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As a business owner or premises manager, there are a number of regular and irregular maintenance tasks that need to be taken care of.
While a lot of attention is – rightfully – paid to facilities management tasks such as cleaning, there’s also the more structural, industrial side of maintenance that mustn’t be forgotten about.
Here, we outline in a little more detail what that process looks like, from asset mapping to review processes.
What’s the goal?
The overarching goal of industrial facilities management is to ensure the structural and functional longevity of the premises in question. This differs from regular facilities management, in that there is a heightened focus that goes deeper than the aesthetic of the premises being cared for.
The aim is to understand the vulnerability of diverse assets contained and integrated in a building or set of buildings, and to implement a maintenance plan that balances preventative and reactive maintenance to maintain maximum operational time with minimal costs, without compromising on safety.
How is the process executed?
There are clear stages involved in executing an industrial facilitates maintenance process.
Asset mapping
The first stage is to map out all of the assets in the premises in question, and understand their vulnerabilities, their impact on safety, and the various aspects that could be involved in their ongoing maintenance.
This can take a while, as it requires taking a step back and considering assets that you may not have thought about before. From stairwells to the roofs of your buildings, nothing can be forgotten.
Preventative maintenance
A key aspect of effective industrial facilities maintenance consists of preventative maintenance. As part of the process of asset mapping, you should make sure that you list the life spans of various components of each asset, scheduling services and replacements proactively.
Whether that requires hiring an engineer to come in twice a year or having the cladding sprayed by a provider like ACS Coatings, doing this before things break is almost always preferable to reactive maintenance.
Reactive maintenance
That being said, there will be situations where things break unexpectedly. When this happens, the goal is to ensure that these issues result in minimal downtime or disruption.
Make sure that you’ve predicted what can go wrong, in your asset mapping, and that you have a range of potential solutions to take care of the breakdown.
Ongoing reviews
There should be no assumption that your current way of dealing with industrial facilities management is necessarily the most effective or efficient way of doing things.
It’s important to commit to ongoing reviews, to ensure that you don’t have any blindspots or commitments to outdated systems. Sometimes, it can help to get the perspective of an external party.
Industrial facilities management can seem like a lot to deal with at first, but it is absolutely manageable. By setting a strong foundation with your initial planning, you can ensure that you implement a system that keeps your operations running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
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