Tags:  Building Maintenance

While many think of maintenance as keeping the lights on, the difference between an effective and ineffective maintenance strategy impacts everything from your annual budget to anyone who depends on the proper working order of your organization’s buildings, offices, equipment, furniture and infrastructure.

Unfortunately, the processes involved in maintenance and operations are often tangled in a web of incomplete point solutions, excel sheets, and complex approval processes that prevent resources from reaching where they are needed most. Work orders go unanswered, deferred maintenance snowballs, and budgets go off the rails.

Archibus untangles this web with targeted applications that work together as one system, streamlining maintenance with the hard data, automation, and digital communication that organizations need to create a lean and effective strategy.

Which Applications Optimize Building Operations and Maintenance?
Archibus offers three applications that optimize maintenance, collectively grouped together under Archibus Building Operations or Maintenance:

  • On Demand Work
  • Preventive Maintenance
  • Condition Assessment

These applications work together as one system, with standardized data fields that update across applications. Each application can be configured to match your organization’s unique workflow.

Let’s talk about what each of these applications offers — the problems they solve, how they work together, and how they enable your organization to do more with less.

On Demand Work
React with Speed and Precision

On Demand Work streamlines and digitizes the management of corrective work orders, making it easy to file, track, and close work orders. The key word here is corrective, meaning On Demand enables organizations to react quickly and effectively to unforeseen problems.

Benefits of On Demand Work
With the On Demand Work application, organizations can:

1. Simplify with Mobile Work Orders
Assign work orders to internal and external staff through a mobile app that enables them to rapidly update and close work orders directly from the field.
2. Create Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Automate the Rest
Save time and avoid confusion by automating processes. Define SLAs up front — then have the system automatically assign and track orders according to who’s responsible for work/approval, the expected response time, and more.
3. Enhance Transparency with Central View of Work Orders
Check the status of all work orders in one central location to eliminate redundancies and keep everyone on the same page. View work orders by type, track personnel, and follow labor schedules.
4. Inform Labor with Work History
Work history for each asset is documented, so that staff can identify patterns and inform maintenance with information from previous efforts.
5. Learn and Improve with Business Intelligence
Evaluate results and track trends with analytics. Track costs by month, building, problem type, or team.  Track labor hours, response time, and performance with simple dashboards that make it easy for managers to identify and investigate outliers.
While On Demand Work optimizes urgent and unforeseen work orders, Preventive Maintenance enables organizations to implement a cost-effective long-term plan.

Preventive Maintenance
Solve Problems Before They Occur

Waiting for an asset to break is costly and labor intensive. Repairs are more expensive than regularly scheduled upkeep, breakdowns are disruptive and untimely, and waiting for something to break multiplies damage and costs. This results in operational failures, waste of resources, and extra labor hours.

Preventive Maintenance provides a digital tool for planning, automating, and refining schedules for regular maintenance and upkeep, preventing problems before they occur.

Benefits of Preventive Maintenance
Like On Demand Work, Preventive Maintenance also offers a fast mobile framework, transparent workflow, automation, and strategic performance metrics/analytics. Preventive Maintenance also offers additional planning tools that enable organizations to be more proactive so they can:

1. Reduce Operational Failure with Automated Schedules
Decide how often you want different maintenance work to occur, coordinate regular maintenance schedules, and ensure your most critical assets get the attention they need.

2. Create a Schedule that Reflects Priorities, Improves Outcomes
Manage all preventive maintenance in an interactive planner for work and labor. Reorganize work according to priorities, optimize maintenance and labor budgets, and set up labor schedules based on labor availability.

3. Enhance Decision-Making with Financial and Operational Data
View metrics to evaluate maintenance work by cost, response speed, time period, criticality to operations, labor hours and more. Track maintenance trends to project future needs, benchmark maintenance and labor performance, and adjust your plan accordingly.

Condition Assessment
Evaluate Your Needs

The Condition Assessment Application does exactly what it says– it provides tools for assessing the condition of buildings and equipment. Effective maintenance depends on an informed understanding of which assets need attention. Condition Assessment avoids unnecessary work and identifies pressing needs by collecting condition data and making it readily accessible in your system.

Benefits of Condition Assessment
Condition Assessment aligns both preventive and on demand work with real needs in the following key ways:

1. Identify Deficiencies Before They Snowball
Catch problems early on to limit wear and tear and extend asset lifecycles.

2. Access Up-to-Date Condition Information at Your Fingertips
Mobile surveys quickly collect information on the condition of your assets so that up-to-date condition data can be centralized and analyzed.

3. Demonstrate Needs with Hard Data
Justify resource requests with objective and accurate data on the conditions of assets. Demonstrate how costs are associated with corrective measures.

4. Reduce Legal Exposure and Compliance Risk
Easily assess which equipment meets operating condition standards, and adjust maintenance schedules to reduce legal exposure and risk of non-compliance.

Optimize Building Ops from End to End

React quickly with On Demand Work, budget and plan with Preventive Maintenance, assess needs with Condition Assessment, and centralize data from all three applications in one cohesive maintenance strategy.

Information is shared across Archibus applications, with reports to help you develop a maintenance program that reduces the time, cost, and labor of maintenance.

Together, these applications connect all stakeholders and ensure that your maintenance workflow occurs with transparency, accountability, and speed.