FOCUS MAINTENANCE
SMOOTH RUNNING
Planned maintenance regimes
for buildings and their
electrical and mechanical assets
are used to guide duty holders and
responsible persons – building
owners, managers or employers – on
how best to comply with statutory
and recommended practice
requirements for workplace health,
safety and welfare.
Core workplace safety
responsibilities are set out in
legislation. Key examples include
the Health and Safety at Work Act
1974 (HASAWA), Electricity at Work
Regulations 1989 (EAWR), Regulatory
Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005
(RRFSO), Gas Safety (Installation and
Use) Regulations and Amendment
2018, and Fluorinated Greenhouse
Gases Regulation (amended 2018).
CIBSE Guide M provides guidance
for developing a maintenance policy,
and SFG20 lays out similar assetbased
maintenance requirements
and frequencies of inspection.
Maintenance activities can take a
variety of forms, including scheduled
or routine (time based), condition
based, risk based, reactive, or operate
to failure. Other considerations
a ecting the design of a planned
maintenance regime will include
manufacturer recommendations and
warranty conditions, the building
function and how assets are used.
Compliance inspection and
maintenance data should both be used
to sense-check and update your asset
register. So much of this information
is relevant to facilities managers
for condition reporting, energy use
analysis, whole-life cost analysis
or capex spend. We have found, on
average, that as many as 40 per cent of
site assets may be ‘rogue’ (unknown
to facilities or site managers). These
rogue electrical or mechanical assets
are highly likely to be overlooked
within a purely compliance-driven
programme, and probably poorly
maintained. Comprehensive
maintenance data is far more easily
36 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2019
captured and delivered in a BIM and
data-rich facilities world.
FMs should seek greater cost
e iciency from multiple PPM
(planned preventative maintenance)
activities. Create more visibility at
the commencement of a contract
with your maintenance providers,
and avoid the complex messy
management of PPM wherever
possible by identifying and agreeing a
full schedule of works. Suppliers can
then create more value and e iciency
by scheduling multiple tasks across
a smaller number of site visits. From
the outset, you’ll be better placed to
control costs and your maintenance
providers will be better placed to
quantify risk and business impact.
Don’t throw your maintenance
partners under a bus if things go awry.
Work with providers to help them
deliver to your SLAs and KPIs. Be as
clear as you can, as early as you can,
about your highest service priorities
and associated KPIs. These are o en
reactive maintenance priorities such
as two- or four-hour critical response
windows for gas leaks or power
outage. Planned maintenance visits,
although less urgent in nature, should
remain central to your maintenance
regime. It is these scheduled tasks that
form the bedrock of your property
strategy. Ensure your supply chain
really understands the scale and
nature of your priorities, so that
providers can deliver to the best of
their ability.
Align your maintenance activities to
best practice industry standards such
as CIBSE Guide M or SFG20. These
standards provide reliable, systematic
and coherent management processes
for ensuring your opex spend is as
e ective and value-driven as possible.
HEALTHCARE CASE STUDY
We have a healthcare client that
carries out over 575,000 dialysis
treatments per year for 4,000
patients in over 50 clinics across the
UK, as well as three clinics in the
Irish Republic. We have provided
planned and reactive mechanical and
electrical maintenance since 2012 for
commercial gas and HVAC, as well as
planned electrical maintenance and
statutory testing services. The task
involves complex, heavily used, critical
healthcare buildings and assets, and
requires a mix of planned, reactive and
condition-based maintenance, based
on the function and usage of buildings
and the asset infrastructure.
The client relies in the first instance
on manufacturer maintenance
guidance, backed by SFG20, against
which phs Compliance delivers in- and
out-of-hours planned maintenance
services according to the client’s
operational needs. In the year to
date, we’ve delivered over 3,000
maintenance tasks.
SLAs, KPIs and contract reporting
measures are agreed annually. We
meet a variety of callout SLAs for
commercial gas systems, and through
our internal helpdesk we resolve
approximately 100 reactive callouts
per month. For reactive maintenance
in our customer’s operational
environment, ‘priority one’ callouts
requiring a response time of four hours
or less cover loss of electrical power,
loss of heating and hot water and
uncontrollable water leaks in critical,
clinical areas.
We provide temporary heating
solutions if boiler spare parts are on
order so that clinic operations remain
una ected. Response times of 24
hours or less are required for loss of
lighting or airconditioning in clinical
areas. Other priorities with response
times of three to seven days or one
month involve M&E works across
non-clinical areas, remedial repairs
or installations. In year one of the
contract, in addition to completing
all scheduled maintenance tasks we
also saw to it that a comprehensive
built asset register was compiled,
giving our customer visibility over all
maintainable equipment, systems and
components.
Our approach is to align and group
PPM tasks to optimise productivity
and e iciency on site, regularly
grouping electrical tasks for fire
alarm, emergency lighting and
electrical installation inspection. We
worked closely with the customer to
determine the best PPM schedule for
airconditioning systems, ensuring
that all asset data was captured. All
airconditioning services are delivered
out of hours to avoid disruption
to clinic operations and patient
treatments, and at least eight PPM
inspections per month are needed to
ensure our customer’s estate remains
operationally e ective and compliant.
Maintenance activity has become
more closely aligned with the client’s
needs over time as we build up a
detailed understanding of clinical
activity and the needs of the sites. We
liaise with the client to keep certain
beds free at certain times, for example,
enabling us to carry out PPM tasks
more e iciently.
Occasionally PPM tasks must be
rearranged at short notice due to
outbreaks of gastrointestinal infection.
We actively monitor the health of our
engineering workforce to ensure that
patients with low immune systems are
not exposed to the risk of infection.
Due to the critical nature of our
client’s operation, agile and responsive
mobilisation is important and we
have a slick upli process in place
for repairs and remedial spend. This
ensures business continuity and
avoids delays to onsite repairs. On
one occasion six clinics could not be
accessed due to infectious disease,
and highly responsive rescheduling
was needed to ensure the PPM regime
was maintained.
A healthcare environment is highly
sensitive to the hygiene risk posed
by water leaks and legionnaires’
disease. To mitigate the risk, we have
added additional control measures
to thermostatic valves and taps to
strengthen our client’s commercial gas
and L8 PPM regime.
James O’Hare Head of M&E Services at PHS Compliance explains
how an eff ective maintenance policy supports client operations while
ensuring compliance