| 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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