How to Tackle the Deferred Maintenance Backlog in Schools with a CMMS

Education facilities management at K-12 districts as well as universities and other educational institutions comes with multiple challenges. For example, facilities management frequently needs to schedule around the academic calendar, timing disruptive maintenance activities for holiday breaks. Maintenance also needs to comply with safety regulations, and work for staff spread out across many locations. And to top it all off, much of educational facilities management is dependent on budget and staffing decisions made elsewhere.

However, without timely maintenance and repairs, there can be equipment issues, building degradation, and even safety hazards in schools. These issues can grow over time into a large deferred maintenance backlog.

If your team has been tasked with tackling this backlog, there are tools that can help you make progress efficiently and power long-term improvements to your maintenance strategy.

What is Deferred Maintenance?

In a perfect world, maintenance activities are done the exact moment they are scheduled. But as anyone who works in facilities knows, things rarely go according to plan. Resources shift, new things break, and scheduling with multiple people runs into a coordination hiccup.

Deferred maintenance refers to a repair or maintenance activity that is rescheduled due to time, resource, or labor constraints. This decision to delay may be strategic; some organizations make short-term cuts in times of fiscal stress to protect cash flow. However, deferred maintenance may also be the unintentional result of day-to-day decisions that shift priorities around.

If there are enough delays, over time all of the rescheduled and pushed maintenance activities add up to what is commonly called a “deferred maintenance backlog”.

These overdue tasks may start as minor maintenance tasks but can snowball over time into bigger problems that can cause major disruptions. You may notice signs within your assets, such as obvious wear and tear on equipment, unusual failure modes, and unexpectedly expensive repairs. Unchecked deferred maintenance can lead to overall higher O&M costs, increased equipment downtime, and even safety hazards.

Disadvantages of staying in “deferred maintenance” mode in your organization:

• Expensive overall repairs

• Reduced asset lifespan

• Increased energy use or spare part consumption

• Potential safety risks

If you work in facilities management, you know: Most of the time, a facilities manager isn’t choosing to have a backlog of deferred maintenance. It is frequently the product of pressures on time, budget, or staffing. However, at a certain point, you have to address the delays and make progress closing out overdue maintenance tasks.

How to tackle Deferred Maintenance with a CMMS

You have been asked to address and shrink the backlog of overdue maintenance tasks at your schools. Where do you start?

One tool to consider is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), a centralized platform where you can track asset history, work order (WO) activities, and streamline everyday maintenance workflows.

You can’t do everything, everywhere, all at once. A CMMS allows you to start strategically tackling by prioritization, not just WO submission date. This tool can help you audit your deferred maintenance backlog, prioritize tasks effectively, tackle projects efficiently, and start the shift to a proactive maintenance strategy. Here are some basic steps to follow in that journey.

Step 1: Audit your maintenance needs

It’s not feasible to tell your team to go close 500 open Work Orders, all at once. You first need to understand the full picture of what you’re up against.

Start by centralizing your school facilities and asset information. While this takes time, it is the foundation for all the following steps. Bring your asset records, work orders, budget, and constraints together with a CMMS. You need to know what makes up the backlog, so that you can make data-based decisions and discover trends.

Step 2: Define your priorities, and do “first things first”

Next, decide what is most important to address first in your backlog — which will differ depending on your facilities and school district. You may want to prioritize anything with a safety or compliance risk. Or you might choose based on ROI in terms of budget or staff hours, or based on the potential operational disruptions for equipment downtime. This step is more of an art than a science, and it may look different for every facilities management team.

But once you know how you define your priorities, order your deferred maintenance work orders based on. You may want to define a set time period during which you will address these high priority items above all else, completing these work orders instead of any new requests coming into your system.

A CMMS can facilitate this step in multiple ways, streamlining the nitty-gritty details of rearranging your backlog. Not only can you easily review WO histories and associated equipment repair costs, even using AI-generated summaries to understand issues quickly, but you can also assign priority levels to WOs and use drag and drop scheduling across vendors or technicians.

Step 3: Keep going with your Preventive Maintenance (PM) plan

While it might be tempting to tackle the deferred maintenance backlog with everything you can, make sure to also protect your preventive maintenance activities. When PMs are completed as recommended for equipment, they can help prevent new equipment issues from entering the WO queue. When you invest in preventive maintenance, you are investing in a smaller backlog in the future.

A CMMS can help automate PM scheduling for all assets, minimizing the administrative burden while giving you visibility into team workloads.

Step 4: Process improvement

As you tackle your deferred maintenance with a CMMS, it is a good opportunity to also streamline the day-to-day processes that make up your maintenance systems.

For instance, your CMMS can be used to automate maintenance scheduling, whether PMs or new dispatches. Your technicians can pull from a centralized WO record and provide updates in the same database, allowing seamless visibility up and down the chain.

Vendor proposal approvals and invoice processing can be streamlined with assigned leads and set reminders. With a CMMS, communication with vendors can be centralized in one place, allowing different team members to jump in if progress is needed.

And as you tackle deferred maintenance and learn more about actual field conditions, consider implementing or improving inspection checklists to reflect maintenance trends.

Step 5: Shift to proactive maintenance

Corrective maintenance is a part of facilities management, but reactive repairs shouldn’t be considered business as usual.

A CMMS functions as a data repository, providing value in multiple ways. Work order history is centralized and can be mined for root cause analysis (RCA) on recurring issues. Repair spend is tracked, allowing for better budgeting and repair vs replace decisions. CMMS records can help inform resource planning, from staffing priorities to spare parts availability.

Data allows you to pull out trends in seasonality, reactive maintenance spend, or other issues, helping you prepare for the future. A robust CMMS can even pull from work orders and asset histories to flag when equipment is at the risk of failure, helping you put maintenance resources to where they can be the most valuable.

Step 6: Track your progress and grow

Tackling the deferred maintenance backlog in schools is not an easy feat, and positive feedback can help you continue making progress. Pick something like a 90 or 180 time period to review facilities data and show trends in WO count, average age of work orders, completion rates, and PM scheduling. Having this data available for easy export from a CMMS allows you to show leadership the difference your team is making.

Your maintenance program will never be perfect, but adjusting your program as you go will help you grow.

Strategic Facilities Management in Schools

Facilities maintenance isn’t just a cost center—your upkeep of school facilities is a reflection of the entire organization.

As anyone in facilities knows, letting a deferred maintenance backlog grow and only repairing emergencies is not an effective long-term strategy. Having data about your facilities management, stored in a CMMS, can help you advocate for budget or staffing. Preventive maintenance and intentional long-term maintenance strategies can reduce facilities spend over the long term.

Contact Ecotrak today to learn more about how a CMMS can help you manage operations, today and tomorrow.