Starting a Facility Management Program
By Bryan James | Updated on 05/16/24
When I was promoted to Facility Manager, how I addressed the position likely differed from how my company had envisioned the position. My predecessor was a versatile maintenance technician who fixed equipment as it broke and kept the manufacturing operations churning. These repairs, however, did little to optimize operations or address underlying issues which may have led to the breakdown. I am familiar with the run until failure maintenance model but I would not recommend that model for manufacturing assets.
Preferring a proactive to reactive approach I searched for information on how to optimize facility and maintenance operations. Most resources failed to offer concrete steps that could be implemented and none described how to build a comprehensive maintenance program from scratch. So, in the hope that my experience may be useful to others I have documented the steps I found were critical in developing a facility management program for an industrial manufacturing company.
- Implement a CMMS
Research and choose a CMMS to start keeping track of your assets, parts, and maintenance activities. Why is this important and why should it come first? The primary reason is a CMMS will save you time. If you or someone else needs to make a repair in the future you will have the part number, cost, vendor, and procedure readily available. The CMMS will also help track all costs and time spent on maintenance, allowing for improved operational decisions and resource allocations.
I am the facility manager and sole maintenance technician. While I want to develop a facility management program I need to fix anything that breaks and keep the facility operating. In the process of maintaining and repairing equipment I built out the CMMS by storing the vendors, manuals, asset information and other data necessary for those tasks. I also utilized the CMMS to keep track of the time and costs associated with maintaining assets, helping to justify the maintenance budget and clarify where capital projects were needed.
Regarding a specific CMMS, I researched several and tried out Fiix, MaintainX, and Coast. I went with MaintainX because the software was easier to use, the technical service was excellent, and the price was great for what we needed. Fiix was an okay system but not as user friendly and had significantly more bugs in its software. I utilized Coast for my personnel assets and while I like some of its options it appears to be geared more towards managing and coordinating maintenance teams. I found MaintainX to be better at cataloguing asset and parts information, which is a more important feature for our organization.
2. Prioritize Assets
My primary job is to keep the production line operational. Following that line of thought I examined our production process and determined what pieces of equipment were essential to the manufacturing process. (I did this first but in hindsight I would have acquired a CMMS prior.) Part of this assessment was investigating how quickly repair parts could be ordered, technicians mobilized. Is there other equipment that can perform that task while the equipment is down? Once asset essentiality is determined I would recommend reviewing the time and costs associated with any repairs and exploring if newer or different pieces of equipment would be a better investment.
3. Preventative Maintenance
Evaluate your preventative maintenance program focusing primarily on your critical equipment. Our program was still being documented on paper and the PM’s seemed more frequent than they should be for our operational tempo. Before our program could be overhauled, however, the equipment manuals and to be located or acquired. Most could be located online and for those that couldn’t I found similar equipment and used their manuals as a guideline.
Utilizing the manuals I rewrote the PM’s to follow the OEM’s recommendations and transferred all of the maintenance to the CMMS. I also eliminated PM’s on easily replaceable and low cost equipment like a DeWalt chop saw. Now, all of our maintenance can be tracked on my phone and when we go through our ISO review each year we have a continuous digital maintenance record readily available.
4. Inventory
Create a maintenance parts inventory system. This is extremely time consuming but critical for reducing downtime and overall time spent on maintenance activities. I started by centralizing the pile of parts I inherited into a central location, labeling every cabinet and shelf under my control, and methodically entering, labeling, and storing each part in a designated location and the CMMS.
5. Maintenance Optimization
There are tons of articles on this but almost all of them assume your facility is already operating efficiently. Unfortunately, many are not and most advice will vary with each facility. In general, look for inefficiencies you deal with or come across as you go about your job. Some issues I ran into were a lack of interchangeable parts. We had different types of air fittings and hydraulic fittings throughout our facility which made any changeout more laborious than necessary. In addition, the hydraulic pumps used on our production line were laborious to change out as they were hard wired. To get around this we installed outlets by the pumps and quick connects on the hydraulic lines. The next issue we’re tackling is labeling breakers and all equipment and outlet power sources. To assist in this endeavor I labelled the I-beams in our facility to create a grid system for quicker and more accurate identification.
Creating a facility management system is not hard but it is daunting. The above steps are easy to implement and time-consuming. Almost a year later I am still working my way through them.