How efficient are the preventive maintenance operations in your organization? More importantly, how do you know how accurately you are able to gauge efficiency? When we talk about efficiency in this context, we refer to a number of people performing regularly scheduled maintenance on a number of pieces of equipment. Because many of these people are also responsible for fixing breakdowns as they occur, it can be confusing in the extreme to figure out how efficient a particular employee might be in regards to PM in particular, or how frequently a particular piece of equipment is being properly maintained. In order to make informed decisions about PM in your organization, it is critical that you have the tools you need to develop a clear picture of what is and what isn’t being done. Your PM system should be able to tell you at a glance who are your most efficient employees, which items of equipment are nearing the end of their useful life, and what locations on your campus or in your building are the most labor-intensive. If your software isn’t living up to this task, it’s time to look for a new system.

Equipment Classes- To start, we need to understand the concept of equipment classes. Classes of equipment are nothing more than a name we assign to a group of individual pieces of equipment for which common tasks must be performed regularly. For instance, an air handler would need to be checked for proper air flow, filter changes, and other things that all of our air handlers must be inspected for. Therefore, “Air Handlers” would make a good equipment class. Determining the scope of equipment classes is important, as we’ll see, to be sure they cover all of the basic tasks but don’t include tasks which might be required for only one or two pieces of equipment. For example, if you’ve got a number of golf carts, mostly electric but a handful that run on gasoline, the task “Change Fuel Filter” would not apply to the electric carts. Therefore, two classes might be more appropriate: one for electric carts and one for gas.

Another nice way the right software can save you money is by the tracking of warranty information. Proper scheduling maintenance, of course, is necessary for many pieces of equipment to stay in compliance with warranty requirements, but staying on top of which item’s warranties will be expiring has an additional benefit: if you have a lemon, you sure would rather the manufacturer make the situation right before the warranty expires and you are stuck with the cost of all repairs. Employee-Based Reporting- Sometimes PM tasks are like a box of chocolates, not because, as Forrest Gump’s mother maintained, that you never know what you’re going to get, but for another reason – the best pieces are often snapped up by the first person to take a look at the available selection. One university for whom I designed a PM system had a big problem with what they called ‘windshield time,” that is, employees who would grab for themselves the jobs that would require the most travel time or necessitate frequent trips to pick up parts at the various shops spread around campus. When the new system was in place, “windshield time” dried up pretty quickly.

Flexibility- At this point you may think we’re developing a system that, far from being flexible, is actually quite rigid and difficult to change. However, if we look closely, we can see just how many possibilities this system allows for. Because individual pieces of equipment aren’t tied to a “list of tasks” but rather to individual instances of these tasks, we can fine-tune the tasks for the oddball pieces of equipment that don’t fit the model. Say you have an aging emergency shower with a leaky O-ring. You know the ring is broken and you intend to replace the shower head when your budget permits, so you no longer want mechanics waste time checking this shower for leaks. In a traditional system, you would need to disassociate the shower from the class “Emergency Showers” and create a new, pared-down class or leave it floating free of any class whatsoever. With the “instance” system, however, all you need to do is suspend the task for that piece of equipment. Similarly, since there is tremendous flexibility in the way you define classes and tasks, you can get as detailed as you want in defining classes. In one case, a university had purchased so many air conditioners of different models and from differing manufacturers over the years that they had over two dozen classes for air conditioners! Most of the classes had the majority of their tasks in common – meaning they all used one generic abstraction of that task – but each class had one or two tasks that pertained only to air conditioners of that particular model and manufacturer. They had even assigned detailed instructions for these tasks that were printed out on the list of PM tasks carried by each mechanic as they went about their week’s duties.

Many PM systems simply churn out a list of tasks at a regular interval when those tasks come due, be it every day, week, or month. But a much smarter system would allow a shop manager or mechanic to see the data not as the computer wishes them to see it, but as they themselves wish to see it, and allow the users to generate the work requests when they are ready and when doing so makes the most sense. Rigidly designed systems are frequently nearly as troublesome as no system at all.

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