Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) is a crucial part of building management, ensuring your assets are properly maintained on a regular basis. Anyone working in the property management industry should be carrying out PPM maintenance across all their properties. This is a great way to add value and extend the lifecycle of your assets.
But if you don’t know where to start—this guide will tell you everything you need to know. In this comprehensive article, we’ll outline what planned preventative maintenance is, the pros and cons of preventative maintenance, and how the PPM tool in Elogs CAFM can help streamline this process. We will also cover:
What is planned preventative maintenance?
In a nutshell, PPM is a scheduled maintenance plan to help you better manage your assets. The idea is to help you carry out routine maintenance on your assets to reduce the risk of damage, prevent future repairs and keep them in working order.
Not only is this important for maintaining the appearance and functionality of your properties, but also to ensure health and safety across the board. Of course, this is vital in property management as it plays a key role in attracting investors and keeping your tenants satisfied.
As a property manager, you need to devise an effective PPM strategy to coordinate regular maintenance activities in advance. These plans will help you to be proactive and address potential problems in your buildings, keeping them running as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Some facilities managers also use reactive maintenance, however this is a much less cost effective approach than planned maintenance.
What are the types of preventative maintenance?
There are a few different types of preventative maintenance that you should be aware of when designing and implementing a PPM strategy:
Usage-Based Maintenance
As the name suggests, usage-based maintenance is a preventative maintenance method that keeps track of how much your equipment or asset has been used. There are a few different ways to measure this—some pieces of equipment will notify you when it reaches a particular number of operating hours, whilst others will need to be manually checked.
An example of this could be a lift in one of your properties; if you calculate the daily usage of this lift, you can predict a future date for a maintenance task and schedule it into your PPM planner. This will help keep the lift in good working order and prevent it from breaking down going forward.
Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance aims to monitor the condition of a piece of equipment or asset. Based on this data, property managers should be able to determine when to schedule maintenance tasks in the hopes of avoiding sudden failures. There are many different techniques that can be used for predictive maintenance including the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning (ML), and more.
For example, by monitoring the efficiency and quality of the heating systems in your properties (perhaps using IoT sensors), you can predict when maintenance or inspection tasks are due and schedule them ahead of time. This is also great in relation to your ESG goals as you can ensure your buildings and equipment are functioning smoothly and conserving energy in the process.
Time-Based Maintenance
Time-based maintenance, also known as periodic maintenance, is one of the simplest forms of preventative maintenance. It simply means scheduling maintenance tasks to be carried out at specific times throughout the year.
So, for instance, you might schedule a boiler service to be conducted once a year at one of your properties. This would reduce the risk of breakdowns or repairs throughout the year. A preventative maintenance schedule would help make this process easier as you would be able to see when the maintenance action is due and you can plan accordingly. Elogs CAFM includes a PPM planner which allows you to streamline tasks and easily manage your scheduled maintenance tasks.
Prescriptive Maintenance
Like predictive maintenance, prescriptive maintenance analyses the condition and performance of equipment—it can then predict when maintenance should be performed. Using AI and machine learning, prescriptive maintenance takes a future-focused approach, analysing operational risks to assets and scheduling maintenance tasks appropriately.
What are the cons of preventative maintenance?
So, at this point, you might be asking yourself: what are the disadvantages of PPM? Although it seems like preventative maintenance can help you stay ahead of the curve, there are some cons to consider…
Planning
An effective PPM strategy requires a lot of complex planning. This means you need to have a knowledgeable team in place to ensure you have accurate maintenance tasks scheduled across all your properties.
Not only do you need to design this maintenance schedule, but you also need a process to carry out the actions effectively and to a good standard. This is easier said than done, especially when dealing with other conflicting priorities that crop up daily.
Investment
Setting up preventative maintenance is a costly investment. Often, you will need to design and implement a new system which means investing in software, training, resources, and equipment. It’s highly likely you’ll see the return on investment and save money in the long run. However, you need to decide whether you can afford the initial setup costs as well as if the benefits will be worth it for your business.
Over Maintenance
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as over maintenance. Even though PPM can certainly help maintain equipment, it can also result in unnecessary costs. Some pieces of equipment don’t need to be inspected as regularly as others—and sometimes, over maintenance can cause failure.
Labour-Intensive
As you can imagine, having routine maintenance tasks for all your properties is labour-intensive. This means you’ll need to have reliable suppliers and contractors in place to ensure all maintenance works are completed efficiently, and to a high standard.
Luckily, we’re partnered with Prosure360, a platform which allows you to choose from a list of approved suppliers and contractors.
Unexpected Failures
Unfortunately, you can’t plan for everything. Even with preventative maintenance in place, you will still experience some unexplained equipment failures. At the end of the day, it’s all about risk. PPM can reduce the risk of breakdowns, but it can’t stop them completely. These failures are also dependent on the tenants in your properties, the type of property, and the property use.
What are the pros of preventative maintenance?
Although there are a few downsides to preventative maintenance, the pros seem to outweigh the cons. Some of the benefits of preventative maintenance include:
Extend Lifespan of Assets
One of the most significant benefits of planned preventative maintenance is extending the lifespan of your assets. By regularly scheduling maintenance tasks, you’ll preserve the value of your assets, and even increase it.
Routine checks of equipment will ensure that it lasts longer. This means you won’t need to fork out on replacements for a long time. In doing this, you’ll also improve the resale value of your properties, meaning you’ll likely get a return on your investment from what you initially had to spend on PPM setup costs.
Improve Health and Safety
Ensuring the health and safety of your buildings should be a top priority in property management. This is especially important in remaining compliant as well as keeping your tenants and workers safe.
By maintaining your assets using PPM, you are mitigating the risk of potentially dangerous equipment failure. This reduces the risk of injury as well as improving overall compliance.
Save Money
Preventative maintenance is all about preventing potential issues before they arise. This proactive approach reduces the risk of equipment failure, meaning you’ll save money on expensive repairs and replacements. There is also less likelihood of emergency repairs meaning you won’t have to pay for costly shipping to get the parts you need.
Boost Energy Efficiency
Assets that are kept in good condition generally perform better which means preventative maintenance can optimise the efficiency of your equipment and properties. Poorly maintained pieces of equipment consume energy faster—by using PPM, you are ensuring that your properties use less energy, meaning there is reduced energy wastage.
Reduce Equipment Downtime
Having a PPM strategy means that you lower the risk of equipment breakdowns. Also, with routine equipment checks, any unexpected failures that do occur should be a quick, easy fix. Preventative maintenance ensures that your assets are optimised to perform at their best which lessens the chance of equipment downtime.
This will help keep your properties safe and functional as well as saving you time and money long term. Weighing up the pros and cons of preventative maintenance will help you decide whether it’s right for your business.
What are PPM Planners in CAFM systems?
CAFM is software that allows you to streamline the management of facilities, buildings, infrastructure, and assets. It gives you full visibility of your costs, risks, and assets, giving you the ability to manage your time effectively. This can be a great way to implement planned preventative maintenance. PPM planners in CAFM systems allow you to streamline tasks such as:
- Asset management.
- Work order generation.
- Resource allocation.
- Data analysis.
With CAFM software, a preventative maintenance schedule can efficiently track maintenance activities, monitor asset performance, and generate comprehensive reports for better decision-making. If you’re still unsure about whether a CAFM system is right for your business, take a look at the pros and cons of CAFM to find out everything you need to know.
How can Elogs CAFM + Service Desk help you implement PPM?
Elogs CAFM is backed by a 24/7 Service Desk which allows you streamline facilities management and maximise efficiency. We recently launched a new and improved PPM tool in the CAFM system which gives you more control of your PPM planner. This makes it easier to stay in line with your compliance platform such as Meridian. Our intuitive CAFM platform will allow you to manage and edit your scheduled maintenance tasks with ease.
