Are your buildings in their best shape?

As a business, the buildings you work in are incredibly important. From hospitals to factories, these are the places that keep your company running and deliver your services or products to your clients.

More often than not, buildings aren’t in the condition they should be. As time goes by, the state of your buildings start to deteriorate unless they are regularly maintained. Deferred maintenance leads to more reactive work in the future and can be more expensive to fix than a preventive maintenance plan would have been in the first place.

A Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) is a process that determines the condition of your building, or a group of buildings, and pinpoints areas you need to improve. It looks at a whole range of factors, including materials, designs, age, and safety issues, to get an overall picture of the health of your facility, and can be conducted on any kind of building. Whether a church, an office tower, or a manufacturing facility, FCA’s can help you prevent emergencies and take better care of your workforce.

Conducting FCA’s can be a huge job, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. That’s why a lot of people use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) with assessment software to help make the work easier. These systems can help you manage your long term capital planning, monitor the condition of a facility and carry out regular preventative maintenance.

Why Do a Facility Condition Assessment?

There’s a huge range of benefits! Let’s take a look at some of them here.

Meet Regulatory Standards

The data and reports from your FCA can help you check that you are meeting the regulatory standards for your country, local area, and industry. These include regulations like the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), as well as building codes, such as ensuring your restrooms have the proper facilities. Meeting these standards is essential if you want to remain open and working, and FCA is a sure way of meeting them.

Create Smooth Traffic Flow

Did you know that FCA’s can improve the flow of your building? Your survey should pinpoint inefficient floorplans and areas where there may be bottlenecks, offering recommendations for how to improve them. From hospitals to department stores, this can be beneficial for a whole range of facilities.

Prioritize Repairs

Conducting FCA’s will help you to prioritize repairs and maintenance. Your survey should highlight the areas where work is needed in your facility and rank them by severity, making it easy to know where to start. Your facilities managers can then schedule the world and create a more organized maintenance system.

Prepare for Safety Audits

Typically, architects will design with safety audits in mind, but if your building is quite old or you’ve done a lot of work to it, it’s essential you conduct safety reports to help you pass your audit. Luckily, your FCA makes this easy. Your data collection should highlight any safety issues and how to fix them.

Help Create Capital Budgets

Your asset managers can use your FCA to create more precise capital budgets for your maintenance and repairs. As a business, being able to predict more accurately the costs you’ll incur throughout the year is essential to keeping your cashflow optimized.

Improve Your Operations

You can improve your overall facility operation with FCA. You can identify areas where your floorplan is reducing productivity and efficiency, and how to solve this.

Prevent Costly Future Failures

If you don’t keep an eye on the condition of your business and carry out regular repairs, you could find yourself with a maintenance emergency on your hand. These can be extremely costly and put your operations on pause, so preventing them should be a must!

How Do You Conduct a Facility Assessment?

If you’re looking to conduct your own FCA’s, you’ll need the right software, such as IBM TRIRIGA. The process is made up of four main steps. First, you plan and set up the assessment details, then you conduct the assessment. After the assessment, you analyze the findings, and then begin addressing the opportunities for improvement. The assessment process enables organizations to address the operational requirements along with required funding requirements.