Nothing about deferred maintenance in institutional and commercial facilities is quick or easy. The issue did not happen overnight, it will not be solved in a day, and the strategies to address it successfully are complex.
That said, maintenance and engineering managers can take several tactical actions that can start their departments and organizations on the path to tackling the backlog of inspection, repair and maintenance projects that are hampering the condition and performance of many facilities.
Perhaps the most critical steps in the process of tackling deferred maintenance involve identifying attitudes and changing priorities.
“The mistake that I’ve seen is that proverbial one: ‘We know we have to get this repaired, but there are other things that have crept up that are more important,’” says Andrew Gager, CEO of AMG International Consulting. “They’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. They’re just moving the budget money around. Because of that approach, too many organizations I see just run equipment to failure. To them, it’s not an emergency until it actually breaks.”
The problem with this approach is that fixing the emergency will cost much more than it would have cost when it first arose.
“It becomes an emergency, and it’s going to be three to four times more expensive and a lot more in some cases if we run it to failure,” Gager says. “Then you have to drop everything, and you have to typically overnight these parts or FedEx these parts.
“It’s also more disruptive. You have to dismiss people, or people in the facility are more uncomfortable because of the heat or the cold.”
The attitudes managers have to change involve those of building owners and facility executives who too often treat maintenance as an afterthought, not a top organizational priority. As always, finances are the stumbling block.
“It comes down to money,” Gager says. “There’s a percentage of building owners that are in the business to make money. As long as that rent money or that lease money continues to come in, they’re maximizing the return on their investment.
“If you start looking at spending money to maintain equipment, that’s dipping into your revenue. They say, ‘I’m going to defer it if it’s not an emergency. I’m going to keep banking those checks every month.’ If you say you need $100,000 to upgrade RTUs, the first question is going to be, ‘How much longer can we go without having to replace those? Is this something we can put a Band-Aid on?’
Changing attitudes and priorities related to an entrenched, long-term problem like deferred maintenance is challenging and complicated. For these reasons, managers are most likely to find success by breaking down the process into more manageable steps.
Assess. The first step is to understand the problem.
“We need to get our arms wrapped around this: What is true north? What is the reality in our facilities?” Gager says. “Finding it is going to require a systematic and strategic approach to address these issues.
“My recommendation is to start with an assessment. What do we have? What’s under the umbrella of what we need to scope out? We can’t do everything within our facilities, so we need to do a condition assessment.”
To locate the biggest, toughest maintenance challenges, Gager advises managers to follow the money.
“Let’s take a look at our past spending,” he says. “Where repairs are we spending an exorbitant amount of maintenance hours on?”
Prioritize. With a better understanding of the nature of the problem, the next step is to prioritize facilities’ needs.
“Prioritization is going to be based on criticality,” Gager says. “That’s really what it comes down to. That and the consequence of the failure — criticality and the consequence and the likelihood of failure. When do we believe it’s going to happen? That comes from the assessment.
“Then we can use strategic planning based on that criticality and the consequence of those failures. Everything starts with safety. If this fails, does it impact safety, health or environment? Those are the top priorities.”
Build. Building the business case for investing in deferred maintenance might be the most difficult because it requires that managers make an honest and impartial assessment of the projects that are most necessary and beneficial to the organization.
“We have to take the emotion out of it, and we have to use some type of methodology that truly does rank and file everything,” Gager says. “What is the most critical, what’s the most urgent, and what are the consequence if we don’t do this? What’s the consequence of that failure?
Pitch. Securing buy-in from building owners and financial players for funding deferred maintenance projects rests on the same issue as so much else in the process.
“Ultimately, it’s going to come down to money,” Gager says. “Do we have the funding? What is the cost benefit or the business case for us wanting to do this or needing to do this? Let’s take a look at the business case. Let’s look at the financials. Let’s take a look at the cost benefit from these assessments.”
Those financial considerations are likely to be the tipping point in a building owner’s decision-making process, Gager says.
“Once we get the assessment done, once we get the priority done with our prioritization based on the criticality, we have to develop the plan. What are the actions and the activities that we need to plan for, and what is the sequence of those activities? That is all part of our business case.
“When we do that, we can go to the leadership and secure our funding for that project or those replacements and upgrades.”
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
