Maintaining standards in FM

Facilities management, by definition and its purpose, is to maintain standards. The whole essence of facilities management is to provide support to businesses and organizations, to ensure that facilities are well run, well maintained, respond to government regulations on security, health and safety, and the assets are able to perform their functions throughout their life cycle in an effective and efficient way.

At the core of maintaining standards is maintenance, which is the main focus for any facilities manager. Maintenance has evolved over the years, as technology has made an impact on achieving standards. Maintenance has to be practical and must also be looked at from a strategic and tactical point of view, while still responding to day-to-day practical issues.  To implement maintenance, a facilities manager, in consultation with users of facilities’ services, must develop a well-defined plan, to respond to both short and long term needs– a practical Maintenance Strategy. 

A Maintenance Strategy is not a static document but one that is flexible, responds very well to unanticipated changes and needs, and serves overall organizational goals.  One of the critical elements of this strategy must be the integration of periodic reviews – to check that the indicators of success are still relevant, and ensure changes are made quickly and with minimal costs and losses.   A Maintenance Strategy that is well thought out could be used for assessing the capacities and potential risks faced by personnel that would be responsible for carrying out the maintenance tasks. These ensure that the strategy is generally proactive rather than retroactive.

Embodied within a Maintenance Strategy are three categories—planned, preventive and unplanned maintenance.  Planned maintenance simply means one that is planned periodically to ensure that facilities and equipment function at optimum level, and this may occasionally require a complete shutdown of operations. Buildings and infrastructure however experience wear and tear, regardless of best efforts during planned maintenance and this is where the second category comes in.  Preventive maintenance deals with issues of condition – how to extend the life of facilities/assets, check out reliability of assets and generally use as a way of assessing overall productivity.

The third one is unplanned maintenance, which also has to be ‘planned’.  An unplanned maintenance requires dealing with emergency issues. For example, an incident in a facility we managed where a car veered off the road and hit the generator, causing considerable damage.  This was not something that was anticipated, but in developing a strategy, its possibility would have been anticipated using scenario planning analysis.  Unplanned maintenance also includes corrective and breakdown maintenance.

Staying on top of regulatory frameworks and compliance standards is another way in which a facilities manager can maintain standards.  While Nigeria is not at par with developed countries, in setting standards for the FM industry, it is not an excuse for the standards that are available, and how to ensure that they are being complied with.  This is a particular challenge as these guidelines and standards might be scattered within different laws/guidelines of the different levels of governments.  A facilities manager that desires to keep high standards would have to be familiar with these standards – through researching, networking, and especially with people within the FM industry. 

Finally, keeping standards requires the ability to undertake facility assessment.  Facility assessment involves an analysis of facilities being managed and what would be needed to keep it going optimally with minimum costs, and still fulfilling organizational goals over a long term period.  For example, what would it cost to manage a facility over a period – from between 10 – 30 years?  How is the facility viewed by those using it; how is the facility manager integrating feedback from users into everyday planning and review of these facilities?

How can a facilities manager ensure that users of businesses are getting value for their money? And very critically, how can the facilities manager support organizations in making decisions on when to retain or dispose of a building, especially once value starts to depreciate.

Tunde Obileye