Responsive Repairs Are Inefficient, So Why Not Eliminate Them?

Responsive repairs are inefficient – even in an efficiently run property services provision. They also mean extra disruption for residents.

The aim of planned preventive maintenance and Total Asset Management (TAM) is to reduce the number of responsive repairs to the absolute minimum. Essentially this means accidental breakages and failures that are statistical outliers that couldn’t be predicted.

With responsive repairs, efficient resource planning is difficult. Do you have staff on stand-by just in case, or take operatives away from other scheduled work if there’s an unexpected peak in demand?

With responsive repairs, there’s little opportunity to combine maintenance tasks to make the best use of the time operatives are at the property, or to reduce the overall disruption suffered by the residents. These factors will become more significant when zero carbon retrofit programmes have to be planned.

And failures needing urgent repairs often involve more extensive and invasive work than planned maintenance.

A Strategic Approach to Social Housing Maintenance

‘Wait until something breaks and then fix it’ is one way to operate a repairs and maintenance service. Osborne prefers to be more strategic. Our TAM approach uses advanced IT systems to log the condition of social housing assets and plan integrated work streams.

We’ve proved across multiple partnerships that this way of working reduces the reliance on responsive repairs. It generates long-term cost savings that can be reinvested in much-needed new housing.

Why Don’t All R&M Partnerships Work This Way?

If the benefits are so clear-cut you might ask why many property services partnerships haven’t adopted a TAM approach. There are two main reasons.

First, it’s hard. It takes a lot of upfront investment in asset condition surveys and building the systems that can make proper use of the data for planning. But in the long run, it’s always worth it. The upfront investment is repaid many times over.

The second obstacle is where there’s a piecemeal approach to service procurement and multiple contracts for different aspects of the service. This type of complexity makes planned preventive maintenance in order of magnitude harder to implement and cost savings even more elusive.

Find out more about how Osborne addresses the property services challenges faced by social landlords by visiting our resource centre.

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For more information, contact Jo Fletcher ([email protected]).