Soft landings and business-focused maintenance

In April 2019, BSRIA launched TG 19/2019 Soft Landings and Business-Focused Maintenance Topic Guide. The free to download guide is an ‘at a glance publication’ giving readers a glimpse of the subject and pointing them towards further reading.

The design and construction of a building should allow it to perform at its optimum. Once it is in operation it is crucial to maintain the building to ensure its effectiveness and efficiency in supporting its function as well as the occupants’ needs and wellbeing.

In most buildings, maintenance is carried out to preserve physical assets through failure prevention schedules. Creating such schedules without knowing which assets are critical for business continuity can result in overspending or disruption due to emergency repairs.

Maintenance schedules should be customised to focus more on the requirements specific to the needs of the business. Business-focused maintenance (BFM) is a planned maintenance structure that supports business function by identifying critical assets and then shaping maintenance activities to suit.

BSRIA’s topic guide helps those involved in the design, construction and operation of a building to understand how an effective BFM regime can be developed and achieved through the soft landings approach.

Nick Blake, the guide’s co-author and Principal Consultant – Facilities Management at BSRIA, said:

“Maintenance can have a major impact on the success of a business and, therefore, can deliver a competitive advantage. It shouldn’t be considered as an overhead – but as a way of adding value to the business. Each building, therefore, should have its own bespoke maintenance programme which can enable the FM to prevent asset failures through a more pragmatic approach.

“BFM can help the team to first decide which assets are crucial in achieving the business goals and the end users’ needs. Then, Soft Landings success criteria in terms of the availability, accessibility and manageability of those assets can be set.

“Both BFM and Soft Landings are well-established industry practices. This topic guide has sketched out how the two can be applied to a project in synchrony.”

TG 19/2019 Soft Landings and Business-Focused Maintenance is free to download from the BSRIA website.

A six-step process for implementing this approach can be found in BSRIA Guide BG 53/2016 Business-Focused Maintenance.

--BSRIA

[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings Wiki

• 2020 Soft Landings Conference.
• Better Buildings Partnership.
• BREEAM Aftercare support.
• BSRIA.
• BSRIA articles on Designing Buildings Wiki.
• BSRIA Soft Landings Awards.
• BSRIA Soft Landings 2019 award winners.
• Business focused maintenance.
• Extended aftercare.
• Initial aftercare.
• Maintenance.
• Maximising maintenance budgets after lockdown.
• Post occupancy evaluation.
• Post project review.
• Performance in use.
• Servitisation, smart systems and connectivity of instrumentation.
• Soft landings.
• Soft Landings for owners.
• Success criteria for soft landings projects.