In the parks and recreation field, a certain amount of reactive maintenance is absolutely required. For example, we must act quickly to repair damages after storms. However, an effective parks and recreation maintenance plan should also include regularly scheduled preventive maintenance.
Preventive maintenance includes tasks designed to reduce the chance of later maintenance issues and safety hazards. Creating a preventative maintenance plan for your parks and facilities can make a huge difference in your agency.
Benefits of Preventive Maintenance
Regularly scheduled preventive maintenance benefits your maintenance team, agency, and the public. Here are a few of the more common ways preventive maintenance makes a positive impact.
Public Safety
Perhaps the biggest reason to perform preventive maintenance on parks and recreation facilities is to help ensure public safety. For example, removing dangling limbs or entire trees that are rotting away is a definite public safety issue. Left standing, such trees can easily be blown down by strong winds or collapse under the weight of ice and snow in parks in colder areas. Removing them when the first signs of problems reduces injury potential.
Prevention of Chain Reactions
Another reason to prioritize preventive maintenance is to reduce the possibility of costly and time-consuming chain reactions. For example, if a facility has a roof leak, it is better to repair that roof quickly. When left unrepaired, the entire structure might incur damage as the roofing issue worsens from weather or invading animals, among other things. Advanced damage needs more materials and time to fully restore the structure later.
Maintenance Cost Reductions
Preventive maintenance can also save a lot of money. For example, regular inspections of plumbing pipes allow techs to spot any potential problems early. Replacing minor parts now might prevent major floods later. The same is true of any facilitie system or park structure. Frequent inspections allow the maintenance team to have a better understanding of the conditions of their assets.
General Convenience and Morale
As parks and recreation workers, we have all been affected by reactive maintenance situations. Some are completely unavoidable, it's true. For example, you cannot possibly fix storm damage before it happens. But other situations are within your control. There is nothing more frustrating than being called when you are off work to fix an issue you know could have been prevented.
Parks and facilities in good condition are also a source of pride for staff and the public. Seeing water stains on the ceiling or a drinking fountain that always seems to be out of order reflects negatively on an agency.
Maintenance Time Management
In the parks maintenance field, maintenance workers are expected to wear many hats. As parks and recreation workers, our shifts could entail anything from cleaning public restrooms to felling trees and everything in between.
With all of those tasks to perform, the last thing we need to deal with is cleaning up after preventable disasters. Preventive park maintenance allows us to make good use of time in the present while saving more time in the future.
Setting Up Preventative Maintenance Plans
In years past, creating preventive maintenance to-do lists and scheduling workers to perform those tasks might have been a logistical nightmare, especially in a large park or recreational facility. Everything had to be done on paper or on spreadsheets. Keeping track of even the smallest changes could be cumbersome.
Technology can help with the creation and operation of your preventive maintenance program. Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software allows a maintenance team to track the agency's assets and schedule and record preventive maintenance tasks.
If you aren't familiar with a CMMS, here are some questions to consider before choosing CMMS software.