to mission criticality,” Kincaid said. “The result was that they still didn’t have enough money to do everything needed and the available funds were not focused on mission critical and critical systems.” He added that prioritizing needs through proper planning has another benefit. “It lets internal customers understand that they just can’t do everything [on limited budgets],” Kincaid said. Is hiring a consulting company like AME essential to getting the maintenance message out to upper level management? “Not necessarily,” Kincaid said.
“There’s nothing magical about what we do that they [facilities managers and chief building engineers] can’t do themselves. But we do help organizations to focus on maintenance planning. We also use our experience to provide ideas on how to set up processes and what we have seen that works in a variety of facility environments in order for them to manage their facilities more effectively.” He added: “The important point is to continually reinforce to upper management that planned maintenance saves energy and money over time by extending the life of equipment and building systems. In addition, by improving processes, and thus increasing productivity, we can show how the same amount of work can be accomplished for less money, thereby freeing up funds for other projects.”
Maintenance Budgets and Emergency Preparedness
When promoting your maintenance and operations budget, another important point to emphasize is the impact properly-funded maintenance budget can have on emergency preparedness. While the bottom line of organizations could suffer because of longer-term cuts in maintenance and operations (O&M) budgets, a more immediate effect of deferred maintenance is the impact it may have on emergency preparedness.
In a weather-related or humancaused emergency, the reliability of facility infrastructure is essential for those inside the facility and emergency personnel who arrive on the scene. Or the failed systems themselves may trigger an emergency.
Payant, who also teaches Emergency Preparedness for Facility Managers at George Mason University, put it this way: “Because of the lack of funding for O&M, the infrastructure within and supporting facilities will start to decay. When these deteriorated pipes and equipment finally break or fail the result could be catastrophic and impact the mission of the organization. Hence facility managers of the future have to be more in tune with emergency preparedness.”
