Two boilers, three pumps and a pressurisation unit
You maintain the plant rooms at a primary school, a small office block and a care home. Each site has different kit: modular boilers, circulating pumps, a pressurisation unit, a plate heat exchanger, gas valves and controls. Visits follow the contract, sometimes with gas safety inspections timed around school holidays.
The schedule is in the owner's diary. The asset list is a spreadsheet from when the contract started. When the engineer arrives, he finds the pump he flagged last visit still hasn't been replaced, and nobody knows whether a quote went out.
The facilities manager asks for a summary of all open findings across their sites before their budget meeting, and the office spends a day building one.
Why commercial PPM drifts
Commercial contracts have more kit, more visits and more parties: facilities managers, business managers, sometimes a building management company. Each asset has its own maintenance tasks. Findings need quotes, approvals and purchase orders before anything is done. With all of that in a diary and emails, things fall between the cracks.
| Contract element | Where it usually lives |
|---|---|
| Visit schedule | Diary |
| Asset list | Spreadsheet, out of date |
| Task list per asset | Engineer's head |
| Previous findings | Paper logbook in the plant room |
| Remedial quotes and POs |
Plant rooms also change. A school replaces a pump without telling you, a care home installs a new water heater, controls are upgraded by another contractor. Unless the asset list is updated when the engineer spots these changes, the schedule falls further out of step with reality.
What drift costs
Missed visits damage the contract relationship. Findings that aren't quoted become breakdowns later, often in winter. Purchase orders that don't match quotes delay payment. And when the contract is retendered, you have little tidy evidence of the work you've done.
Approvals are another bottleneck. Many commercial clients cannot spend without a purchase order, and a quote sent to the wrong person or without the right reference can sit for weeks while a failing pump gets worse.
Paper logbooks in plant rooms also get damp, go missing or fill up, and the history of a site can be lost when one is replaced.
The maintenance schedule we build
- Asset register: each site's plant is recorded with make, model, serial, location and the tasks your contract covers for it.
- Visit generation: visits are generated from the contract and offered to the site contact, with blocked periods such as school holidays or care home restrictions.
- Engineer view: on site, the engineer sees the asset list, task checklist, last readings and open findings.
- Visit record: tasks and readings are recorded per asset, with photos, and a visit report goes to the client.
- Findings to quote: each finding becomes a remedial item, priced by the office and sent for approval with the client's PO process.
- Contract view: every contract's visits, findings and approvals are visible in one place.
Maintenance tasks and frequencies come from your contract, the manufacturers and your client. We build the schedule around them.
Contracts that run themselves
Visits happen on time whoever is in the office. Engineers arrive knowing the plant. Findings become quotes the same day. Clients get tidy reports, and your records make the retender conversation much easier.
It also helps you plan resources. The owner can see the visits due across all contracts for the months ahead, which makes it easier to decide when to take on more work and when to hold back.
Engineers also benefit when they cover a colleague's sites. They arrive knowing the plant and its quirks, rather than spending the first part of the visit working out what is there.
Does this sound like your contracts?
- Commercial visit schedules live in a diary.
- Asset lists are out of date.
- Findings from previous visits are still open.
- Remedial quotes wait for purchase orders nobody chases.
- Visit reports are handwritten or built in a word processor.