The day-to-day routine of a Building Engineer can be chaotic. Tenant requests flow in from all areas of the property and the staff needs to be available and ready to jump from task to task every time their phones ring and chime with orders. This style of daily activity can quickly render even the best and most organized engineer frustrated and inefficient. You simply cannot predict and control the requests that come in on a daily basis from a property’s tenants.

I suggest that we control what we have the power to control. The best example of a controllable area within a building engineer’s space is that of a Preventive Maintenance program. Every property has routine and preventive maintenance tasks that need to be completed on a regular and reoccurring schedule. These items can be as simple as the changing of air handler filters every few months, or as daunting as a yearly cooling tower cleaning and shut down before the winter arrives.

With a little help from property management software and the General Services Administration (GSA), these routine preventive maintenance tasks can be organized into a manageable and accomplishable schedule for the engineering team. The GSA provides an available equipment template library that can then be implemented into any best-in-class preventive maintenance module for easy access – and even better, through any mobile device. This template library provides an amazing head start into the setup of a preventive maintenance program at any property.

The available templates from the GSA cover any and every type of building systems equipment. Just like preventive maintenance work itself, the upfront effort makes for less costly and time consuming work down the road. The same rings true in the setup of the program. Rather than dig through files and paper records to locate old routines of steps that should be taken to maintain property equipment, you can start with just a list of the equipment that needs to be maintained. The GSA templates provide all the suggested steps, tools, and times that it takes to maintain each piece of equipment. This is a great starting point to really dial in each task to apply directly to how the engineering team performs the work on any given property.

We all know engineers do not have the time to reinvent the wheel, and no one wants to fix things that aren’t broke. A proper preventive maintenance program ensures that those things won’t break, and setting up that program with the help of GSA templates is the first step towards actually getting to work on tasks that aren’t popping up last minute. Engineers need these routines set up quickly and painlessly, because you never know when the next tenant will send over another request.

Did you know?

Building Engines has upgraded its current preventive maintenance (PM) library to one based on recommendations from the General Services Administration (GSA). The GSA library is more frequently updated with new equipment types, suggested schedules, and parts and materials, as well as recommended time for completion.

New BEI clients will now receive:

• A library of over 400 building equipment types along with suggested maintenance schedules and task lists, detailed by frequency

• Unique, pre-configured libraries available by property type – Office, Industrial, or Retail

• A list of recommended tools to bring for each task

• Lockout/tagout identifiers.

• Estimated, best-practices completion times per task

• Less frequent but more thorough schedules and tasks

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