How to Create a Building Maintenance Plan
What Is a Building Maintenance Plan?
A building maintenance plan is a way to prioritize goals, maintain assets, schedule work, and monitor
progress. A well-executed plan guarantees fewer emergencies, less disruption, and more
straightforward repairs across working environments. It also means fewer occupant complaints and
happier employees with better control over their workday.
For all this to happen, your building maintenance services team needs to shift its emphasis from
reactive maintenance to preventive maintenance.
Reactive Building Maintenance vs. Preventive Building Maintenance
Reactive Maintenance (RM)
Reactive Maintenance addresses problems after they happen. RM falls into two broad categories:
corrective maintenance and emergency maintenance.
Corrective Maintenance: Corrective maintenance is fixing something that has already broken, like
changing the battery of a malfunctioning thermostat or replacing worn-out rubber washers on a
dripping faucet.
Emergency Maintenance: Emergency maintenance is the most urgent and costly type of reactive
maintenance. Some examples are gas leaks, backed-up sewer lines, no heat in winter, or any
maintenance issue that puts people at risk.
Preventive Maintenance (PM)
Preventive maintenance involves a plan to perform maintenance on building assets that are still
working. It is cost-effective and prevents unplanned failures of critical assets, such as broken
elevators, water coolers, and overhead lighting. For example, replacing a dirty AC filter with staff labor
is considerably less expensive than replacing the entire AC unit when it breaks down because your
maintenance team did not regularly replace the filters.
Preventive maintenance is a type of planned maintenance. For example, think about janitorial and
cleaning services like disinfecting surfaces and cleaning bathrooms. Or weekly landscaping and
general facilities maintenance like indoor window washing and deep cleaning carpets in trafficked
areas. Or monthly maintenance, like checking fire alarms, cleaning gutters, scheduling pest control
services, and using commercial cleaning services to clean vents and wash outside windows.
Preventive maintenance also allows building managers to monitor energy efficiency and
management, negotiate better pricing on non-emergency maintenance, such as janitorial services,
and keep a good eye on general building upkeep.
Balancing Reactive Maintenance vs. Preventive Maintenance
The goal of building maintenance is to achieve an optimal balance between RM and PM. Preventive
maintenance seeks to reduce the frequency and cost associated with reactive repairs by regularly
completing low-cost tasks that don’t take much time. For example, $10 repairs on leaky toilets can
save you a boatload of money on your next water bill. Unfortunately, maintenance departments often
perform costly and time-consuming repairs because building owners have not followed a preventive
maintenance plan.
4 Simple Steps to Creating a Preventive Building Maintenance Plan
1. Inventory Your Building’s Assets
You need to decide what equipment to include in your preventive maintenance program. A
thorough walkthrough and review of your building’s floor plans will help you log all necessary
assets and areas. In addition to common areas, don’t forget to log what you don’t see: electrical
systems and HVAC systems, including air conditioning and ventilation, outside drainage, etc.
Record the following data for each building asset:
Make and model
Serial number
Specifications and capabilities
Unit number
Category
Location
Primary users
Strategic preventive maintenance (PM) programs can
Parts increase ROI (return on investment) by reducing
unnecessary O&M spending. Practicing PM is not about
eliminating all equipment problems as much as preventing
2. Establish Priorities and Maintenance Frequency larger ones from taking place.
Priorities
One way to determine PM priorities is to conduct a criticality analysis.
For building maintenance, the following questions will help get you started:
What is the expected ROI of the equipment?
Which inexpensive equipment can follow a run-to-failure model?
What equipment is causing the most disruptions to your department?
By prioritizing the equipment that takes up most of your maintenance team’s time, you can reduce
the most time-consuming tasks and find more time for PM work.
Maintenance Frequency
To determine the frequency of your PMs, refer to manufacturer guidelines, speak with
experienced maintenance technicians, and review historical maintenance data.
3. Create a Work Order System
A work order system is at the core of any modern maintenance schedule because all
maintenance activities require a work order. The following work order process is how a proactive
maintenance department would use work order software to organize its maintenance tasks.
Basic Work Order Process for Building Maintenance Plans
Create Work Orders for All Tasks: To make the right decisions and avoid missed
opportunities, create work orders for every task, from routine maintenance to inspections. Of
course, you want to gather all the information you can. With historical data at your fingertips,
you can easily make maintenance repair vs. replacement decisions and identify cost-saving
opportunities.
Prioritize: Consider how much time a maintenance task will take, where it fits with other
priorities, and any operational considerations that could impact scheduling. For example, the
maintenance activity may require a planned power outage or special equipment like a boom
lift.
Automate Work Orders for Recurring PMs: You can enter PM frequencies of different PM
tasks right into your CMMS. The app will generate a perpetual calendar and automatically
issue work orders to technicians on their cell phones and mobile devices the day before each
scheduled job. Remember to add maintenance certifications, regulations, and inspections to
the list.
Include SOPS and Additional PM Procedures on Work Orders: Standard Operating
Procedure (SOP) templates help save time and reduce human error by providing a
standardized way to follow procedures. You also can automatically include additional
preventive maintenance procedures for each piece of equipment on work orders, along with
instructions, manuals, and illustrations to help execute the task.
Review then Repair: Building maintenance workers often want to review equipment and
work order history in their CMMS before starting maintenance. This historical information
helps technicians diagnose the issue, know where to start, and decide whether to repair or
replace it. In addition, once a technician begins the maintenance activity, a mobile CMMS will
allow them to check parts availability quickly.
Document and Close: When maintenance work is complete, the technician records the
completion time. The technician can then upload photos of the repairs and close out the work
order.
4. Monitor Progress and Adjust Accordingly
The best way to ensure you achieve your goals is to use a Computerized Maintenance
Management System (CMMS) to create work orders and checklists, track maintenance progress,
and provide data reports on key performance indicators (KPIs).
Your most useful KPIs will be:
Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP)
PMP compares the number of planned maintenance tasks to the total number of completed tasks.
PMP will help you identify opportunities to minimize reactive maintenance to optimize your
planned and unplanned work ratio.
To calculate your PMP, divide your total hours spent on planned maintenance activities by your
total number of hours spent on all maintenance activities within a given period. Then, multiply the
number by 100 to get your PMP percentage.
PMP = (Total Hours of Planned Maintenance / Total Hours of ALL Maintenance) * 100
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)
MTBF is the average time between asset breakdowns. You don’t want to do too much or not
enough PM. If an asset experiences continual failures, you may need to increase the frequency of
PM tasks. Assets that have never experienced a breakdown may still operate without failures.
To calculate MTBF, divide the total uptime of a repairable asset by the number of failures of that
asset within a given period to arrive at an hourly measurement.
MTBF = Total Uptime of Repairable Asset / Number of Failures of Asset within Given Time
Period
