There are many things throughout life that require investment. For instance, if you invest in your physical health with proper nutrition, exercise and hydration you’re more likely to stave off various ailments. Same if you own a car or other vehicle—it’s a big investment and needs the proper care and maintenance to keep it optimally running well into the future.

Run-to-failure is a concept where no routine or preventative maintenance is performed throughout the lifetime of an asset—or investment—and it has failed. Can you imagine if you didn’t get medical attention until your body was failing? That would be catastrophic! The same is true with a car which needs regular oil changes, tire rotations and tune ups. Yet, many organizations employ this concept when it comes to some of their most valuable assets: their building envelope.

Run-to-Failure in the Building Envelope

When it comes to building assets, run-to-failure is when maintenance is only performed when a building asset is failing or fails. This approach incurs a high cost-of-ownership because a one-time system replacement is much more costly than incremental, routine maintenance that allows for manageable repairs over time and extends the usable service life of the building envelope asset. Just like you perform routine maintenance on your body, car or house, Building Owners and Facility Managers should take a proactive, sustainable approach to maintaining their building envelope assets.

Sustainability in the Purest Sense

At a basic level, sustainability is the ability to make things last longer. Using a proactive, predictable approach that takes care of your building envelope assets ultimately helps them perform their best for longer which in turn lowers reactive repairs and emergency spending. For example, larger assets, like a roofing system, typically have numerous capital renewals/replacements over the total service life of a facility and the implementation of sustainable programs can extend the life of these assets, reduce emergency spend and minimize the frequency of capital renewals. By implementing a preventative maintenance plan for your facilities, you can get ahead of repairs before they become larger, more labor-and capital-intensive projects.

Reduce Your Emergency Spend

If a comprehensive, proactive approach is the key to helping your building assets last longer and reducing your total cost of ownership, then you need to make the best long-term use of your limited resources. Just as you get an annual diagnostic test for your health or your car, you can also utilize a system of triaging your capital spend based on data-driven scientific metrics. The ON-PNT® Enterprise Building System Management Budget Report and Project Analyzer incorporates a triage methodology that takes into account each building asset’s Condition Index, Mission Dependency Index, System Criticality Index and Total Cost of Ownership to determine a plan of what needs to be done and when, providing an unbiased solution to the complex problem of ranking and prioritizing capital and repair projects.

A simplified, programmatic approach allows you to streamline the building envelope asset management process making it more manageable for both budgeting and planning. Just like with your health, implementing life extension measures now will prolong the life of your building system assets well into the future.

Contact Us Today!

At Technical Assurance we are passionate about helping Building Owners and Facility Managers solve problems within their facilities, whether it’s one building or a multi-building portfolio. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with where to start on your proactive approach to sustainability take our facilities self-assessment to help you get started, or contact us today for a consultation.