Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the maintenance of your facility?
Are you constantly trying to put out fires, catch up, or react to the next emergency? Maybe it feels like there’s no structure, everything keeps falling back on you, and you don’t really have a facility maintenance plan.
You may not have a capital replacement plan for when your facility assets reach the end of their life cycle either.
Then every year when the budget comes up, you don’t know what to put in there as far as which assets will need to be replaced because you don’t honestly know when those assets are expected to reach the end of their life cycle.
So when something does fail, you’re going back to the rest of the team and asking for more money in the facility maintenance budget.
All of those things cause a lot of stress.
I’ve been there. I’ve been in situations where I’m putting together the plan or trying to work with no plan. Now, as a Certified Facility Manager, I’ve created a lot of plans and helped others do the same thing.
But when you’re in that place where you don’t even know where to go and every day feels like, “What’s going to be the next surprise I’m dealing with?” it’s stressful, and it gets old real quick.
Don’t Try to Figure Everything Out on Your Own
One thing I always tell people is not to try to go it alone.
I’ve done it multiple ways, and it is much harder to try to figure everything out on your own, especially when you still have to deal with all of the day-to-day tasks.
Some of you might even be performing multiple roles. Maybe you’re a business administrator who is also dealing with the facility issues at your church. Maybe you’re responsible primarily for the facility, but you’re trying each day just to keep up with your normal tasks while emergency repairs and deferred maintenance keep piling up.
Before long, you feel yourself falling further and further behind.
The first thing you need is a better overall picture of your facility.
Start by Understanding What You Have
You need to know:
- What facility assets you have
- What condition they’re in
- When they’re expected to reach the end of their life cycles
- What deferred maintenance needs to be addressed
- What should be planned for in future budgets
Once you have that information, you can start capital replacement planning.
You can also use your inventory of facility assets to build out a preventive maintenance plan.
A preventive maintenance plan is basically a calendar of scheduled maintenance for each one of your facility assets.
For example, think about changing the filters on your HVAC system.
Maybe you’re hiring an outside contractor to handle that. Maybe you’re doing it yourself. Either way, you should have a calendar showing when it needs to be done.
I’ve seen people do it quarterly or monthly. A lot of it depends on what type of filters you’re using, the area you’re in, and even the building itself. Some buildings are in areas where more dust is created. Older buildings may circulate more dust and dirt, which can clog those filters quicker.
If you’re only changing filters once every six months or once a year when the system requires them more frequently, your HVAC equipment has to work harder to pull air through those clogged filters. That puts additional strain on the system, can cause more breakdowns, and can reduce the overall life cycle of the equipment.
And that’s just one example.
Build a Preventive Maintenance Schedule
The point is that you need a preventive maintenance plan so recurring tasks are planned out.
In our industry, it’s best if you have what’s called a CMMS, or computerized maintenance management system. But even without one, you can use a task management system to create recurring preventive maintenance tasks. If you want to go really old school, you can even use a spreadsheet and assign the tasks as they come up.
The system you use matters less than making sure the tasks are actually laid out and scheduled based on the facility assets you have.
That includes preventive maintenance for things like:
- HVAC systems
- Water heaters
- Pumps
- Plumbing systems
- Electrical systems
- Roofs
- Grounds
There needs to be preventive maintenance across the board. Within reason, the more appropriate preventive maintenance you do, the longer your facility assets are likely to last.
Of course, you don’t want to change your HVAC filters every day for no reason. Then you’re just costing yourself money in labor and materials. There are industry standards and manufacturer recommendations that can help determine how often maintenance should be completed.
If you don’t know where to start, work with a professional or even someone you know in the industry who has put a plan like this together before.
Trying to handle your normal responsibilities while building an entire facility maintenance program by yourself can become overwhelming very quickly.
A Facility Condition Assessment Can Give You a Starting Point
One of the best ways to get that overall picture is through a Facility Condition Assessment.
A Facility Condition Assessment can provide a complete inventory of your facility assets. It can tell you the current condition of those assets and give you their expected life cycles so you can start planning and budgeting for when they will need to be replaced.
It can also tell you what deferred maintenance you have and which issues need to be taken care of first.
From there, you can create a preventive maintenance plan based on the actual inventory of your facility assets.
Now you have the foundation of a facility maintenance plan that you can repeat and build on. Without that information, you’re coming in each day waiting for the next surprise.
After a while, that gets really old because the stress mounts up. Inevitably, those surprises seem to happen during a Christmas service or another season when you’re already busy, which makes the situation that much more stressful.
Having a good plan in place will not eliminate every emergency, but it can drastically reduce them.
Regular Inspections Help You Catch Problems Earlier
With a preventive maintenance plan in place, you’ll also start doing regular inspections of your facility and its assets.
Over time, you and your team will become much more familiar with your buildings, your equipment, and how everything normally operates. You’ll start to notice when roof shingles are losing more granules, curling around the edges, or missing in a couple of spots.
You’ll start to hear when your HVAC system sounds like maybe a bearing is going out or the system is working harder than it normally does. You might notice that water keeps running because a toilet flapper valve isn’t shutting completely, especially after you see that your water bill has been going up.
You start catching these things before they get worse.
That’s really one of the goals of preventive maintenance. You want to reduce the number of emergencies you have to deal with.
It can save you money in the long term, and it can save you a lot of headaches.
The Goal Is a Facility That Works
Our goal as facility managers is to have our facilities up and running as much of the time as possible.
We want visitors and staff to be able to come in and enjoy the facility. We don’t want them coming in and dealing with a lack of heating or cooling or a bathroom that’s constantly shut down.
Whatever the issue might be, we want to provide a nice, clean, appealing, and safe atmosphere for people to come in and enjoy.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed and thinking, “Where do I even start?” or, “I don’t even think there’s a way out of this,” you’re not alone.
Maybe every day you’re dealing with a complaint over here, another problem over there, and you just feel like you’re falling further behind.
Organizations across industries deal with these same facility challenges. But you can reduce that stress by putting together a proper church facility maintenance plan.
Move From Reactive to Proactive Facility Maintenance
It’s going to take some time. It’s going to take some resources.
But it can be done, and it will pay dividends in the long run.
You can reduce your stress. You can reduce emergency expenditures. And you can increase the amount of time your facility is operating the way it should.
If you have questions or aren’t sure what your next step should be, reach out to us at Foundational Facility Management Consulting. We can help you determine what you need to take your facility from being purely reactive to a more proactive approach.
