A zoned maintenance approach is a structured maintenance method that assigns a team of collaborative facility maintenance professionals to specific buildings or geographic areas of a facility. These teams are only responsible for the buildings or locations in which they are assigned. These four advantages are examples of why many organizations execute a zoned maintenance approach:
Rather than knowing a little bit about the entire facility, zoned maintenance allows team members to know a lot about the assets within their zone. Enhanced knowledge about equipment, maintenance issues, and access requirements, for example, makes a team more effective and efficient in providing services and solutions.
Only being responsible for a specific building or area means that team members are always close by when a problem occurs. Instead of having to travel to the location of an equipment issue, they are close by, with the tools they need to perform a repair so it can get addressed and revoked much faster.
Some pieces of equipment are highly specialized and require a maintenance professional with experience to perform preventative and corrective maintenance. A zoned approach would ensure that every member of the team assigned to that zone can take care of that piece of equipment with a depth of knowledge and experience.
In addition to gaining specialized knowledge, a zoned approach also requires that team members learn how to perform preventative and corrective maintenance on all assets in their zone, even if they are outside their specialty. This expands the skill set of the entire team and allows them to diagnose and repair any maintenance issue that happens within their zone with more accuracy and efficiency.
Using a zoned maintenance approach allows team members to become familiar with building-specific systems, be hyper-focused on the equipment in their zones, and respond more quickly to urgent needs. And while this approach may not be right for every type of organization, for some it brings significant benefits including increasing team productivity and reducing equipment downtime.