Facilities As Assets - Effective Building Maintenance: Protection of Capital Assets - page 2

PROGRAMMED MAINTENANCE AS ASSET MANAGEMENT
Critical infrastructure and industrial facility owners and operators
have adopted the term “asset management” to describe their core role
in life—caring for and obtaining a satisfactory level of service from the
physical plant, infrastructure, and associated facilities. Their concept is
that, sincefacilitiesrepresentsigniicantcapitalassets,theymustbeprotected
throughwell-plannedandappropriatelyfundedprogrammedmaintenance .
For industrial and many commercial facilities (retail, offices, etc.),
the level of maintenance can be evaluated as part of an overall optimiza-
tion of asset utilization, balancing the cost of maintenance and retained
value of the asset against the overall economics of the business “model.”
However, for public and institutional facilities, the facility itself is often
the most important asset and the need for maintenance at a level that
allows the facility design life to be attained and its economic value be
retained is paramount. In the public and institutional environment, “cash
flow” rarely supports significant renovation or replacement of facilities
as it does in the industrial and commercial sectors. The starting point for
implementing an asset-based maintenance program is to understand two
important concepts.
First, as shown in Figure 1-1, the goal of maintenance is to prevent,
or at least reduce, the degradation or deterioration of the quality of ser-
vice provided by each building component over its design service life.
Maintenance is not a process of improvement that may be required to
meet increased expectations for performance beyond which the compo-
nent was originally designed to provide.
Second, each building, and the individual components that make-up
that building, has a finite service life. At the end of that life, replacement
or major renovation is required since, in the long run, it is less expensive
to replace or renovate than to continue to make repairs that become in-
creasingly frequent and costly.
Programmedmaintenance , as illustrated by Figure 1-2, is a combina-
tion of preventative maintenance and planned replacement or major ren-
ovation of building components.
Plannedreplacementormajorrenovation is the step taken when a com-
ponent reaches the end of its design service life and is discussed in Chap-
ter 2 of this text.
Preventativemaintenance ensures that facility components actually
achieve their service life and consists of two elements: