Aug 1 2005
The Energy Performance in Buildings Directive will place far more emphasis on the good performance of mechanical and electrical services in buildings, forcing more attention to be paid to management and maintenance practices, argues BSRIA's Bill Stringer.
A building that houses a happy and productive workforce is normally one that possesses caring and professional facilities management, and building services that are fit for purpose, properly commissioned, and efficiently run and managed. The latter requires the facilities managers to know what they've got, and to understand the risks to their business if a critical item of plant were to fail. In many ways the Energy Performance in Buildings Directive (EPBD) presents an opportunity to wrap up energy performance with the maintenance and management needs of building services. It sounds obvious, but that's not the way many building services are run. Facilities managers faced with poorly performing services are constantly having to ask themselves: is it worth maintaining?
This usually happens around the time of the annual budget process. Faced with a lack of information on the true maintenance needs of building services, a financial director is forced to set aside a sum of money every year based on little more than the opinion of the facilities engineer, plus some hazy idea of what nasty things might happen to the business if the lights went out. As a result, maintenance is usually based on preserving the physical assets using failure prevention and asset care. However, such a strategy must add value to the business process. What's needed is a reliable way of assessing the maintenance needs of the services against the business risk of plant failing in service.
The good news is that BSRIA has produced a risk assessment toolkit which will do just that. The Business-Focused Maintenance Toolkit is designed to enable facilities professionals to implement a maintenance regime that focuses on the services critical to core business. It's based on risk-assessing the plant, and creating a maintenance regime based on the contribution of that plant to an organisation's bottom line.
"Plant that is maintained regardless of its importance is a confusion of ends and means," says BSRIA's facilities management specialist Paddy Hastings. "A lot of preventative maintenance is also expensive, and often unnecessary.
"The Business-Focused Maintenance Toolkit enables businesses to assess their plant on company-specific risk factors, and to set the frequency of maintenance based on actual need," he explains. "It's proving to be very cost effective compared to other methods which tend to rely on bespoke software plans where you have to spend six months inputting data to an asset register to get anything out of them" added Hastings. "Our system can be used by s small owner-operator or a large corporation to get risk assessments very easily and quickly".
The Business-Focused Maintenance Toolkit shows how to achieve a level of maintenance that matches the strategic service level requirements expressed in terms of availability and quality. The emphasis is on functional outputs and failure consequences, rather than simply maintaining assets in good condition without much idea of the business benefits. The business-focused maintenance approach enables facilities managers to pose key questions, such as: what equipment is critical, what are the common causes of failure and how should equipment be maintained?
The toolkit also contains maintenance tasks schedules providing advice and information in relation to some of these questions. BG 7/2004 Business-Focused Maintenance comes on a CD-ROM containing the risk assessment forms, along with a supporting guide and technical preambles.