From stressful budget work to coordinated facility maintenance

Challenge

Stressful budget work without a sufficient overview

Karl-Johan Lindahl has a broad and strategic role as head of property at HSB Stockholm, with staff responsibility and ultimate responsibility for some 70 facilities. From his very first day on the job, in November 2016, he began familiarizing himself with the maintenance planning work – and he saw early on a need to coordinate it and make it more efficient.

Above all, the annual budget work became stressful, since there was no sufficiently good overview of what needed to be done, in both the long and the short term.

For Karl-Johan, working preventively rather than reactively with facility maintenance was a strategic decision and a given. The goal was to reduce stress for the property managers and take control of decisions about upcoming projects, instead of just reacting to incoming fault reports.

“It’s important to know that we’re doing the right things, and that we’re doing them at the right time. Carrying out projects far too early is prioritizing wrong. Of course, we don’t want to be too late either, to avoid consequential damage and extra costs that way.”–
‍Karl-Johan Lindahl, head of property, HSB Stockholm

There was already a maintenance planning system within HSB Stockholm, but it was built for the part of the organization that manages housing cooperatives and couldn’t be made to fit rental facilities.

“We wanted to be able to view the facilities in different clusters, divided by different property manager areas, and also get an overview of the entire portfolio in one and the same view.”

Solution

A standalone tool specialized in maintenance planning

HSB Stockholm already had systems in place for administration, case management, and finance – what was missing was a module for maintenance planning. Karl-Johan therefore looked for a simple and fast tool, not a new all-in-one solution.

“I searched around for maintenance plans for facilities, and Planima came up in most of the places I found,” says Karl-Johan.

“I knew we needed a simple and fast tool. So I tried reaching out to Planima after coming across the name in several places. I felt very quickly that this could be something for us. A standalone service, specialized in maintenance planning!”

HSB Stockholm evaluated several alternatives but was won over by Planima’s flexibility and simplicity. They also hired the construction consultants at Sustend to produce maintenance plans for the portfolio. Since Sustend also uses Planima, the process was efficient all the way through.

“Planima is a fresh company. With very accommodating people who make the collaboration smooth.”

Results

Less stress and better coordination between property managers

With the maintenance plans in place in Planima, it became a given for everyone at HSB Stockholm to continue with the tool, according to Karl-Johan. Even though each property manager needs to work actively with their maintenance plan, the organization now experiences clear relief – and the tool is easy to get started with, even for employees with less computer experience.

Every year before summer, the property managers revise the maintenance plans for their respective facilities, check off completed projects, and review what’s coming up. One of the property managers has also been given main responsibility for coordinating maintenance projects between colleagues – something that was previously hard to do, since each property manager ran their projects without visibility into each other’s planning.

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“It could happen that two major facade projects in the same area were carried out only a year or so apart. With the overview in our digital maintenance plans, we can instead coordinate projects like these to save both time and money.”

Gathering everything in a clear, digital maintenance plan for each facility also gave HSB Stockholm a clearer picture of the actual maintenance needs.

“Once we had the maintenance plans in place, we got a picture of the maintenance needs, and they were more extensive than we had thought.”

Carrying out everything in the maintenance plans right away isn’t realistic yet, but with a consolidated, digital overview, HSB Stockholm can now make well-founded decisions and focus on the right things.

“Now that the stress of not knowing what we need to do is gone, we can focus on making the right priorities.