Serving People through Facility Maintenance

by Andrew Pust

There are few things more frustrating to a maintenance person than to be called to take care of a problem only to discover that what could have been a $10 fix yesterday has turned into a $500 repair today. And on top of that, it must be fixed in the next four hours. Genuine maintenance will reduce demand maintenance calls and help to prevent costly equipment failure and needless property damage as well as reduce utility costs. How do we do this? Inspect, inspect, inspect! We must regularly, actively, and constantly look for potential problems as well as for ways to improve those things that are working.

Using a detailed checklist (see page 10) helps us to be thorough during scheduled inspections; but we must also learn to have our eyes open all the time, to understand what we are seeing, and most importantly, to communicate that information to the person who needs to know. Another helpful thing we can do is to train our colleagues, whether or not they are on the maintenance team, to also be on the lookout for potential problems. The use of fix-it request slips or a computerized maintenance request form gives everyone on the team an organized method of reporting both actual and potential problems.

At first glance it may seem counterproductive to spend time looking for unreported or potential problems. I already have so many things to fix, why look for more? And besides, my budget is in trouble. The answer is found once again in our desire to serve people. If maintenance were just about everything working properly for its own sake, we could be content to let it break before fixing it. But this is not the case at all. In a purely economic sense, this attitude is financial suicide. While it does require a bit of overhead to stock the necessary parts to enable timely repairs, the alternative is downtime which always costs more than prevention and preparation.

In a business sense, downtime means loss of revenue, which is a temporal problem. For those in ministry, maintenance carries an even greater responsibility due to the spiritual mission of the organization. For us, downtime has eternal implications and can have a negative impact on the ministry potential of the entire organization. Safety is an area where we cannot afford to let things fail before we correct the problem. Risk management is not just about following correct procedures, it is also about ensuring the dependability of the facility and equipment in use. To borrow an old adage—it’s too late to close the barn door after the horse is already out. An example from our personal lives would be a low tire on our car that we fail to notice before we leave the driveway. Failure to inflate the low tire may not only cost us the price of a new tire, but also could be the cause of an accident that puts those around us in danger. Preventative maintenance is the process of purposefully looking for anything and everything that is just a little less than normal and then acting on that information to prevent loss.

Routine maintenance inspections give us detailed information. The ability to understand the details is what we call experience. Sometimes that ability can be increased by specialized training in a specific area. A word of caution is in order here. Inspections are not the cure-all. They are just another tool in the quest of preventative maintenance. We must take that information, decide what needs to be done, and then prioritize using the objective, decision-making tool we talked about in part three of this series. When we know that we are working on the most important thing, we can work with confidence. Of course, there will always be new things to figure out; and at first the volume of things to do may just make you feel like going back to bed. But as we persevere in doing what is most important, we will one day realize that there is something missing—the constant nagging of the urgent. Whew! Dealing with an occasional urgent situation is much nicer than always having a dozen hanging around.

Many tangible benefits accompany preventative maintenance, but for those in ministry the invisible benefits should be what drive us to excel. We must daily remind ourselves that God has called us to serve our colleagues by insuring the proper operation of the tools and buildings they need to do their job and to serve our clientele by providing a comfortable, safe, clean facility so that they will not be distracted from what the Holy Spirit desires to accomplish in their lives. Yes, preventative maintenance is a lot of work; but as we seek to serve people through facility maintenance, let’s remember that we aren’t heroes, just obedient servants doing what God expects of us. “Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love, in honor preferring one another; Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord” (Romans 12:11).