How to Manage Your Maintenance Contracts Effectively

How to Manage Your Maintenance Contracts Effectively

Scared of losing your building information when changing maintenance contracts? Contracts can be messy, but you must manage them correctly to achieve building maintenance compliance. In this webinar, you will hear from Mike Talbot, Chief Technology Officer at SFG20 and Lisa Hamilton, Marketing Director at SFG20.

They will talk you through how to effectively manage your maintenance contract so that you don't waste time and money whilst staying compliant. Let's jump over to the webinar to find out more, and if you have any questions, let us know in the comments of this video.

Lisa Hamilton: So let's start off by thinking about the common challenges now. We've been talking a lot to industry, a wide range from building owners, FMs through to service providers and contractors as well. And this is what you've told us. I'll go through each of these five points, but I want to run a poll at the end of it just to see what you think of the audience live today, which is your most common challenge out of these five areas?

So number one is understanding scope of responsibility. So the responsibility of knowing which tasks to carry out, which to prioritise, which to deprioritise or even which tasks to ignore. That's a significant responsibility. And the buck stops with the building owner when it comes to carrying out correct and compliant maintenance.

It's important to remember that building owners and FMs cannot abdicate their responsibility to their service providers and their contractors. Outsourcing the work doesn't mean outsourcing the responsibility because all parties involved have their own responsibilities.

So building owners or property managers should be regularly auditing works to check that their legal obligations are being met. The second area is all around mitigating and managing your risk. So we know how challenging it is to keep on top of an ever-changing legislative landscape. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes specialist knowledge, and also the ability and confidence to apply the information correctly to updates and create new maintenance guidance and schedules.

It's a full-time job. Why do we know that? It's the full-time job of our team of technical authors. They are dedicated to running this process. Thirdly, tendering. So you've told us that this is a frustrating process for you, actually from both sides of the coin. So if you are a facilities manager, your challenges include sizing up and costing the maintenance work that needs to be done.

One of the key challenges that you told us about was: how do you know if you are looking at quotes that are like for like when you run an invitation to tender? And if you're a service provider on the opposite side of that, how do you know if what you are quoting for is the same scope of work compared with the other parties that are tendering?

Then another area of concern for you was around moving maintenance providers. So when you come to the end of a maintenance contract, whenever there's a change in maintenance provider, you told us that there are inefficiencies in the process through loss of building information, and that leads then to needless repetition of work.

So at the end of the contract with one service provider, building information always gets lost, meaning that the new service provider comes in, has to map the estate, create an asset register, create a maintenance regime, et cetera, et cetera. This is wasted time, effort, and money. And not only that, due to the Building Safety Act, if you have buildings that fall within scope, there's a requirement on building owners to maintain the audit trail of everything to do with that building.

So losing building information is not just a time and cost inefficiency, but it now becomes a legal issue. Finally, building handover. So there's definitely a recognition and a need for better collaboration and transfer of information when a project moves from the design and build phase to the operation and maintenance.

Okay, so we're going to talk now about understanding your responsibilities from three perspectives. So firstly, if you're a building owner, it means your responsibilities lie with ensuring the buildings are safe, and that includes fixing historical safety defects, but also staying up to date with legislation and regulations relating to your building and your assets.

It also includes ensuring that maintenance is carried out. So definitely all of those statutory tasks—please remember, they are non-negotiable—but also those tasks that mitigate your risk to an acceptable level. Now if you are a property manager, some of your responsibilities when it comes to achieving compliance include staying up to date with legislation and regulations, but also coordinating and scheduling regular maintenance tasks, handling emergency repairs and maintenance issues, and managing contracts relating to maintenance.

Now if you are a service provider or a contractor actually doing the works, your responsibilities lie with upholding health and safety regulations when it comes to carrying out maintenance, ensuring all of the workers have the required skills, knowledge, training, and experience to carry out each maintenance task.

So, as I said, we've got a great e-guide for you coming up that covers this in more detail, so make sure that you stick around for that. Okay, so we've talked about responsibilities. Now let's talk about managing your risk. So to optimise your maintenance approach, you should definitely place focus on risk. Now, what is risk?

It's the probability and the impact of failure. Risk management involves anticipating what might not go to plan and putting in place actions to reduce your risk to a tolerable level. So for example, those assets that are critical to your organisation, what are they? Think about them, and if they've got a high impact, if they were to fail, you should be prioritising the correct maintenance of those assets, particularly if you perceive there to be a medium or a high probability of failure.

And in contrast, there will be assets within your organisation that will have a limited impact if they were to fail. And it might be perfectly acceptable for you to reduce down or even eliminate your non-statutory tasks. So let's have a look at how the industry are mitigating their risk. Let's put this into a real-life situation.

So meet Sarah. Sarah is a building owner. She recognises her responsibilities to ensure that her building is maintained in line with legislation. So Sarah uses SFG20 to help her keep compliant. Not only that, she uses the standard to manage her risk. The best way to access and get the maximum value from the SFG20 standard is using Facilities-iQ.

And that's the new software solution from SFG20, which Mike and his team have built, and that's why we've invited him on today. So I know that a few of you were requesting to see the software in action, so we'll definitely give you the opportunity to request a one-to-one walkthrough shortly. But first, let's show you how to use SFG20 to keep compliant and also to mitigate your risk.

So what you are looking at here is an excerpt from an SFG20 schedule. What you can see is that each schedule has an asset name, and it also has a unique code and a task descriptor. It's easy to see which tasks are statutory and must be completed. So we have a colour-coded system and red means statutory, meaning that you need to perform it to be in line with law, and this is how you achieve compliance.

In addition, you can see the timing of the task, the frequency of the task, the competency or the skillset of the person who is required to do that task. So this is all more detail, which is provided to aid with operational planning. Then we've got the specific actions that you need to go through to complete the task.

And this is all, let's call it CAFM-friendly. So it's all structured in a way that flows nicely into CMMS. Then over on the right-hand side, you can see all of the links to the relevant legislation, regulation and also codes of practice. So how does SFG20 help users to manage risk? Well, it's all through the colour coding.

So as I said, red means statutory, and then there are different colour codings for the non-statutory tasks. Now this allows you to focus your resource and the idea for owners and FMs is to minimise their risk to an acceptable level. So for non-statutory tasks, Sarah, our building owner, can place more emphasis around those assets that are critical to her facilities, and she can deprioritise those assets that would have a limited effect if those assets were to fail.

So how this would work in practice is that Sarah would take her asset register. She would then set up a maintenance regime in Facilities-iQ, and she can do that by searching for an asset by its name, or its NRM code, or its UNICLASS code. Then Sarah can tailor each schedule to suit her so she could eliminate tasks that are not relevant to her.

She could change the frequencies and the timings for non-statutory tasks. So effectively she's creating a specification for her maintenance, which brings me nicely onto running a tender. So I've spoken about how SFG20 can help you achieve compliance and mitigate your risk. But now let's imagine that Sarah needs to run a tender.

So we are going to show you how that can be done efficiently to save you time and money. So Sarah can use the maintenance regime that she's just created as a specification on which to tender. And the big benefit for Sarah as a building owner is that she will be comparing like-for-like quotations from the three service providers that she's decided to invite to tender.

An additional benefit is that she can then transfer that regime to whichever service provider wins the tender. Now, this cuts down on time spent by the service provider recreating Sarah's maintenance regime themselves, and it also eliminates the risk of human error when creating that regime. So let's look at how that would work in practice.

So the first thing that Sarah would do is to create her maintenance regime. So as I mentioned to you, you go into Facilities-iQ, you structure your regime, you choose the schedules that are relevant for your facility, your estate. Then Sarah can share that maintenance regime with her chosen service providers. And she does that by creating a secure sharing link. Then she can email that sharing link to notify her chosen service providers that they've been invited to tender.

Or for those of you that run public tenders, you could use exactly the same sharing link and let people access it that way. Now, Sarah has stipulated that she wants her service providers and contractors to be able to comply with SFG20. So when the quotes for the tendered works are returned to Sarah, she can check that all parties have an active licence.

Now she would do that using the member list that's found on the SFG20 website. And I'm going to ask Alex, if you wouldn't mind just pasting the link to the website URL in the chat and we'll make sure that we include this in the Q&A document that we send out as well. So the point here is that to be SFG20 compliant, you need to be able to access the latest version of the standard, and you do that with an active subscription, which allows you to view SFG20 content.

It's not good enough to be working off paper-based versions of SFG20. Why? They won't be up to date. The standard is dynamic. It changes each month. Okay, so let's imagine we're going through the process. Sarah's put out her invitation to tender. She's got three different quotations that have come back to her. She's received them. She's confident that she's now comparing quotations that are apples for apples. She's chosen her service provider. Let's call it Service Provider One, SP1.

So once Sarah has chosen her preferred supplier, she can then transfer her maintenance regime to that service provider. So the great thing is that by transferring the regime to the service provider, this eliminates wasted time recreating the plan, and also removes the chance of human error during that process. So the service provider at that point needs their own Facilities-iQ subscription.

So just to reiterate, it's the building owner that's accountable for ensuring that their property is maintained in line with all relevant laws, regulations, and codes of practice.

Mike Talbot: When we started to look at building out Facilities-iQ and we were thinking and talking to customers about wanting to be compliant with the standard, then actually one of the biggest challenges turned out to be the daily checks. If you have certain types of assets like forklifts, trucks, certain types of gates, lots of other types of equipment, it is required that the operator or user performs checks on them on a regular basis.

Now that normally doesn't fall under the computer-aided facilities management software or the workplace management software that you're using. So what we've done is, we've identified these operator and user checks and we've enabled our mobile application to provide a way for that user just to tick them off and say every time they need to do them.

Maybe that's, you know, in the case of something just because it's been used or operated or there's been a particular weather condition, sometimes literally you are going to use it that day. You can just check off these daily or weekly checks and that will then record them and show that you are compliant with them.

Because I think the key thing here is that, you know, what we want to do, what Sarah wants to do as a responsible building owner is to ensure compliance, not when something's gone wrong, but to prevent things going wrong in the first place, to be aware and on top of all of these different checks. So that's a really important part of the Facilities-iQ solution and the mobile application.

And you can get that—one of our Collaborate licences provides you with the ability as that user to then go and perform those daily checks and record them against the maintenance regime. That really talks about how we want Facilities-iQ to integrate with this though. So clearly people come to SFG20 because they want to have the statutory maintenance that they need to perform on their assets.

And with Facilities-iQ, as Lisa has mentioned, you can then tailor this to make things which are for your plans and for the assets you use and for the ways in which you want to maintain them. So obviously that needs to integrate into your operational systems. And we have a completely freely available API that allows anyone with a CAFM system to come in and given a sharing link, be able to pull all of that data electronically into their systems so that they can actually go and schedule that work and get that work done.

But it's also really important, I think, for Sarah as a building owner, that she can see at a glance that this is in fact happening in a standard way, especially because maybe there's more than one system, maybe some people don't use that system, their specialists come for particular tasks. So what we've wanted to do is to pull that whole thing in the loop to get the data back out just of the task completions so we can present a very straightforward dashboard to show that building owner that the work is up to date or to identify where there were challenges so that things can be caught in advance.

It's really not good enough I don't think, to wait for something to go wrong and then to check back for those records. You really want to have that, you know, up-to-the-moment understanding of that kind of integration, of that kind of operation and that integration allows us to do that.

So combined with the daily checks, then you can have a complete understanding of how the maintenance regime is being operated and run and how on-plan you are, how up to date with statutory maintenance you really are. Next slide please.

So Lisa mentioned the golden thread. That's clearly now a requirement, a legal requirement to provide a thread of information about how assets have been purchased, installed, and then clearly maintained probably for many years. So that golden thread of information really can come out of this understanding of what was planned to be done and maintained on this equipment and who planned it and what decisions they made about that.

So it's incredibly important that we can record and capture that information on the who planned what, what they said, what they did, why they did it, and then actually as that asset is then maintained by a service provider that we can capture and store that kind of thing as part of that golden thread.

Next slide, please. So a really important part of that, of course, is at that end-of-contract phase. If at the end of a contract, a service provider has gathered all of this knowledge about the equipment and assets which are being maintained, they've recorded information about it, they've seen that asset for many years.

Losing that information seems wrong, you know, because maybe now the contract's been awarded to someone else or some other reason. It's no longer the same service provider, or in fact the same systems being used, that creates a massive inefficiency at that end-of-contract point. So with the Facilities-iQ software and the ability to keep this continual loop between our systems and Facilities-iQ and the operational systems, we can at the end of contract transfer that data back to Sarah, back to the building owner, so that that information can be passed on to the next organisation that's going to work on it.

And also that we can capture in those particular engineer updates so that those things can be pushed on into the future and kept in the golden thread. So if an engineer says, this equipment is beginning to show its age, you know, you can do something about that when you plan your next maintenance regime and we work with your next supplier, it doesn't lose that knowledge somewhere in the past.

Next slide, please. So let's talk about really breaking that cycle of inefficiency. Shortly coming to the Facilities-iQ product are some new very important features, which, you know, my team are working on right now and, you know, in the final stages of working and that is trying to make sure that this information is efficient for all buildings, whether they're being newly built or whether they're being passed over as a piece of legacy, you know, already-built stock.

So by putting in BIM information and being able to map that into SFG20 schedules in an automated fashion, we can start talking about creating maintenance regimes even before the keys of the building are handed over on a new build. Clearly, a lot of buildings aren't new buildings. So we're also building in the ability to pull in asset registers from a very wide range of different formats using technology and AI to be able to manipulate that and turn that into something that can be moved into the SFG20 standard so that we can really help capture that data, capture that information from wherever it is to try and reduce the need to continually resurvey things.

And obviously that also works extremely well when we pass on the regime. No need to resurvey if we've got this really detailed mapped data set that already exists. And so we can pull that kind of thing in with the CMMS data. So then what is the plan? We build a maintenance regime by looking at the assets.

We create a plan for how we want to execute that, you know, in the CMMS. Facilities-iQ can help with that. The work is carried out and then, if you give me the next slide, at the end of that process, that entire regime can be transferred back to the building owner and then on into another tender. Then from whoever wins that tender onto them so they can carry on the work keeping this golden thread of information.