| What was the background for your analysis?
Syska Hennessy manages the operation, maintenance and repair functions
at eight medical treatment facilities for the U.S. Department of the Air
Force, and we are monitoring data on nearly a dozen more. All are older
facilities that have had to operate for some time under the kind of budgetary
limitations that lead to maintenance delays and procedural shortcuts. The
upshot of that approach is that poorly maintained facilities are often
more unreliable and costly to operate, particularly as they age. We wanted
to empirically show that dedicated maintenance staff, reasonable budgets
and good engineering practice could restore the normal equipment lifecycles
of existing building systems, ultimately bringing costs back in line and
minimizing lost mission time.
Have you shown that, and if so, by what measure?
Yes, we have, as measured by the reduction of emergency and
urgent work orders. That indicator not only represents a comparative
savings in dollars but also signifies enhanced reliability as we are
saving the time that was otherwise lost through mission downtime. Fewer
urgent and emergency work orders also means less reactive maintenance
and repairs, therefore more hours available to devote to facility enhancement,
upgrades and preventive maintenance projects.
Is this scenario unique to government facilities?
No, but I would venture that the situation is more
acute than in comparable private-sector facilities.
In government facilities, for many years, preventive maintenance
has been deferred, performed improperly or simply ignored
due to several factors.
Budget cuts have eroded the ability of a facility manager
to perform the proper levels of maintenance required to
keep systems operating at peak performance. Scheduled maintenance
may be deferred to future years or canceled outright to
save on current cash. Staffing levels are reduced, materials
are not purchased and all maintenance activities become
reactive to crises and equipment breakdowns. Under these
circumstances, it doesn't take long for things to spiral
out of control and to find yourself in a completely reactive
mode.
Unlike its private-sector counterpart, an obsolete government
facility is far less likely to be replaced when it should
be. The best interim investment you can make is a proper
preventive maintenance program.
If that's the situation going in, how do you begin
to change it?
This is true for the management of any overstressed
facility: first, you have to recognize that the property
is deteriorating more rapidly than it should be; and second,
that you can do something about it.
We begin with a rigorous assessment of all the equipment
and its required maintenance--parts, labor and advanced
testing. Next, we review the maintenance staffing for the
proper mix of labor skills. Subcontracts are negotiated
for those areas outside the core in-house expertise. We
evaluate the time and expense it will take to stock and
store proper materials, train manpower and automate or update
automated maintenance systems.
We take all of that intelligence to our client--in this
case, hospital management--and demonstrate that there are
improvements possible with a relatively modest incremental
investment in terms of the value of the facility.
Finally, you have to measure the results. We're
finding that proper preventive maintenance and repair
programs can yield big dividends for even the most neglected
facilities. Often, after these programs begin to show
results, maintenance crews develop a sense of ownership
toward the facility. The real improvement can then be
achieved through the initiative of the maintenance crews
and the discipline developed by a rigorous PM program.
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