Operations and maintenance covers a larger part of facility management, and there is need for practitioners to get their maintenance strategy right as frequent failure of facilities and equipment will negatively impact their organizations’ productivity.

Facility managers upon taken over a facility should carry out a facility condition assessment, identify essential assets critical to business operations, develop asset register and a suitable maintenance program. Facility managers should also have a better knowledge of their facilities and equipment, Asset life cycle (acquisition, operations, maintenance and disposal), know how they function, so as to choosing a maintenance program that best suit each asset.

Maintenance of assets ensures that the assets perform the functions they are meant for, and also prevents their frequent failures.

Facility Maintenance Strategic Planning

Facility maintenance strategy is a structured maintenance approach. The maintenance strategic planning should include:

• Allocation of resources
• Application of technology
• Establishing the scope of the maintenance programs
• Creation of maintenance checklist
• Setting of timeline (having a well defined response and completion time)
• Creation of maintenance records of each asset
• Clearly stating what the clients’ expectations are

Benefits of Facility Maintenance Strategy

The reasons to have Facilities Maintenance Strategy are:

• It helps to establish the cost of maintaining assets over their useful lives.
• The data from the maintenance records helps to make future decision.
• Assets will be well maintained so as to perform optimally.

Timeline

Setting of timeline addresses the response time to when the maintenance will be carried out from when a fault is reported. This will depend on how the asset is critical to the business operations. The timeline can be within hours to weeks. For example, health and safety issues require urgent attention.