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GSA has many field offices with employees or contractors who perform preventative maintenance (PM) on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment using an outdated prescriptive PM guide system. The PM's are scheduled manually or via a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) which generates a PM work order when the scheduled maintenance is due. The employee or operations and maintenance (O&M) contractor then goes out and performs the work and afterwards closes out the work order.

PM is then followed by a quality control inspection by the contractor and a quality assurance inspection by GSA to ensure contractors perform the PM as outlined. This system has a number of problems or areas of opportunity to improve.

Additionally, in most cases, we no longer have government employees that are qualified to inspect preventative maintenance. An electrician should inspect electrical work, a refrigeration technician should inspect refrigeration work. This lack of expertise greatly reduces the ability to ensure contract compliance.

In a performance based system, each piece of equipment has a performance guide that is still maintained in the computerized maintenance management system. The performance guide would describe the required condition of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment; for example, the pressure-drop on a coil, or the RPM of an air handler blower. It would have a place to record maintenance performed, but it does not have a schedule that an inspector would have to track, to know when to do an inspection. A performance based PM system should reduce overall operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses from five to ten percent without negatively impacting customer satisfaction.

Electrical PM's would be replaced by annual infrared scans of all electrical equipment, followed by repair of any problems and cleaning, and torquing. This customer service component would reduce or eliminate many disruptive outages. Life safety would improve because fire alarm and sprinkler systems would follow NFPA code, which covers more than the old GSA PM guides.

The number of inspectors needed would be reduced if converted to a performance based system. One qualified inspector could easily inspect well over 1,000,000 square feet. Alternatively, current quality assurance inspectors could perform extra functions such commissioning because they would not have to spend hours following inefficiently scheduled contract work. In case where GSA does not have qualified inspectors it's a simple matter to contract this work out, thus ensuring an operation meets functional requirements.

For more information contact Mr. Charlie Rienhardt at 303-236-8000 (ext. 5325) or by email at charles.rienhardt@gsa.gov.