Broadening Responsibilities
by Bill Garland, Daniels & Associates Inc.

Increasingly, we are finding that the duties of the Environmental Services Manager and their staff involves or is expanding to include mechanical maintenance. This article focuses on the establishment of a preventative maintenance program. The methodology described below is very similar to the methodology that would be used when establishing a housekeeping program.

The first step is to establish the goal which, in this case, is to implement a preventative maintenance and a capital replacement program.

Next a survey of the facility needs to be performed to verify and collect data. This includes the following:

  •  Interviews are conducted with facility maintenance staff to identify complete maintenance requirements including responsibilities not related to equipment.
  •  As equipment data is collected, it is categorized into equipment types so that preventative maintenance tasks can be assigned to similar units. This categorization is also used to assign a specific number to the equipment to allow for ease in locating the equipment at a later time.
  •  During this process you will need to verify and collect specific equipment information such as serial and model numbers, motor and frame size, date of installation, and equipment condition.
  •  The condition of the equipment is broken down into 10 categories each indicating how much corrective maintenance is required. As an example, equipment assigned a scale of 10 is new and under warranty, while equipment assigned a scale of one should be replaced during the next 12 months. This rating is also used to calculate the amount of corrective maintenance that is required. This process is explained below.
  •  If you are using a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) program, all the information that has been collected is entered into this system. If software is unavailable, hard copies of collected data is made.

The next step is to develop the preventative maintenance tasks. As in cleaning, the goal is to establish exactly ‘what’ is to be done and ‘how often’ it is to be performed. These tasks are key to establishing the goal of the maintenance program and define the scope of work required to achieve that goal. Each task is then separated into component steps.

In developing the programs, the definition of the tasks is normally dictated by the use and importance of equipment to be maintained. As an example, a large chiller or boiler is given more importance than a circulating pump that is in parallel with other pumps.

This, in turn, dictates the frequency and amount of time equipment inspections are allocated. Major equipment will normally have both monthly and annual inspections, while a fan coil or unit heater will have on inspection a year.

Another factor is that seasonal equipment such as boilers and chillers are assigned preventative maintenance inspections in the months that they are operating.

If the equipment is being used to provide critical services to a building, then again frequencies and priorities are adjusted. An example would be an air handler servicing a computer area that is on-line 24-hours a day, and is sensitive to temperature and humidity. This equipment would receive a higher priority and more preventative maintenance than the same unit serving an office area.

The development of a ‘total time’ require to service equipment as well as labour and parts requirements are done by developing a ‘Preventative Maintenance’ (PM) task. This task can be best compared to a budget. It is a standard against which actual results can be measured and specifically details the steps required to complete the task. The PM task develops the initial framework, which is then modified, finessed and moulded to fit your specific needs using actual on-line experience to fine-tune the exact requirements of each piece of equipment being maintained.

In order to quantify the effort or time required to achieve the goal of the program, Standard Times are used which have been developed for virtually every PM task used in the facility. These are normally expressed in minutes per task.

To determine the total time required to perform various tasks in a building, the standard time for each task is multiplied by the number of pieces of identical equipment and then multiplied by the frequency of task performance to establish annual PM hours requirements.

If the time for each PM task is multiplied by an equipment condition factor, then the time for corrective maintenance is also included. Consequently total maintenance time per piece of equipment is established.

As indicated earlier, equipment conditions are quantified on a scale of one to 10 during data gathering. The annual corrective hours are determined by multiplying the annual PM hours by the factors detailed in Figure One.

As an example, if a piece of equipment requires one hour of PM a year and its condition is eight, then the corrective factor is two. Consequently, the annual corrective maintenance hours are two for a total of three maintenance hours a year.

Time summation of individual maintenance times per piece of equipment over a given area will yield the total time required to maintain an area.

In order to determine the manpower required to perform these tasks, total time is divided by the hours of a normal workday. The results of the calculation will be the number of Equivalent Full-Time Employees (EFTE) required to achieve the desired goal.

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