Fortunately, preventive maintenance offers a clear and compelling return on investment. One organization found that for every $1 invested in PM, institutions save $2.73 in future reactive needs. To help Facilities leaders shift the balance from reactive to preventive maintenance, this report provides 11 executive-level best practices to improve the allocation of limited staff, data, and financial resources for preventive tasks.

Three themes central to maintenance challenge

“It’s a whole lot better to get $10 million a year for 10 years than to get nothing for nine years and then have $100 million dumped on you all at once.”

Dennis Bailey, Senior Associate VP, Facilities Florida State University

As senior leaders in higher education shift their focus to maintenance, they most often cite money, data, and communication as the major barriers to success. They point out that more funding, better data, and engaging key stakeholders are all core to resolving the maintenance challenge. However, each of these issues is more nuanced and requires action from Facilities units. While institutions need more dollars to put against maintenance needs, they must also make better use of the resources they have and prioritize the projects with greatest return. Similarly, senior leaders must marshal the data they have to make a more compelling case for investment. Finally, better communication should also include Facilities staff – engaging them in new and different kinds of work.

Higher education’s maintenance imperative

Maintenance has been a top priority for Facilities leaders for decades. Yet as institutions face aging buildings and growing deferred maintenance backlogs, tackling this challenge has increasingly become an area of focus of other institutional leaders, including chief business officers, presidents, and boards. The growing attention on maintenance in higher education is unsurprising given that maintenance issues affect all areas of campus. Four examples of Facilities maintenance challenges and their impact on other institutional leaders are described below.

 

Create greater PM capacity by eliminating common timesinks

The first step toward becoming a less reactive shop is to create capacity for staff to do more preventive maintenance. From the moment a technician begins the work day, timesinks (i.e., non-essential tasks such as changing lightbulbs, hunting down supplies, and looking up manufacturer’s guidelines) pull him or her away from more valuable wrench time. In fact, Facilities leaders estimate that maintenance staff spend up to 30% of their time on common timesinks. Recapturing even a small portion of that 30% of unproductive time can drive a dramatic uptick in preventive maintenance.

Practice 1: Point-of-service information hubs

While Facilities departments possess extensive information about work order history and equipment condition, it is often captured on paper or in centralized databases. Though valuable, this information is often inaccessible to maintenance staff in the field, and hunting down this information cuts into completing actual work. By providing staff with real-time access in the field, institutions speed time to information, thereby freeing maintenance staff to dedicate more time to scheduled work.

The first major inefficiency that leads to maintenance timesinks and reduces preventive maintenance wrench time is the need for maintenance staff to hunt down information to complete their assigned work. Brown University began investing in asset identification in 2013, when Facilities started barcoding their assets with easy-to-spot yellow tags. This initiative has two benefits. First, it gives Brown a complete and detailed inventory of their assets, including type, number, and location of each piece of equipment. Second, the barcodes allow technicians to access information about the asset while in the field using their mobile devices.

Brown estimates that the barcoding effort, which concluded at the end of 2016, cost about 16 cents per assignable square foot. The one-time investment yielded impressive savings, including nearly 5,000 labor hours saved (which translate to $2 million in labor savings for Brown). Overall, Brown has seen a 30% reduction in reactive work orders.

Practice 2: Automated inventory procurement

For most institutions, collecting and delivering supplies from the supply room to work sites is a time-consuming process. Even institutions that schedule work in advance face delays when maintenance staff search for their own supplies or pause work while waiting for materials to arrive. As a result, shop managers are often forced to dedicate more time to administrative tasks like tracking and ordering supplies. Automating the procurement and distribution of supplies ensures maintenance staff have the necessary tools and materials when and where they need them, without extra time on their part.

The second major inefficiency that reduces wrench time is gathering tools and supplies. This inefficiency manifests in two ways. The first is procurement: maintenance staff do not have the materials they need when they need them. This forces staff to spend time collecting materials, ordering new parts, or at the extreme, traveling off campus to buy them. The second problem is distribution: maintenance staff do not have the materials they need where they need them. When materials are dispersed haphazardly across campus, Facilities workers must leave work sites to search for what they need, often in multiple locations.

Common sources of inefficiencies

The California Institute of Technology measured the cost of this inefficiency and found that when technicians gather their own supplies, it costs about $25 per box. By comparison, a single person could deliver those same materials to a work site for less than $2 per box. Further, Caltech estimated that their technicians spent 27% of their day ordering and obtaining materials. The following pages provide solutions that institutions have implemented to address both procurement and distribution problems.

Practice 3: Process improvement toolkit

Process redesign efforts stall because staff often lack the time or expertise to analyze complex process maps or identify and correct bottlenecks that may free up staff time for PM activities. Given that many inefficiencies tend to be campus-specific and difficult to generalize, this resource helps clarify confusing process maps by focusing staff on prioritizing efforts around common sources of process inefficiency.

Three common problems plaguing Facilities departments

Better prioritize scheduled activities to optimize maintenance efforts

In a perfect world, Facilities units would have infinite resources to complete every preventive maintenance task. Since this is impossible, the focus must narrow to an ideal subset of work as the preventive maintenance tasks staff can reasonably accomplish. This section provides three practices to better isolate, schedule, and complete the most important preventive maintenance tasks.

Practice 4: Strategy-based maintenance standards

Institutions often lack a formal system for prioritizing preventive maintenance tasks, leaving individual staff members to decide which tasks to complete. This can result in consistently inefficient decisions as time and resources are shifted away from the most critical work (such as tasks required by code or that mitigate risk to campus) and toward more urgent or customer-requested work. By establishing prioritization levels aligned to strategic priorities, institutions ensure staff complete the most essential preventive maintenance work first.

While using multiple factors would result in a more principled preventive maintenance schedule, a multi-variable approach is almost impossible to implement because some factors are more easily quantifiable than others. The following table provides two examples of how institutions have built their own standards to weigh factors and prioritize preventive maintenance activities.

Implementation options

Practice 5: Data-driven preventive maintenance scheduling

Preventive maintenance schedules are typically built using a combination of staff knowledge and manufacturers’ recommendations, which results in some tasks being completed too frequently while others are not done frequently enough. To better schedule preventive maintenance tasks, institutions need a more thorough understanding of current condition. Institutions can deploy sensors, predictive technologies, and data collection strategies to better identify trends and dynamically adjust schedules.

A robust preventive maintenance schedule requires a clear picture of asset condition. However, leaders struggle to ascertain this information as it constantly changes and evolves. The graphs below illustrate this challenge. If condition devolved linearly like in the left graph, scheduling maintenance activities would be as simple as following manufacturer’s recommendations. However, asset condition degrades more like the graph on the right. For instance, the condition of a generator depends on many factors, such as the weather and time of year. Even with established standards and task prioritization, the challenge is making informed, dynamic work scheduling decisions.

Three major barriers to dynamic optimization

Practice 6: Preventive maintenance czar

This practice focuses on the scoping and hiring of this “preventive maintenance czar” role. The Facilities Forum does not typically recommend new roles as best practice. However, as this role becomes more common and more institutions look to hire a dedicated preventive maintenance leader, this practice supports institutions in effectively establishing this role to maximize impact.

Align staffing plan to preventive maintenance goals

While all institutions aspire to complete more preventive maintenance work, scheduled tasks often fall in priority when urgent work arises. Time spent on reactive needs impedes technicians’ ability to complete preventive maintenance tasks. This section includes strategies for institutions to use their staffing models to ensure the completion of more preventive maintenance.

Practice 7: Dedicated preventive maintenance staffing

At many institutions, maintenance workers are responsible for both reactive and preventive maintenance. When crises arise, preventive maintenance is typically deprioritized so that workers can address urgent corrective issues. In addition, the staff members responsible for preventive maintenance tasks often have higher skill levels than necessary for the work. Dedicating specific employees or groups of employees to preventive maintenance ensures that this work is always accomplished, even when unplanned needs arise. The dedicated model further allows Facilities to hire less skilled (and therefore lower paid) workers to perform preventive maintenance tasks.

There are two ways institutions can lock in staff time for preventive maintenance. The first option is to dedicate some staff exclusively to preventive maintenance, illustrated on the left. In this example, about 60% of staff exclusively conduct preventive maintenance work. The second option, illustrated on the right, is to distribute preventive maintenance work across all staff. In this model, each person dedicates at least 60% of his or her time to preventive maintenance. While the execution is different, the resulting amount of preventive maintenance should be the same under both models. The following pages explore each option in greater detail.

 

Option 1: Create a dedicated preventive maintenance team

The first option is to dedicate a team to perform preventive maintenance exclusively. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has maintained a dedicated preventive maintenance team for over a decade.

This group of 11 (10 tradespeople and 1 supervisor) make up 20% of the total maintenance staff and is exclusively dedicated to completing preventive maintenance tasks. The team is responsible for a pre-determined subset of buildings and assets. Importantly, while the dedicated team only performs preventive work, not all preventive work is performed by the team. Their Facilities leader points to a significant reduction in after-hours service calls and an increase in the institution’s overall preventive maintenance completion rate, which is now at 93%.

 

Option 2: Distribute a percentage of preventive maintenance work across all staff

The second option is to distribute preventive maintenance work across staff. Institutions that do not want to take the dedicated team approach have found success in dedicating a fixed amount of time to preventive maintenance. By scheduling more of each worker’s time, leaders can ensure preventive maintenance takes priority. Caltech takes this approach, requiring 80% of staff time be scheduled. Shop supervisors have the flexibility to schedule work in whatever way works best for their team as long as they hit the 80% target.

This option does not necessarily require a new staffing model, as the target can be implemented through existing zones and/or shops. As a result, Caltech’s approach may seem easier to implement than a dedicated team because it is less of a departure from most existing staffing models. However, regardless of the intended outcome, some institutions have found that this model still allows urgent work to crowd out preventive maintenance tasks. For some institutions, a dedicated team is more likely to ensure preventive maintenance actually happens, even if it is a bigger change.

Practice 8: Maintenance SWAT teams

Some institutions lack the resources to fully staff their maintenance programs. Others find that they face high maintenance demands at certain times of the year. When institutions face these challenges, creating temporary maintenance SWAT teams allows institutions to resolve maintenance gaps through short-term staffing solutions.

This practice is well-suited for institutions undergoing maintenance staffing transitions or those lacking the staff to perform predictable and important work at particular times of the year.

Practice 9: Resident facility assistants

Facilities departments at many institutions dedicate significant maintenance and custodial staff time to small fixes and upkeep tasks that require a low skill level. Using high-skill employees to respond to overtime calls, low-skill emergencies, and minor customer-requested fixes takes away resources from more complex work. Delegating minor maintenance and custodial tasks to students or other less specialized employees allows higher skilled Facilities workers to dedicate more time to complex work.

Almost all institutions have high-skill employees spending some time performing low-skill work. Meanwhile, even high-skill workers are forced to spend about a third of their time on work a low-skilled worker could do.

This problem prevents Facilities from maximizing the impact of its highest-skilled employees. The University of Hartford found the greatest mismatch between task and skill level occurred in residence halls, where 75% of overtime work orders originated. In response, the University of Hartford created student resident facilities assistants to complete some of the low-skilled work required within the residence halls.

Build a culture of stewardship

Increasing preventive maintenance work is crucial, but it can have unintended consequences on staff engagement. When Facilities operates in a largely reactive mode, staff perform “white knight” tasks. Staff enjoy the recognition from customers and the unpredictability of their day-to-day duties. Facilities leaders must better engage staff in the transition from mostly reactive maintenance to regular preventative maintenance .

“Even if the outcome is positive, the process matters. Celebrating a positive outcome attained through the wrong processes encourages undesired behaviors. That won’t take us where we want to go. If we continue providing accolades to staff who remedy failures at the expense of PM work, that’s all they’ll want to do.”

Facilities Leader Public Masters University

Practice 10: Behavior-reinforcing metrics

Most Facilities leaders track metrics to measure staff performance on maintenance tasks and inform management decisions. As Facilities units increasingly look to build out their preventive maintenance functions, the traditional suite of metrics, like cost per work order, can unintentionally incentivize undesired behaviors. By tracking and rewarding staff for performing well on metrics that reinforce preventive maintenance tasks, institutions can begin to transform the Facilities unit’s focus from fixing failures to preventing them.

Most institutions already track metrics to evaluate staff performance on maintenance tasks and inform management decisions. While these metrics are important for Facilities leaders to track, some metrics may unintentionally incentivize the wrong behaviors if widely broadcast.

 

Track metrics that reinforce the importance of preventive maintenance tasks

The first component of leveraging behavior-reinforcing metrics is to track metrics that highlight the importance of and increase engagement with preventive maintenance tasks. The table below offers twelve principled preventive maintenance metrics. The metrics are divided into two categories: operational and strategic. Operational metrics track the volume and type of Facilities work, like maintenance mix, which is the ratio of preventive to reactive maintenance tasks completed.

 

Communicate select metrics to Facilities staff

The second component is to communicate the selected metrics to Facilities staff. Circulating preventive maintenance-centric metrics ensures staff are aware of their current performance and understand where to focus improvement efforts. Additionally, a public display demonstrates to staff that the metrics matter, further incentivizing them to improve their performance.

Practice 11: Mission-focused town halls

Since higher education is a mission-driven industry, failing to connect the role of Facilities staff and the success of higher education is a missed opportunity for Facilities leaders. Clearly demonstrating staff’s connection to the success of the education and research missions of the institution is a critical lever to increase engagement and ultimately encourage staff investment in preventive maintenance work.

One institution that has done this particularly well is Emory University. Every year, Emory hosts biannual town halls, which bring together Facilities and the rest of Campus Services to learn about new initiatives and recognize staff for their impact on advancing both service and education at Emory. In the three weeks following the town hall, the Vice President of Campus Services hosts a series of smaller conversations with groups of 20 to 25 employees. These chats provide a more intimate opportunity to solicit feedback and hear staff concerns. The goal is to reinforce the importance of the staff’s work.

 

“Doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons.”

In 2012, Emory developed a mission statement for Campus Services, which includes Facilities: “Doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons.” This mission statement, particularly the final clause, makes the connection between staff duties and Emory’s larger educational and service mission. Emory brings this mission statement to life for staff through a number of different strategies. Matthew Early, the Vice President of Campus Services, holds weekly walks to connect with staff in a more informal setting. Leaders also circulate customer impact stories to showcase staff influence on the campus community.

Jumpstart process improvement efforts on campus

To address other campus-specific inefficiencies, leaders can use process improvement tools.