Graduating to CMMS - Cover Story

Engineered Systems, Feb, 2004 by William R. Sousa

North Andover High School has committed to creating and supporting a sustainable building management plan. Learn what needs to be done at various project stages--and how to start the CMMS process even after the ball is rolling--to manage long-term maintenance needs and costs while allowing for capabilities like remote supervision. For a school like this, the time investment required for effective CMMS setup is real, but so is the subsequent protection for the taxpayers' investment in education.

In response to a growing student population and a need to accommodate today's technology in support of the teaching curriculum, North Andover Public Schools (NAPS) in Massachusetts has been expanding and upgrading their educational facilities, including the addition of a new high school. The new 294.000-sq-ft North Andover High School (NAILS) contains more than 70 classrooms--administrative offices, and an 800 seat plus auditorium/performance center, full cafeteria with a snack bar and canteen area, distance learning labs, television, and radio studios. It has some of the most technologically advanced systems of any public building in the town of North Andover, including:

* Computerized BAS:

* Life safety and critical equipment emergency generators;

* Automated stage lighting and sound systems:

* Video studio with sophisticated lighting controls:

* Multiple roof top package HVAC units:

* Central chilled water and heating hot water systems;

* Sophisticated energy recovery systems; and

* Specialized plumbing systems to supply and treat the waste from classroom laboratories.

Faced with the need to maintain this new, high performance facility and its more than 500 pieces of primary mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and kitchen equipment, Paul Szymanski, the school system's director of management support services, recognized that their maintenance management processes needed to be upgraded to meet the challenge.

Ensuring that the appropriate PM would be accomplished in a fiscal environment of increasingly tight operating and maintenance budgets required a process tool that would allow flexibility, prioritization and active real-time management. The solution needed to also give the administration the ability to adjust the plan in response to budget changes while keeping the risk of equipment failure to a minimum. The model for this solution did not appear in any nearby public school systems, but rather is one typically seen in large colleges, universities, and other types of institutional campuses or in major commercial and industrial facilities. The implementation of a CMMS was deemed the key administrative process implement needed to help achieve a system-wide maintenance operations upgrade.

The North Andover School Building Committee fully supported and funded the efforts of the administration to obtain the CMMS. Lou Minicucci, chairman of the committee, said, "The investment in a CMMS would go a long way toward providing efficient and proper equipment maintenance in support of the overall academic process, the teachers, and the students. That's really important." With this kind of support and expectation, it was important to have a well-executed implementation.

Introduced by the project's architect, DiNisco Design Partnership, to the school building committee and the school administration, Richard D. Kimball Company, Inc. (RDK), a Massachusetts-based engineering firm, outlined a sustainable building management menu of CMMS opportunities that would be ideally suited for this 21st-century education facility.

Based on this introduction, RDK joined the NAHS project team and began the process to provide a CMMS that facilitates life long care of the school's assets. Use of this tool and the maintenance process it supports can be extended to include other assets that make up the new school, such as technology items, building skin elements, roofs, athletic equipment, landscape features, etc. It can also be used for room by-room asset management. The school system's CMMS offers the ability to later expand the upgraded building management process to other school buildings, new and old, as part of a long-term, proactive, sustainable business plan.

DISCOVERY PHASE

The first steps in providing a CMMS solution are to assess existing conditions and identify strategies for implementation (Figure 1).

In assessing the existing conditions, it is necessary to learn not only which of the facilities are to he included in the program, but how old the facilities are. For new facilities just coming on-line, it is easy to collect the equipment and O&M data using the contract documents and submittals.

In some cases, it is possible to have the construction contractor participate in collection of necessary equipment data and other operating information by making it a contract document requirement. Providing a CMMS for older facilities will prove to be more challenging and costly to implement with, often, many different equipment types and an equipment history of activities to collect.