| Volume 3, Number 1 Winter 2000/2001 |
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Money talks, and when a public entity discovers how much time, energy and money can be saved with a comprehensive facility maintenance plan, money practically screams. But properly and vigilantly conducted preventive facility maintenance is not just about saving money. A comprehensive facility maintenance plan also extends the functional life of a facility and the critical equipment within that facility.  Ultimately, however, preventive facility maintenance keeps buses, cars, trucks and rail vehicles on the line and running so that they can satisfy their primary purpose - serving the riding public. Unfortunately, not everyone quite understands that perspective.
"You would never dream of buying a vehicle - whether it's a personal car or a million dollar transit vehicle - and run it for 20 years without ever changing the oil," states Don Leidy, managing principal of Maintenance Design Group (MDG). "But some facility owners spend millions of dollars on a maintenance facility, move into it, and don't do any preventive maintenance (PM) on the building or its equipment until something breaks.
"You've got to do PM on a facility just like you would on any vehicle," he continues. "Whether it's operable windows, overhead garage doors, mechanical systems, electrical components, shop equipment - practically every aspect of a maintenance facility needs regularly scheduled preventive maintenance. The whole rationale behind PM is to increase the overall life of a facility and its equipment and to catch potential problems before they happen. It's a lot easier to do PM and keep your facility running smoothly than to wait until something fails and have to repair it under an emergency situation. Also, it's a lot easier and cost effective to maintain than replace."
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A comprehensive preventive maintenance plan is a carefully drawn, diligently executed, work-order-driven program wherein a facility and the equipment it houses receive regularly scheduled service. From tightening belts to replacing light bulbs, and from greasing bearings to checking waterproofing, practically every element within a facility requires some degree of regular attention.
Determined by and derived from the operations and maintenance manuals that accompany each piece of equipment (along with architectural and engineering specifications for the building and its elements), an optimized maintenance schedule is developed by facility maintenance experts from manufacturers’ specifications and recommendations for service. Aside from providing greater equipment longevity, preventive maintenance enhances worker productivity and safety.
With properly functioning equipment, appropriate lighting and guaranteed safety tolerances, technicians not only work in a better environment, they carry that philosophy through to other jobs at hand. In addition, through rotational scheduling and an easy-to-apply work-order methodology, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual tasks are distributed throughout the year to accommodate staffing numbers and prevent unbalanced workloading. But the true value of PM can best be seen in specific scenarios. Consider a vehicle washer.
One of the most expensive and maintenance intensive pieces of equipment, vehicle washers can cost up to $150,000 to purchase and install. A manufacturer-supplied checklist dictates daily preventive maintenance required to properly maintain this complex and completely automated machine. That maintenance checklist must be completed, dated and signed every day, proving that the maintenance work was done. The manufacturer knows that without this maintenance, the machine's effectiveness and reliability cannot be guaranteed; that is why they put it in writing.
If a vehicle washer breaks down within the first year of operation and the manufacturer's representative arrives to fix it, their first question will be, "Can I see your daily checklist of PM work?" If a completed checklist cannot be produced, the technician will then explain that the owner has voided the warranty. All subsequent repairs then come out of pocket. Given the cost and complexity of this particular piece of equipment, those out of pocket repairs will probably not be cheap. In fact, in almost every case, they will outweigh the cost of preventive maintenance.
"I can't tell you exactly how many dollars we save by doing this, but we definitely save money through preventive maintenance," explains Jack Gabig, Director of Transportation for the City of Montebello, Calif. "And when you think of the long-term costs - we invested $13 million in our current facility alone - preventive maintenance protects that investment. When you look at it in the long run, we probably save more money with each round of preventive maintenance we do."
As Director, Gabig heads up Montebello's recently expanded Corporation Yard. Increasing from five heavy and two light/medium maintenance repair bays to eight heavy and four light/medium bays and two support shops, the renovation also included a 15,000-square-foot, two-story administration building attached to a 154,000-square-foot parking structure (used for both employee parking and transit vehicle storage). A 2,500-square-foot area was also provided for Montebello's Street Department shops and storage. For Gabig, however, the key to maintaining the value of that expansion was a newly created comprehensive maintenance facility plan.
"There's a lot of work to be done to stay on top of things in a maintenance facility of this size," says Gabig. "It actually takes an incredible amount of in-depth knowledge of facilities and how they work to create an effective yet practical plan. Choosing the right team to create and implement that plan is extremely important to the long-term success of any facility. But that's no easy task. There simply aren't that many people out there with this kind of expertise."
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Richard Dent, Superintendent of Facilities for CTTransit in Connecticut, agrees that preventive maintenance is vital. And as superintendent of a maintenance facility for a large bus company that serves Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford, he would know.  But Dent admits that preventive maintenance of these types of facilities was not always a priority for many transit companies.
"The mission statement of just about every transportation company is to get clean vehicles operating on the line, moving people from point A to point B," he says. "Everything else used to be considered pretty unimportant. So, not much attention was ever paid to facilities management or maintenance. That's different today because we've learned the value that PM creates.
"When you look at preventive maintenance, it's impossible to say exactly how much you save - we just don't know how much money we would expend without doing preventive maintenance," he adds. "But there are some clear measures. For example, there's probably about 50 pieces of equipment on the roof of our facility. In 10 years, we've only experienced one motor failure. That's pretty impressive. But we've put money into filter changes, lubrication, electrical tightness of connections - everything. And believe me, servicing those motors ends up being a lot cheaper than replacing them."
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As technology progresses, so does preventive maintenance technology. With more and more operations-and-maintenance manuals arriving on CD-ROM, PM experts now quickly and easily incorporate that information into the PM plan. Generating work orders and PM schedules via advanced PM software, preventive maintenance specialists now make state-of-the-art, computerized preventive maintenance management widely available to all owners - basically anyone with a PC who's willing to institute a PM plan. But technology doesn't stop there.
"There is a basic level of facility maintenance planning, and that's essential for maintaining a primary level of readiness," explains MDG's Don Leidy. "But there are many deeper levels as well. We can use geographic information systems (GIS) technology to monitor every aspect of a facility from a single computer. There are many different levels of sophistication available, but that all depends on the facility and the equipment that must be maintained. As equipment becomes more advanced, those kinds of higher levels of PM will become much more common.
"What's most important, however, is that people get to the first level of preventive maintenance," he says. "The quantum leap is getting people to commit to that first step of a basic facility maintenance work-order plan and PM plan. Refinements after that practically become second nature. Once they see the extended life of their facilities, they tangibly see the value of a facility maintenance plan and want to extend that to every part of their facility."
As hard as it is to believe, many maintenance facilities still have no PM plan in place. But that is changing. Every day, preventive maintenance programs gain in popularity with facility owners around the country. And as more and more facility decision makers see the tremendous value and return that PM provides, they are implementing plans extending the lives of their facilities and equipment, and therefore their fleets. Once a facility decision maker sees how proper preventive maintenance actually increases the value of their facility, they learn, first hand, that a good PM program is worth its weight in gold.
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GIS technology helps facility managers comply with GASB 34.
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