The Essential Tool for Building Maintenance Planning

A building or facility maintenance plan is designed to be a comprehensive view of all the systems, equipment and assets that keep your facility running. It should answer any question that might arise about your facility’s upkeep and serve as your one source of truth for any maintenance work that needs to be done.

By planning your maintenance activity in advance and keeping an eye on when repairs, inspections and cleaning should take place, you are able to move to a more structured maintenance strategy where you can focus on maintaining the function of your equipment rather than fixing breakdowns. In practice, this allows you to improve asset uptime and plan resource more efficiently, whilst having confidence in the safe operation of assets and facilities for building engineers, occupants and the general public.

To build your facilities maintenance plan, you’ll need to consider all of the vital facilities systems that require any kind of upkeep. This includes things like:

• Building services
• Security and safety systems
• General building fabric

Once you’ve identified the assets and building elements in your estate portfolio, SFG20 will define how to maintain each of these areas. This is the basis of your maintenance plan. You should be able to have a complete overview of every single maintenance task that needs to be done in your facility, as well as how often it should be done, and what skill sets are required for the task.

SFG20 provides access to over 1200 maintenance schedules and task lists based on industry best practice, which makes it easier to prepare and develop your maintenance plan and amend them as the need arises. Rather than trying to stay on top of all guidelines for facilities management, SFG20 can take the heavy lifting out of the planning stage so you can focus on getting the right team for the job, optimising your activities, and planning your budget needs.

On top of this, SFG20 provides a conformity document feature, so you can have a 'paper trail' of when work was undertaken for your records which will support any auditing activities. SFG20 will give you a clearer idea of your budget requirements for forward maintenance planning and definition, qualification and justification of cost planning. You can also share your task lists with engineers in the field via the SFG20 Mobile App. and integrate SFG20 into alternative software solutions e.g. CAFM systems.

Whether you outsource your facilities maintenance, or you run it in-house, SFG20’s software helps to give you complete oversight over all of your maintenance activities. With colour-coded priority lists, you can ensure that you’re always compliant with laws and regulations and that your tasks are being completed in a timely manner.

If you ever need to go through a tender process, SFG20’s software allows you to easily specify the maintenance activities you need outsourcing, as well as allowing you to estimate working hours and spend. Decision-making also becomes more straightforward, as you can spot efficiencies and opportunities quickly.

Maintenance professionals need to take a balanced approach to optimise their building maintenance strategy. To develop a balanced approach, consideration needs to be given to risk – the probability and impact of failure.

Risk assessment is at the heart of the SFG20 standard. It uses four levels of risk to help users make informed decisions. These are:

• Statutory (red) – ensuring legal compliance
• Mandatory (pink) – ensuring sector/organisation compliance.
• Function critical (amber) – maintaining business-critical assets
• Discretionary (green) – maintaining non-critical assets

A building maintenance strategy needs to meet organisational requirements Factors including an asset’s age, condition, and previous service history should be taken into account when applying and customising maintenance strategies.