Facility maintenance is the engineering half of running a building: keeping the plant, the systems, the fabric and the grounds working, on a schedule, with the statutory tests done and recorded. It is one of the services a facility manager owns, and it is the one with the longest tail and the worst records, because the work is done by people with their hands full and written down afterwards by nobody. This page sets out what it covers, how it is managed, the goals worth setting against it, and the three records that are the only evidence it happened.
What is facility maintenance, as against the rest of the building's services
Federal policy lists a building's services as custodial, waste, heating and cooling, grounds, tenant alterations, minor repairs, building maintenance, pest control, signage, parking and snow clearance. Facility maintenance is the engineering subset: the plant room, the air handling, the water systems, the electrical distribution, the fire systems, the lifts, the roof and the envelope. Cleaning a floor and servicing a chiller are both services to the occupant and only one of them has an interval, a competence requirement and a certificate, which is why maintenance is managed differently from the rest.
Facility maintenance management: the schedule, the request and the history
Three streams and a manager reading all three. The schedule is what should happen, by interval, per asset. The request stream is what the occupants report, which is also data about the building rather than an interruption to the plan. The history is what actually happened, with what was found. Facility maintenance management is holding the schedule against the request stream without letting one consume the other, and the ratio between them is the honest health measure: a function whose week is mostly requests is running behind its building.
Facility maintenance goals and objectives worth setting
Four, and they can all be read from the same records. A falling share of reactive work, because that is the only measure that says whether the building is getting ahead. Schedule compliance the team can actually meet, which usually means a shorter schedule rather than a bigger one. Findings recorded rather than jobs ticked, because a tick proves attendance and a finding changes an interval. And a deferred backlog that is counted and shrinking, rather than a number nobody has ever totalled. Goals about uptime or satisfaction are consequences of these four and cannot be managed directly.
The three records that prove it happened
The asset register, because work against an asset that is not on a list cannot be audited. The work order with its findings, which is the only place the evidence for an interval ever lives. And the certificate for each statutory test, filed against the asset and readable in date order. An inspector, an insurer and a new manager all ask for the same three, and a site that has them can answer in an afternoon what a site without them cannot answer at all.
Questions people ask about facility maintenance
Is facility maintenance the same as building maintenance?
The terms are used for the same work. Facility maintenance is the more common phrase where the building is a workplace or a plant; building maintenance is more common where it is property. The scope and the records are the same.
What is the difference between facility maintenance and facility management?
Management runs the building as a service, which includes cleaning, space, security and the maintenance among them. Maintenance is the engineering work of keeping the plant, systems and fabric working. One is the duty, the other is the largest job inside it.
How many technicians does a building need?
Work it from the schedule rather than the square footage: the tasks, their hours, their frequency, plus a realistic allowance for the request stream. A schedule nobody has costed in hours is how a site ends up permanently reactive.
What does facility maintenance cost a year?
The priced schedule plus last year's reactive spend, both from the record. A building with no record can only guess, and the guess is always low because breakdowns are remembered and deferred work is not.
Can facility maintenance be fully contracted out?
The work can. The record cannot: the asset register, the certificates and the findings are the site's own, and a contract that leaves them with the contractor leaves the site unable to prove anything when the contract ends.
Is facility maintenance management software different from facility manager software?
The two names are sold for the same thing, and both usually bundle a maintenance record with reporting and a request portal. The record is the part that has to be right, because everything else is a view of it, and it is what to judge a demo on: raise a job against an asset, record what was found, and read that asset's history back a year later.