How NHS Estates Can Use SFG20 Mobiliser to Reduce Operational Burdens Without Increasing Risk

Paul Bullard: Hello everyone. It's great to see so many people join us today. This is a subject we're very passionate about and we can't wait to share the content that we prepared. My name's Paul Bullard. I'm product director at SFG20, and I'm joined today by Davy Clark, one of our senior consultants, who's recently worked with a number of NHS trusts and will be sharing his experience and also giving you insight into what SFG20 Mobiliser can achieve for your organisation.

First of all, let's look at what is SFG20. So SFG20 was formed in 1990 under the Heating and Ventilation Contractors Association, or the HVCA, who decided that there was a need for a standard for maintenance of equipment for their members. Now, that group within HVCA was called the Services and Facilities Group, and this was their 20th publication.

SFG20, that standard started as a book, and over time it evolved into a PDF available on a CD-ROM. Then it moved on to being available on the web, so you access the PDF through the internet. And then in 2012 SFG20 launched the first application that hostedthat content. And that product's been in use since then until the beginning ofJanuary 2024.

SFG20 launched Facilities-iQ. Facilities-iQ was a whole new way of making best use of that content within an organisation. We've now really escalated the options for people to change the way they're delivering facilities services within their organisation. And SFG20 Mobiliser is a new module that enables people to quickly, effectively, and accurately mobilise a facility, its asset register and identify the correct maintenance that needs to take place.

You can see some stats on the screen now, where we see that SFG20 has more than two and a half thousand customers. There's over 1,500 maintenance schedules, all looking at different types of assets across a facility. Now, 250 plus of these are what we call HTM-aligned, that's where we've taken the NHS HTM documents and the requirements of those documents have been aligned with the additional standards, actions, and tasks that SFG20 provides.

So you really have a blend of the things that are mandatory within the NHS and also those things that a readded on where maybe legislation isn't too clear, maybe it's looking at more outcomes than actually what needs to be done. And other codes of practice or standards have identified what you must do in your facility, and that's where SFG20 comes in and fills in those gaps. And the HTM-aligned content is very much providing you with that complete information.

Now if you look at SFG20 and how it's actually applied, something that's really important is the definition of statutory maintenance. What must we be doing in our facility? Now in 2024, the industry aligned, as you can see on the screen. We had IWFM, CIBSE, BIFM, and of course, BESA. We aligned to create that definition of what is statutory maintenance.

Now, the important thing around here was it was recognising that, of course, legislation is incredibly important, but the legislation, as I just said, doesn't always tell you exactly what you need to do to fulfil your obligations. And that's where the approved codes of practice and other industry standards come in and help fill in those gaps.

But the definition was also flexible in that it does recognise that there are more than one way of fulfilling your obligations, that if you choose to do so, then it's veryimportant that you are documenting, evidencing why you're making those decisions so that in the instance there is something that happens unfortunately, that you are able to evidence why you've chosen to act in adifferent way than a recognised standard.

And that's really where Facilities-iQ comes in, in that it enables that complete documentation of everything you've chosen to do and why. But making sure it's fitting the objectives and maybe the limitations of your budget, of your capabilities or just the time that you have available to achieve things, but without putting people at risk or compromising on your duties.

Now, as I mentioned, SFG20 is very focused on this statutory definition, but there are also other classifications for SFG20 tasks. So we start off with red being the statutory. We also have amber and green, amber being optimal, and we'll talk about optimised maintenance in a minute. But it's very important when you're looking at your facility, we're not just looking at can we just do all of the statutory items because we've also got a facility to run, and if we're gonna run that facility effectively, it's really important that we're addressing all of those key assets that are keeping our facility available and operational, and we're making sure we're not under-maintaining them.

So suddenly we have those critical incidents and no availability. And that's really where the traffic light system comes in. Within SFG20, we're able to say what we must do, what we should do, and what we could do. And maybe we don't wanna spend that 'should do' or 'could do' on assets that aren't as important to our facilities. But we definitely wanna spend that money where it's a critical asset that we can't be without, and we need up all the time to ensure that availability. And that's really where optimised maintenance comes in.

In Facilities-iQ, it gives you the opportunity to take your SFG20 standard and customise it or tailor it for your organisation. We enable you to say, this is the standard that we deliver maintenance to. And that might be slightly adjusted from the SFG20 standard where we're saying, well, it's okay. We are gonna focus on these assets, we're gonna focus on our statutory work, and we're gonna make some key decisions about things we are gonna do and things we're not gonna do. But we're also gonna add evidence why we've made those decisions so that everything's good and proper.

Now, within SFG20, as I mentioned, we have a whole set of HTM-aligned schedules. We also have the SHTM,so we're aligned for English and Scottish NHS, and we've broken those down into the document classifications within those standards.

Okay, let's have a look at an SFG20 schedule. So, as I said before, within SFG20, we have more than 1,500 different types of schedule available, covering that many different types of equipment. Now, each of the schedules is defined by the asset type. Here you can see this is a fire alarm, voice alarm system, and that's really where the story begins.

So each of those asset types also has its own SFG20 code, and you can see that alongside the asset type. Now of those 1,500 plus SFG20 asset types, underneath each one of those asset types will have a number of tasks. Each of those tasks represents all of the detail required to break down that schedule into manageable components.

So first of all, you can see this particular task has a criticality. Now the criticality that's identified is red, which relates to the statutory definition that we talked about earlier. We also have the timings, which gives you an indication of the effort required to carry out this task. And this isn't specific to your sites, we allow you to adjust that accordingly because if this particular asset happened to be located in an area which required specialist access, or maybe it required equipment to reach this asset, then you could adjust that for your own specific purposes. But this is really an estimation of effort for the engineer carrying out this particular piece of work.

We also identify the frequency. That lets you know how often you need to carry this task out. And the one we're looking at at the moment is designated as a six-monthly task. Then we have the competency, and this is where we're identifying the type of person or the skillset required to actually carry out this task. And what we're looking at here is designating some requirements. So this is a certified engineer who is required to carry out this particular task. And within SFG20, and the SFG20 Mobiliser product, you also have the option to say who could, if we couldn't use a certified engineer, what's the other alternative? So we call that 'Permissible Alternatives,' and we could maybe just say a competent engineer if in an event we couldn't get a certified engineer.

This just gives you that flexibility and control about where you're planning your resources, making sure you're on top of your compliance work and meeting all those statutory obligations. Then under that we have the primary task description, or the action. Now the action is what the engineer is required to do in order to meet compliance with this task. But we do have an actions in-depth. That's a full set of information explaining to the engineer step-by-step what we expect them to do when they carry out that particular action.

Then underneath that we have the applicable legislations where you can see we list all of the legislation, codes of practice, and industry standards that a particular action fulfils. It's one of those great things about SFG20, that it takes all of that information, brings it together in one place. People don't have to have copies of numerous health and safety guidance notes and legislation and codes of practice. It's all brought together neatly in the SFG20 standard, and you can see it all clearly listed there on the screen.

So we can go from asset, schedule, task, all the information about that task, and then all of the other information that's important for understanding this task. And what I wanted to just say at this stage is the other thing you can see on the screen now is that we're actually looking at this task within Facilities-iQ. And I'm going to pause there and hand over to Davy, who's going to talk you through this task, but also how we use the SFG20 Mobiliser to quickly and easily, and very accurately mobilise assets.

Davy Clark: Thanks, Paul. So as we can see, we're still looking at the same task here that was visible on the PDF just now. So you can see here we've still got the criticality, we've got the task name, and just to the right here we've got the SFG20 code. If we scroll down, you can still see the information that relates to the frequency, the skill level that's needed, the timing, and the alternative competency. Below that, you can still see the main task action and the action in-depth, which is quite often used by technicians when they're doing the reactive or the PPM. And in the box here, you can see the full list of the legislations that we might need to be looking at when we're doing this certain task.

Just to the right here, you can also see that there's also a series of questions relating to this asset. So for instance, 'Does this fire alarm have voice recognition in it?' If the answer's yes, then we're going to give you a certain task that you need to carry out. If the answer's no, then that task won't be present, which basically means we're getting a more accurate definition of the maintenance that needs to be carried out on that specific asset. If we scroll down even further, you can even see here that there's an option to create a bespoke schedule, so you can actually add bespoke tasks in here. So, quite often we see NHS wards or theatres that have specific tasks that they've been told to do by their manufacturer and by their guidance, and there's nowhere that you can record it. This is the perfect place to record that for us.

Okay, so what we'll look at now is the mobiliser element. So in this mobiliser document here, we've called it 'York and Scarborough' for the purposes of the demonstration. In our organisation here, we've already got a couple of sites loaded. What we're going to be doing is adding a new site in here. It's quite often that these sites can be buildings in any location. So for instance, a trust might have multiple, or a county council might have multiple sites. We can have those all recorded here. To add a new asset register, we'd simply just hit the 'Add New' button. This means it's quite quick and easy.

So what we'll be doing first is we will be setting the name of the site, which we'll be called the 'Grange Hospital'. Once we've got the address in, we can add in the reference code. This is essentially what your client or your FM team will be referring it to, and then you can mark that as active or not. If you're not currently mobilising in this location, then you'd untick that box. For optimisation purposes, which Paul alluded to earlier, you can assign a risk level to that site, so that you can say, 'I want my maintenance on a critical site to be at the statutory and optimal level. But on a lower-risk site, I just want it to be my statutory. That's essentially what the options are here. We can also add some notes aswell if needed.

What we would do next is we would upload a spreadsheet or import one. So in this instance, we're going to do a spreadsheet upload. So when we get asked to map a site, we'll quite often receive an asset list from the FM team or from the client. And what we're going to do here is upload that asset list. So for the purposes of this, we're just going to grab some demonstration data. Once we select the data, we'll just hit 'OK'. Now because there's a few fields that we need here, it'll just take us a second just to populate those.

So you can see here, we've got some headers across the top. We've got 'Tag', 'Location', 'Type', 'Make', 'Model', and so on. What we would usually do is we would assign what each of these columns relates to in Facilities-iQ. So for instance, the 'Tag' or the 'ID' is quite often the unique tag that the asset has been recorded by. If you've got an asset register, you'll most likely have one of these. The 'Location' is where that asset is. So for instance, if it's in 'Ward 1A', that would just go in that column there. And then the 'Type' would essentially just say 'boiler', 'pump', 'air handling unit'. It's not critical that all these things are populated, and we'll get to that in a second.

But what I'd like to draw your attention to is on this side, we've got some options. One of the main ones that we'd like to look at is this optimisation window. So this is where you can sett he frequency that you want the tasks to be put at. So if you want your six-monthly tasks to be annual or vice versa, this is where you'd set it. You can also specify a competency, and you can also choose by classification of work. So we can select 'healthcare' in this instance because this is what our demonstration is going to be looking at. But you can quite often grab multiple of these. So I could select 'general' or other options if needed. However, in this instance, it's just going to be 'healthcare'. And then because this is a healthcare one, you'll notice that it's now got an option to say 'HTM-aligned'. So I can filter it by schedule that have got an HTM document on it. And again, I can filter by what the HTM document actually is as well. So I'll just turn those off for now though.

There's also an option here which a lot of people appreciate. We can select by criticality, which we also drew attention to earlier. So for instance, if I just want to look at my statutory tasks here, I'd only tick the red box. If I wanted to look at my statutory and optimal, I'd tick the red and the amber. If I wanted to look at all my tasks, I would tick all three. It's up to you what you choose to do here. But what we're going to do for the purposes of our mobilisation is we're going to look at statutory and optimal.

What we're going to do then is we're just going to start the mapping. So we're going to hit 'next'. We can save this at any point, but for now we're going to just crack on with our demonstration. So it's going to take us a few seconds, but what it's essentially doing here is it's running each one of the assets in the asset register against our database of 1,500-plus schedules. So what it's going to do is it's going to try and pick out the best schedule that it can think of that's related to that specific asset.

So we're going to give it 30 seconds or so. So once the system's done its bit of magic there, what you can see now is that it's put us into the mapping interface. In here we can see all of the assets from the asset register that we uploaded. So we've got just over 500 in here that have been used for this demonstration. On this left side, I can see what it is that I actually uploaded in my asset register. So I can see the location, I can see the type, I can see the make and the model. On this right-hand side, I can see what it's recommended from Facilities-iQ. So it's going to recommend the SFG20 schedule, it'll tell us the HTM document related if there is one, and it'll also tell me how confident it is on the mapping.

So you'll see that there's a few that are on a very high-percentage confidence. Quite often these are ones that are quite well-named and well-described in the asset register that we've been given. Sometimes we get ones that can be quite low, where if it's not well-described, then we might have to go in and manually override this. That's quite easy to do. What you can do is, you can click on here and you can override by just searching. So if I wanted to search for an asset, I could quite easily just select it and then it will populate the thing that we've selected.

Quite a nice feature about this as well is you can use the filters. So for instance, I could filter this for all assets that have got a mapping confidence of less than 60%, which would bring up all the assets that I probably need to look at and verify. Once I'm happy, what I can do is I can just do a quick sanity-check, and this will tell me how many tasks it's generated, what my statutory work is, what my optimal work is, what my additional work is. I can see what the labour distribution is going to be for all of the tasks. And I can also see, on a simple pie chart, what the labour distribution is on asset class. It's quite nice to see that 'I need maybe 80 hours for my chilled and heating assets, I need 20 hours for medical gases' etc. And then I can click 'Next'.

What we'll do here is we'll add those assets into our system. So give that 10 seconds just to compute. All the assets, as Paul alluded to earlier, can be mobilised at any point. Sometimes people decide to mobilise the full site at the beginning, and sometimes they decide they want to start by mobilising by 'I want to do my heating and ventilation and my medical gases.' So you can quite easily mobilise parts of your site.

So once the system's processed that, we can see now that I've got my list of assets, the systems that they're related to, where they're located, what the criticality is, and my maintenance period. So you can see that there's a variety of different maintenance periods here, such as monthly, six monthly, annual, etc. You can quite easily export this data and send it out to people for verification. So quite a nice feature about this that I'd like to show you is the ability to add photos and documents. So if I select this battery, what we can do is we can upload photos of that asset. So if an engineer's uploaded a photo as part of their reactive maintenance visit, or as part of the mobilisation visit, I can just upload that file and they can view that. We can also attach documents. So for instance, if we've had a commissioning report for that asset, I could upload that commissioning report for future people to view.

Just going back, what we'll also do is we can just select an asset to see the full detail on it. So in this instance, I'm looking at the lift. So if I scroll down past my questions that I can answer in regards to this lift, you can see a fully generated maintenance schedule based on the optimisations that we've selected. So you can see the task name, what the task code is, the criticality, the frequency, the competency and the labour. What you can also do is you can export this into a PDF as well if you so wish. So if I just bring up a PDF that I've generated previously, you can see that it's got the full asset detail, all the tasks, and it's got all of the actions in-depth. So if we want to give a maintenance schedule to an engineer, for instance, I can give them this. So, quite nice feature of this is that if I'm going out to mobilise somewhere or I'm having to do reactive on something, I know exactly what I should be looking at and what I'm doing.

So we're just going to return back here. I'll close this window down. Another nice feature of Facilities-iQ is this share function that we've got. So what we can do is we can generate a share link, which allows us to share with either our colleagues or with FM service providers. So we can add a name on it so that we know who it's for, we can add some notes, and then we can put an expiry date on it so that the share link dies after a certain period. We also have the option to select by skillset, so if you were sharing with an electrical contractor, for example, you would only want them to see the electrical tasks, and you can choose that here. And I also get to choose the data export type as well. So if you're using an XML for your transfer rather than an API, we could do that here. Once we have the share link, we've got the full URL to view it online, or we use this part of the code at the end to transfer it via the API straight across to a CAFM system.

Paul Bullard: So this whole piece here is about collaboration, is about how we're getting this data to our colleagues, to external parties and also to our internal operational systems. Well, thanks Davy. I think you've encapsulated lots of what's on the screen now in that this is about fast mobilisation. It's about the ability to take the asset register quickly, identify all those maintenance activities, which generally takes people a lot of time and effort to do. Now it is making sure you're in control. You're actually making sure the right maintenance or even the maintenance that you've optimised within your Facilities-iQ system, so the standard of maintenance for your organisation is being applied to these assets.

The whole thing is about making sure you're doing the right thing when it needs to be done, and that you can evidence the things that you're doing. And this is about scale. I mean, Davy just showed you 500 and something assets that he mapped very quickly, but we recognise that a lot of your organisations have many more assets to deal with. So when you're operating in terms of tens of thousands of assets, this activity really does take a lot of time.

Davy Clark: It's really important that we've got the capability there to deal with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of assets if we need to. And it's really helping you manage those assets at scale and the accurate mapping. I mean, we've seen a lot of instances where organisations have been using their own mappings, identifying SFG20 schedule against an asset, and that might be from 10 years ago.

Paul Bullard: The SFG20 standard is constantly moving. It's constantly evolving to reflect the changes in legislation and codes of practice and other standards, but also how the technology's moving. And if you look at how things evolve, and maybe now there's 10 different types of asset type, where there used to be two or three, that could significantly impact the identification of the correct maintenance for that particular asset that you have in place.

This is all about faster mobilisation though. It's about getting your buildings mobilised quickly, getting those tenders correctly identified and making sure you are asking for the right things so that when you come to actually having the work carried out, you are getting the things you ask for. And it's consistent with the standard your organisation has designated for maintenance.

So now we've come to the point on the webinar where we're actually gonna look at some of the questions that have been coming in. And we thank you so much for all your contributions. Now, if we don't have time to go through all of the questions, please be assured that we will be in touch to answer any of those that we don't get round to in person.

So I think we can start now. So, Davy, if I start with you, we have, first of all, someone's written in, they've got an incomplete asset register. Can SFG20 help with the identifications of assets that they don't have on the register?

Davy Clark: We can, yes. We do quite a lot of asset work with our professional services department. We can even help with asset surveys.

Paul Bullard: Okay, so thanks. So on to the next, and actually I think it's something I just mentioned, but it was talking about scale and the number of assets, Davy, and how many, what's the maximum that we can work with.

Davy Clark: I haven't actually met a limit yet, so I'm not aware of there being a maximum to be quite honest. We've done a couple of hundred thousand at least, and we've not had any major issues so far.

Paul Bullard: So, if I move on, then we've got those questions that were popping up on the screen. Am I able to copy them and send them to someone in my organisation who can give me the answers?

Davy Clark: I believe you can. Yeah, I believe you could just copy and paste them straight onto a Word document or an email.

Paul Bullard: Okay. That's great. So, in terms of optimised maintenance, how does Mobiliser help with that optimised maintenance? I think when you're using SFG20 Mobiliser, it's about how you are, you saw Davy pick from healthcare to identify HTM schedules. If we are looking for where we've actually defined the actual maintenance we want to carry out, so where we've identified critical assets, we've highlighted that we're gonna apply our statutory work, we're also gonna look at optimising the use of resource.

So where we have daily tasks, weekly tasks, perhaps they're user checks, and they've been identified as so in the classification of the skillset that we looked at earlier. Things like that dramatically allow us to reduce the cost on our maintenance spend. If we can have people who are users of the building, users of the facility, carry out some of those daily checks, weekly checks, we don't have to pay someone to come in and actually do them. And it's really important we're able to get them to maximise our maintenance spend, and getting the engineers to do those things that really those specialist skill sets require.

Where we have checks and people need to read a panel, look for an alarm, then that's something we can do ourselves. And I think it's just about helping you understand that from your maintenance regime where it is you can achieve. Now in terms of looking at your critical assets, it's very easy within the Mobiliser product to actually go through and we can say for our low-risk assets where we're only gonna look at statutory maintenance for those particular assets. But where something's a higher operational risk, maybe we will carry out the reds and ambers on those as we looked at optimal maintenance to make sure those assets are well looked after and that they're performing to the best ability.

Okay, Davy, so I've got a further question with the spreadsheet that you showed. If people don't have a standard asset register, can we provide them with a template?

Davy Clark: We can. We use a template which is geared towards the government soft landings standard to assist people in starting off gathering asset information.

Paul Bullard: Okay. That's not mandatory though, because like we said earlier, we built this for the purpose of we can take any type of Excel spreadsheet and as you showed, you can help the system by identifying which column refers to which column in Facilities-iQ. But like you said, we can actually provide that template if people need it.

Okay, so I think that's about time for us today. Thank you everyone for watching, and if we haven't answered your question as we said earlier, don't worry. We will be in touch to follow upon that with a personal response. What we are also doing though is that there is a downloadable guide available for you that we'll be putting in a poll up in a minute. So if you'd like to receive that guide on SFG20 Mobiliser, then please choose to do so.

We will be sending out a recording of this webinar so that you can share that with any colleagues you may feel would benefit from it. Otherwise, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure presenting to you and we'll see you all soon.