James Percival Blog: The joys of maintenance and a PPM schedule4th September 2012

My role as a graduate in the Building and Project Consultancy team in the Savills Southampton office is hugely varied, and one of the more challenging areas I am involved with is maintenance of estates. My team advises a number of commercial and private estates on a range of issues including the upkeep and maintenance of built assets, and often we find our negotiation and persuasion skills on these elements have to be as well honed as our technical ability.

When a building is constructed it immediately begins to decay, whether by rotting, rusting, weathering, wearing, corroding, cracking, splitting, sinking, impacts from traffic, occasional lightning strikes or the implausibly destructive force of small children. Structures constantly suffer the ravages of entropy and if left to their own devices, could fall into obsolescence. Some are more resistant than others (see the pyramids or Stonehenge) but complicated modern buildings usually have a designed life expectancy and periodically require replacement of components.

Here is where a Planned Preventative Maintenance (or PPM) Schedule comes in rather handy to work out when items need to be replaced by estimating their operational lives from the outset. The key point here is that this allows replacement of parts to be budgeted before they fail. The point of this is, as always, money. As in the old adage A stitch in time saves nine, paying for a new roof before it caves in is going to be cheaper than paying for a new roof and cleaning up the mess.

Unfortunately, here’s where these lofty ideals come up against the cold, hard practicalities of life, or more specifically, cash flow and budgets. Predominantly, organisational culture rewards cost savings rather than value maximisation, meaning that estate managers often struggle to justify the idea of replacing something that isn’t broken, (or even replacing something that’s a bit broken but hasn’t quite catastrophically failed yet). In such circumstances quick fixes in order to make it last another year or two seem to be the norm. Counter intuitively, this cost-saving focused attitude has a negative effect on the long term value of the asset through aesthetic and structural deterioration and increases the risk of failure. Breakdown of an element then causes disruption of occupants, reduced income and of course the inevitable replacement of the element in the end, plus the cost of whatever half-hearted repair work was undertaken in the first place.

Fundamentally, the difference is that planned, proactive repair is within the estate manager’s control whereas reactive repair is inherently unbudgeted, out of control and bad for the estate manager’s nerves! In a perfect world, organisations would think of their estates as part of the machine through which they operate, and would invest in keeping them fit for purpose. Unfortunately the usual paradigm considers the estate as a drain on resources, an inevitable cost to be eliminated wherever possible. For most organisations, the estate is the second greatest cost after salaries and successful businesses need to invest in both.

Organisations that care for the health of their buildings (and these organisations do exist – see the National Trust for one obvious example as well as most universities) tend to use comprehensive estates strategies which use PPM schedules to manage scarce resources, budget for predicted costs and reduce risk.

And so in order to give the best service to the client, part of our role involves presenting a clear and trustworthy case at the outset to avoid longer, higher costs and repairs.