Running the centre
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance is the work done before something breaks: inspections, servicing and certificates with a due date (lifts, air conditioning, gas or electrical installations) that a residence has to complete so its equipment keeps working and stays compliant.
Also known asplanned maintenance · PPM · scheduled servicing · statutory inspections
What it is exactly
It is the opposite of corrective maintenance, which is fixing what has already failed and which in a residence comes in as a maintenance ticket. Preventive work is planned: it has a calendar, someone responsible and often an outside contractor or an inspection body that has to come on a set date. Part of it is required by the rules for each installation; part is the residence's own decision, so the boiler does not fail in January.
In many residences the plan lives in a spreadsheet kept by one person. The risk is not technical, it is the calendar: the date slips by when that person is on holiday or when nobody opens the sheet that month. The programs that run all of it, with an asset register and work orders, are CMMS tools. What Bedel does with those dates: preventive maintenance.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that preventive maintenance is the job of the contractor who holds the contract. The contractor comes when called or when it is in their diary; the one who needs to know the date is coming up is the residence, because it is the residence that shows the certificate at an inspection.
Sources
Related terms
- Maintenance ticketA maintenance ticket is the record of a fault in a residence's facilities (a dripping shower, a broken blind) with what is wrong, where, who reported it and when. It is used to assign the job to whoever fixes it, track the deadline and keep a record of how it was closed.
- SLAAn SLA (service level agreement) is a written commitment to the time and quality with which a service is delivered. In a student residence it usually sets how many hours a maintenance ticket has to be picked up or resolved by type, and it is what decides what counts as overdue.
- CMMSA CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) is the software a maintenance team uses to keep the asset register, work orders, the preventive plan, spare parts and costs. In Spanish it is known as GMAO.