Avoiding disasters with an effective facilities and maintenance program

Many of us now live in condos—and a quick glance at Manila’s skyline would reveal that many more are being built every day. But what about the safety of the residents and the upkeep of these buildings?

The headlines about fires are a wake-up call for all of us to be more conscious about how an effective facilities and maintenance manager not only promotes efficiency and cuts costs, but saves lives as well.

We asked Ram Tardaguela of Reap Academy, our partner, who has years of experience in real estate management, for some tips on how to ensure that facility managers are up to the task.

He shared that the very basic requirement is to have a checklist, and to understand how to operate and maintain the building’s equipment and facilities.

Additional tasks include:

Managing the budget

A facility manager should be able to identify spending patterns and find ways to create policies or new systems to minimize costs. A proactive stance in researching on latest trends in energy conservation, for instance, would be beneficial.

Establishing an emergency preparedness and business continuity procedures
The threat of fires and earthquakes are always present, hence investment in purchasing the tools and equipment needed during emergencies is a no-brainer. But concurrent with this would be the creation of an Emergency Response Team (ERT) with their roles clearly defined.

Managing relationship with tenants

Tenants are our most important customers, clearly. And establishing a service level agreement is a must to manage expectations. Monitoring complaints and having a regular customer satisfaction survey is also advisable.

The Inquirer Academy, in partnership with Reap Academy, will hold the “Facilities Management and Comprehensive Maintenance” program on Feb. 23, 2018. The course will discuss roles and functions of the Facilities Management team in the development and administration of a comprehensive maintenance system. The course will equip professionals with working knowledge of facilities management and maintenance to help add value to their property and to minimize repair time, costs and accidents and sustain the productive use of assets.

Topics included in the courses are emergency preparedness and business continuity, environmental stewardship and sustainability, contract deliverables, latest trends in facility management, types and stages of preventive maintenance, equipment maintenance procedures and core competencies of the team.

There will also be a course “Property Management for Horizontal Projects” on March 21, 2018 at the Inquirer Academy. A special run of the “Building and Condo Management” course will be on Feb. 27, 2018 in Cebu City.

The Inquirer Academy at 4168 Don Chino Roces Ave. corner Ponte St., Makati City. For more information about the workshop or if you would like to add your input on the article, you may email [email protected], call (632) 834-1557 or 771-2715 and look for Jerald Miguel or Judy Bondoc, or visit the website at www.inquireracademy.com.