Designing for Maintenance

Maintenance is a standard, inevitable aspect of a building’s life. Buildings need to be subjected to periodic regular repair to maintain the building’s efficiency and effectiveness.

The level of maintenance and what maintenance is required is regularly reviewed. Maintenance is essential to sustain a building’s functionality, and this functionality is necessary to uphold quality of life for all tenants. To provide adequate upkeep, several different kinds of maintenance are used by organizations to increase the uptime of their assets and utility of their facilities. Based on an organization’s budget, amount of resources, level of combined experience, and maintenance goals, one or more maintenance types are used.

Planned maintenance

Planned maintenance details how and what work will be completed. This involves the process of detailing what materials, tools, tasks, and services are required to solve a problem. The purpose of planned maintenance is to determine what work needs to be completed and how it needs to be done.

Preventive maintenance

Preventative maintenance is the regular and routine maintenance of equipment and assets in order to keep them running and prevent any costly unplanned downtime from unexpected equipment failure.

Corrective maintenance

Corrective maintenance is the category of maintenance tasks that are performed to rectify and repair faulty systems and equipment. The purpose of corrective maintenance is to restore systems that have broken down. Corrective maintenance can be synonymous with breakdown or reactive maintenance.

Proactive maintenance

Proactive maintenance is a maintenance strategy that corrects the source of underlying equipment conditions. The goal of proactive maintenance is to reduce unplanned downtime, equipment failure, and risks associated with operating faulty equipment

Scheduled maintenance

Scheduled maintenance is any repair and upkeep work performed within a set timeframe. It details when given maintenance tasks are performed and by whom. Scheduled maintenance may occur at repeating intervals or in response to a work request.

Unplanned / Breakdown maintenance

Breakdown maintenance is maintenance performed on a piece of equipment that has broken down, faulted, or otherwise cannot be operated. The goal of breakdown-maintenance is to fix something that has malfunctioned. To the contrary, preventive maintenance is performed in order to keep something running.

By factoring in the above maintenance types as well as intended service life, you can help reduce the buildings whole-life cost in the long run. This can also include smart components equipped with sensors linked directly to the manufacturers/specialist supplier with offsite monitoring and controlled remotely.