From Reactive to Proactive Management
In many organizations, large and small, a reactive strategy is employed for managing property, equipment and other assets. This means that actions are taken based on complaints and malfunctions as they occur. This strategy not only leads to higher cost in the long run, it also has a number of disadvantages for people who use the building or the assets. After all, if you only perform maintenance, or replacement when something breaks down, this makes your building and assets less safe and less reliable.
It’s better for organizations to switch to a more proactive maintenance and capital planning policy, so that maintenance, or replacement work is done regularly and according to a plan to prevent malfunctions. What organizations need to get there is a good framework.
- Determine what your vision is
If you want to manage your property well, the first thing to do is to set goals for what you you’re your property capital planning and maintenance to be. If you plan to give up one of your buildings, you don’t need to invest any money in it in the next few years. On the other hand, if you want your building to represent your organization better, you want to improve its quality and that means you need to invest more money. Creating a clear vision for each building makes long-term property management much easier, because you know what you want for your building in the future.
- Create an overview of your property
Your vision outlines what you want your property to look like in the future. If you want to achieve your vision, you’ll first need to know what condition your property is with regard to equipment probable usable lifespan, condition and maintenance. It’s a good idea to benchmark the current state of your property and any flaws it may have.
- Create a long-term plan
In a long-term plan, you establish what needs to be done to get your property to the condition you have in mind as a goal. Ideally, investments that come with these actions should be spread evenly over several years. Most organizations won’t be happy with sudden peaks in spending. A good way to spread costs is to make clusters of similar jobs. This can also help you save money and achieve economies of scale
- Decide on actions for the year ahead
Organizations should zoom into their long-term plan once a year to see which jobs can be completed in that year or deferred. The result should be an annual capital/maintenance plan. Some jobs and actions will simply follow from existing contracts with suppliers.
- Execute planned activities
When the annual plan is finalized, you’ll know what activities you can expect that year and what the costs will be. Some of them will be established beforehand, such as annual emergency equipment checks. If you don’t have an existing agreement, the procedure starts with you asking for quotes and ends with completion of a job. It’s a good idea to safeguard this procedure and archive the things you considered in your decisions, so you can look into them later on.
- Monitor and direct progress
To make sure a building gets to the desired maintenance level, it’s important to check its condition regularly. These checks are usually done once every one to three years. Just like with the long-term plan, you don’t need to go into every little detail.
Predictable malfunctions
Even when you’ve switched to proactive maintenance and capital planning, malfunctions are simply a fact of life. But you can minimize their frequency. With proactive maintenance you’re better able to predict when certain systems, equipment and parts have to be replaced. This makes it easier to manage maintenance costs and you’ll have fewer peaks in your workload.
An even bigger advantage is that since you can plan maintenance activities much better, they won’t come as an unpleasant surprise to your organization and the people who use your building. By switching to proactive maintenance, you take a big step towards better services and happier customers.
Reference
Nienke Best. “Enterprise Service Management”. May 2017