Run-to-failure maintenance plans are just what they sound like: Your organization avoids preventive maintenance, opting instead to use facilities and equipment until they wear out and need to be replaced. It’s as costly as it sounds. Keeping equipment and facilities properly maintained with regular preventive service makes budgets go further—and avoids unwanted downtime when your gear finally breaks.

As inefficient as run-to-failure is, it’s often the default maintenance method for at least part of an organization’s portfolio. If you want to contain costs while supporting your facilities and equipment with proper preventive maintenance, you need a plan. Enter FCAs: Facility Condition Assessments.

Effective FCAs give you the who, what, when, where, why and how to maintain capital assets and facilities. The idea is to assess everything in your portfolio and pin down the current and expected backlog of maintenance expenditures, then create a plan with an order and hierarchy of what to tackle, how to tackle it, and when to tackle it.

As you might imagine, an FCA is no small task, and it will need to be comprehensively managed from the asset level to the portfolio level for best results. Fortunately, if you’re using a robust Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) like IBM TRIRIGA®, FCAs become a whole lot more manageable.

Using Facility Condition Assessment as Part of Your IWMS

An IWMS like IBM TRIRIGA is optimal for helping organizations manage their real estate portfolios, their facilities, their capital projects and their operations. Included in all this is its ability to aid in facilitating and conducting FCAs. TRIRIGA’s Workplace Operations Manager has been designed to handle Facility Condition Assessments as well as Property Condition Assessments (PCAs), which are similar, but are usually performed on commercial properties as a part of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions. While conducting a full FCA or PCA is a complicated and detail-reliant matter, a robust IWMS like TRIRIGA can streamline the process.

FCAs start with a physical assessment of all the equipment and facilities in your portfolio. Particularly for organizations with dozens or hundreds of facilities, this alone can be a massive undertaking. Data storage and reporting must also be considered, along with analysis and portfolio optimization aimed at setting you on the path toward possible savings—all while avoiding equipment and facility downtime and related opportunity costs.

Some FCAs and PCAs involve third-party inspections, sometimes as a requisite for regulatory compliance. You can give those outside inspectors access to IBM TRIRIGA to enable them to record their findings directly, which will help keep you on track to receive the regulatory signoffs needed to stay up and running. You can streamline the process further with eCIFM’s Inspections On-The-Go mobile app, which gives your people and any approved third parties access to IBM TRIRIGA while in the field. It’s all designed to simplify a monstrously complex task, leading you toward a more efficient and properly maintained and managed portfolio.

Use FCA Findings to Justify Your Maintenance Budget

As detail-intensive as an FCA can be, the payoff comes when you put the resulting data to use. Many portfolio managers find themselves battling annually for maintenance budget dollars. School districts and university systems are especially familiar with this process. With a proper FCA, however, you’ll have the data needed to make your case. Instead of tallying another year’s total number of boiler failures, you’ll be able to show exact numbers on potential savings from a proper preventive maintenance program. The best way to find, estimate and receive funding for your deferred maintenance budget is by proving that preventive and ongoing maintenance is a money-saver—especially in comparison to run-to-failure maintenance.

An IWMS can also help you with your funding and opportunity analyses, including all your repair-versus-replace decisions. If upgrading now to newer and more efficient equipment could save you money over time, you’ll have the data to prove it.

Create Financially Sustainable Budgets

Most FCAs use a facility condition index (FCI) as a numerical rating for measuring operations and maintenance. An FCI can help with repair-versus-replace decisions, which businesses often make by using the fifty percent rule: If maintenance on a facility is 50% or more of the facility’s replacement cost, replacement is advised. An IWMS lets you compare different maintenance budget scenarios. From mission-adequate to aggressive growth, you’ll be able to set operations however you prefer. Your budget will be financially sustainable with predictable costs that the C-suite will love.

Getting Started

An IWMS like IBM TRIRIGA is invaluable to organizations looking to manage their real estate portfolios in cost-effective ways. As an additional benefit, it can also help tame the complicated and detail-oriented FCA process by giving you access to a vast amount of data about building conditions at your fingertips—and eCIFM can help get you up and running. eCIFM’s Data Migrator and other proprietary tools make the process as speedy and accurate as possible. Moreover, our team includes some of the world’s leading IBM TRIRIGA experts, including many with industry experience using IBM TRIRIGA themselves. Contact us and tell us how you manage your maintenance issues now. We’d like to show you how you can handle it more efficiently, with better results and less long-term cost.