Running maintenance across a hundred sites

At one site, the problem is getting the work done. At a hundred, the work mostly happens and the problem is that every site does it differently, so nothing compares, nothing rolls up, and you cannot tell a genuinely struggling site from one that records more honestly.

Standardise three things, and leave the rest alone

Central teams usually try to standardise everything and fail, because sites are genuinely different. Three things have to be the same and almost nothing else does.

• •The words: what work is called, what the priorities mean, what counts as done
• •The checklists for anything statutory or brand-critical
• •How a fault gets reported, so a store manager in one region does the same thing as one in another

Let the schedule differ by site

A site in a coastal climate needs different intervals from one inland. A store open until midnight cannot be maintained on the same pattern as one closing at six. Forcing one schedule across a portfolio produces a plan that is wrong everywhere and gets ignored locally.

Roll up on the small number of things that compare

• •Late statutory and preventive work, by site
• •Cost per site normalised by area or by whatever unit the business uses
• •Repeat faults, which find the sites with a real equipment problem
• •Requests with no first response, which find the sites that are overloaded

Beware the ranking table

The moment sites are ranked publicly on a metric, the metric starts being managed rather than the buildings. Sites with the best numbers are often the ones recording least. Pair any league table with the evidence rate, which is very hard to fake and immediately exposes a site that has stopped recording.

Give regional managers a list, not a dashboard

Somebody covering twenty sites does not need charts. They need the five things that need their attention this week, named, with the site and the reason. Most portfolio reporting fails by producing a beautiful summary that generates no action.

Standardise the contractor experience

At scale, most of the work is done by contractors, often different ones per region. The one thing to insist on is that they all record work the same way, through a link rather than an account. That is what makes portfolio-wide comparison possible at all.