سوداگران سایه افکن: بی کفایتی در کار میدانی نگهداری

This research investigates current practices in Operations and Maintenance (O&M), from the initial phase of assigning maintenance requests through the completion of the requests, in order to identify types of inefficiency and their causes. Fifty-eight real maintenance cases have been shadowed; and maintenance activities performed by the tradespeople have been recorded with time data corresponding to each activity. O&M inefficiencies categorized into two groups, Structural and Individual, are demonstrated through specific cases. A statistical analysis is used to show how O&M tasks, activities, and categories impact overall O&M performance. The results show that tradespeople vastly underutilize maintenance data in the field due to problems with data accessibility and reliability. Based on the shadowing activity results, we observed 12+% potential for improvement in maintenance time efficiency by providing proper information support.

There is significant potential for improvement in the performance of building equipment and facilities maintenance fieldwork. Operations and Maintenance (O&M) occurs throughout the lifecycle of a building. Not surprisingly, the majority of expenses are incurred during O&M. Many strategies have been developed to enhance the O&M environment. However, it is well-known that the maintenance industry adopts new technologies more slowly than other industries. Although the industry's tools and maintenance support systems have been enhanced considerably, for decades, its overall style of maintenance fieldwork has remained essentially unchanged. Furthermore, tradespeople vastly underutilize maintenance data in the field due to problems with data accessibility and reliability. This research investigates current practices from the initial phase of assigning maintenance requests through the completion of the requests in order to identify inefficiency in maintenance fieldwork and to develop strategies to improve the O&M environment with information support. 1.1. What is O&M? The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) [1] defines O&M as “the activities related to the performance of routine, preventive, predictive, scheduled, and unscheduled actions aimed at preventing equipment failure or decline with the goal of increasing efficiency, reliability, and safety.” Mann [2] defines facility maintenance as “the activities required to keep a facility in as-built condition, continuing to have its original productive capacity.” Chanter and Swallow [3] see it as “work which enables the building to continue to efficiently perform the functions for which it was designed,” and Cotts and Lee [4] define it as “the work necessary to maintain the original anticipated useful life of a fixed asset; the upkeep of property and equipment.” Therefore, O&M encompasses the activities that Facilities Management Services (FMS) personnel perform to ensure that facilities continue to fulfill their intended functions. More specifically, the term “Operations” include activities performed to provide comfortable working and living environments, whereas “Maintenance” provides equipment upkeep to prevent functional failure. The definitions above, however, do not take into account one critical factor: the limited resources in terms of materials and human labor that FMS personnel use during O&M. 1.2. Importance of O&M The O&M phase is the longest period in the lifecycle of a building. Consequently, the majority of expenses are accrued during the O&M phase [5]. According to Teicholz [6], more than 85% of total costs spent over the life cycle of a building are on O&M. Furthermore, good O&M improves the efficiency, reliability, and safety of a building. For example, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed an O&M decision support system called “Decision Support for Operations and Maintenance (DSOM),” which is “an expert O&M system that integrates plant operations, fuel management, and maintenance process [7].” With DSOM in one application, they were able to eliminate a potentially dangerous water hammer condition as well as increase output efficiency by about 13% [8]. In addition, Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. (PECI) [9] has stated in their report to the U.S. Department of Energy for FEMP that good operation strategy can save 5–20% on energy costs without a significant investment. 1.3. Types of O&M O&M activities are categorized in different ways. Thomas [10] sees three areas: • “Demand work: where the client calls in for service, where breakdowns in equipment require repairs and emergency events that affect the facilities department.” • “Preventive maintenance work: where a scheduled program of work maintains the investment in the physical assets for a corporation. These assets may be equipment assets or facility assets.” • “Project work: where changes to the business focus require a reorientation of space and people or the changes in regulations require upgrades to maintain compliance, such as ADA, EPA, or OSHA.” ADA, EPA, and OSHA stand for Americans with Disabilities Act, Environmental Protection Agency, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Anadol and Akin [11] have conducted a case study on facilities design and management. In this study, the authors summarize the organization's five types of maintenance as follows: • “Daily service (DS) is limited service work, scheduled by need priority and availability of trade groups.” • “Unplanned maintenance (UP) is any emergency addressed within 24 hours to insure life safety, to protect university assets or to meet critical user needs.” • “Planned maintenance (PM) is preventive maintenance carried out on a planned schedule to prolong equipment and building life cycle.” The organization does not use this term for work order classification in the work order management system. Preventive maintenance (PM) is used, instead. • “Projects (PR) include installation or modification work which enhances the asset value of a building and its systems.” • “Parts/Contracts (PC) is work pending due to material availability (longer than 1 week) and specialized contracted to supplement service capability.” PC is not a term used for the work order management system in the FMS department. They use “In Progress” status for any work orders not completed. In addition to the maintenance types, there are also repair jobs not yet classified because problems were reported directly through security or coworkers, rather than through the FMS dispatcher who assigns a type of maintenance through the work order system. In this case, work orders are generated on the following day, based on reports made by the tradesperson who carried out the work orders. Our aim of shadowing FMS tradespeople is to better understand facilities O&M in the field and to collect raw data for these activities and time spent on each activity. Surveys conducted in the 1990s found that useful information in this area was either unsatisfactory or lacking all together [5] and [12]. Since then, computerized O&M systems have been developed to fill much of the information gap but difficulties in accessing and accuracy of O&M information still remain. This study intends to identify sources of inefficiency in maintenance, which include not only redundant or superfluous activities but also core activities conducted in inefficient ways.

This paper discussed structural and individual inefficiencies in maintaining equipment and facilities. The inefficiencies were developed based on actual observations of O&M fieldwork. To collect raw data from the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) practice, Facilities Management Services (FMS) personnel were shadowed on a volunteer basis for four weeks. Descriptive and statistical analyses with the obtained data reveal quantitative results of inefficiencies in O&M fieldwork (similarities and correlations of time-at-task data and frequency-of-activity data) from various perspectives. In case of time-at-task data, the results of F-tests, ANOVA: single factor and ANOVA: two-factors with replication indicate that the data distributions of O&M fieldwork by the electricians and the plumber are overall sufficiently similar from various perspectives. This suggests that when considering time-at-task aspects of the two trades (data from electricians and plumbers) one can combine their data together. In considering the maintenance activity categories (core maintenance activity (CMA), maintenance support activity (MSA), transit activity), the transit category may be the critical factor in the efficient execution of field work because the highly correlated CMA (getting materials, spare parts and tools; carrying out maintenance requests specified in the work order; inspection; requesting collaboration) and all MSA are dependent on transit in most cases. Excluding the conventional core maintenance activities such as diagnosis, repair, and inspection that tradespeople conduct with equipment, most O&M activities observed are information-related activities, for which they spent around 12+% of their total time. These activities could easily be facilitated by providing proper computational support. In addition, we observed that the current conditions of O&M information stored in computerized O&M systems and, especially, hard-copy documents are often old and therefore unreliable due to the fact that the tradespeople tend to rely on their and/or colleagues recall rather than computerized O&M systems when they collect information on the specific equipment and the facility. This was also one of essential cause for O&M fieldwork inefficiency. In order to complete work orders, various types of O&M information are used, including performance-related data from sensors, equipment specifications, O&M history and drawings. It is obvious that accurate information about equipment is critical to successfully complete O&M activities. ‘Accurate’ in this context means the correct specification for a type of replacement part, the exact location where a work order task has to be completed, or the correct contact number and address for a person involved in the execution of the task, Otherwise, the O&M personnel have to perform additional information collection activities which can be time consuming. Moreover, as revealed in the correlation analysis, those activities are often accompanied by redundant transit activities. Consequently, this is a significant factor in controlling O&M efficiency. Therefore, there is a need for a computer based decision support system that provides accurate information at the needed time so that FMS personnel can minimize information retrieval time. In order to improve the accuracy of information, such a system needs to be designed such that users update, easily and correctly, any changes they made during O&M fieldwork. From the perspective of retrieving information, a computing strategy which supports ubiquitous information access needs to be considered so that O&M personnel can retrieve information without extra transit. Consequently, such a system would enable O&M personnel to have more time for core O&M activities. This would result in faster and more reliable O&M, which is the ultimate objective of primary research in this area, including the present one.