Maximising maintenance budgets as we return from lockdownJune 2020

Nick Blake
BSRIA Principal FM Consultant

We are now seeing businesses reopening across the country and many are inviting people back into their buildings. As we return to buildings that were vacated in, most often, a brusque manner there are a number of considerations that need to be addressed to bring employees safely in, and BSRIA has been addressing those through our free-to-attend PPMs in a Pandemic webinars. With the immediate safety aspect addressed, we are now looking into the care of our nation’s buildings and their occupants in the mid-term aspect.

BSRIA Business Focused Maintenance (BFM) is a framework to help organisations make sure that maintenance of buildings ensures safe and healthy environments for workers while at the same time managing cost in a most effective way.

BFM looks at the needs of the business and puts them first and foremost. Whether it is a focus on uptime, maintenance costs or environmental impacts, the BFM methodology challenges the planned preventative maintenance frequency of building services plant. The assessment methodology takes into account plant history (age, condition, failure history, plant loading, and maintenance history), the number of standby plant items (redundancy), and the level of resources available. The six-step process offers an objective approach to a purposeful redefining of a planned preventative maintenance program.

Many of the intrusive maintenance tasks can be replaced by condition monitoring (CM) which in turn leads to condition-based maintenance (CBM). The actual practice of CM is far quicker in terms of person-hours than time-based PPMs (Planned preventative maintenance) and often involves zero down time to the asset and therefore no impact to the business. Furthermore, it greatly reduces the incidence of maintenance induced failures. In addition to the usual array of gauges on an asset or its BMS sensor display that can be used to monitor plant performance; common CM methods include thermal imaging, vibration monitoring, acoustic emission monitoring and lubricant analysis.

Regular use of these methods at appropriate intervals can be far more cost-effective than regular time-based generic intervals, whereas for non-critical plant, the most cost-effective maintenance methodology may be to run-to-failure.

BFM results in maximum availability of business-critical plant with the minimum required input. The outcome of this equation is time and therefore cost savings, while streamlining the PPM program. Whilst every job is different, an indicative timeline can show that BFM can very quickly make its impact on a business’s performance and cost.

The latest version of the BSRIA BFM guidance can be downloaded here or by searching the BSRIA website for BG 53/2016 – Business-focused maintenance.

Since BSRIA first publicised the BFM methodology in 2004, an increasing number of building owners have adopted the methodology. We have conducted BFM in public and private offices, data centres, warehouses, libraries, art galleries, hospitals, care homes, schools and universities and have recently been contacted to provide BFM services to a manufacturing site. The tried and tested BFM method has proven effective in delivering maximum availability of critical plant whilst simultaneously offering environmental sustainability, time and cost savings in a number of different settings.

By applying the BFM methodology, the facilities team can be confident that the most appropriate maintenance technique has been selected for the services in the building to ensure health and safety, operational continuity and maintenance cost control.

To learn more about how BSRIA's BFM can help your business become more efficient, read Banking on Savings: a BFM Case Study.

For further guidance on Business-Focused Maintenance, see the BSRIA Guide Business-Focused Maintenance (BG 53/2016) and BSRIA launches Soft Landings and Business-Focused Maintenance Topic Guide.