To improve preventive maintenance performance on campus, institutions need to ensure staff have the capacity to do more preventive maintenance. Facilities leaders estimate that technicians spend 10% to 30% of their time unproductively on activities such as unnecessary travel, searching for missing information, and dealing with inefficient processes.
To address other campus-specific inefficiencies, leaders can use process improvement tools. Jumpstart efforts with these strategies and best practices.
No Facilities unit has the time or resources to complete every possible maintenance task. Instead, institutions must leverage data, technology, and personnel to identify and schedule the most important preventive maintenance activities.
Scheduled preventive maintenance often becomes delayed or cancelled when urgent reactive tasks arise. To minimize this situation, institutions can use their staffing models to lock in technician time and focus on crucial preventive maintenance assignments.
Option 1: Create a dedicated preventive maintenance team
“I want approximately 60% of my staff exclusively doing preventive maintenance work.”
Option 2: Distribute a percentage of preventive maintenance work across all staff
“I expect at least 60% of all staff time to be devoted to preventive maintenance.”
The University of Hartford discovered that 75% of overtime reactive maintenance work orders originated in their residence halls. To allow their highly trained technicians to focus on essential preventive maintenance activities instead, Hartford created student resident facilities assistants to identify maintenance problems and fix basic issues within student housing spaces. After implementing the program, Hartford saw a 90% decrease in overtime maintenance work orders from their residence halls.
While essential for the long-term health of campus, preventive maintenance assignments can come across as mundane in practice. Facilities staff previously used to obtaining recognition from customers and resolving unpredictable emergencies may find preventive maintenance tasks less engaging. Therefore, EAB recommends institutions deploy acknowledgement- and mission-focused mechanisms to help incent staff to achieve preventive maintenance goals.
Quantitative Strategies
• Track metrics that reinforce preventive maintenance performance
• Communicate preventive maintenance metrics to frontline staff
Qualitative Strategies
• Host regular mission-focused town halls
• Develop a Facilities mission statement
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