OAT observed that there wasn’t a consistent approach to maintenance across their estate. Each school was ‘doing their own thing’. To tackle this, the Academies chose to contract out 60% of building maintenance work but, as the overall cost of the contract was too high, the academies ‘picked and chose’ what tasks would be completed.
As the Trust began to analyse their maintenance regime in detail, they identified that their maintenance was not fully aligned with SFG20 – the industry standard for building maintenance specification.
Previously, Louisa used regulatory guidance - such as HSE, team expertise, combined with manufacturer’s guidance to create maintenance task instructions which took a considerable amount of her time.
The Trust now hold their assets and compliance and health & safety data centrally within a CAFM system called iAM Compliant so they can monitor the levels of compliance of each school and provide maintenance tasks centrally, ensuring that work is carried out in a consistent, safe and compliant fashion and to SFG20.
Ormiston Academies Trust is confident that by using SFG20 and aligning it within the trusts managed CAFM system they will be able to maintain their assets more effectively to provide safe compliant academies for students and staff.
OAT believe that by using this planned preventative method, using in-house staff to carry out some compliance tasks, and standardising its maintenance approach it will benefit everyone by working smarter which will ultimately result in cost savings.