Keeping Your Schools Safe While Not Operational During COVID-19

Most of the school districts in the United States shut down almost overnight, forcing a quick and hasty exit from elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities. If your educational facility is like thousands of others, you left in a rush and now have a skeleton crew with buildings that are no longer operational on a day to day basis. Aside from meal and packet pick-up, these school buildings remain largely empty and unused. This presents an incredible risk to your campuses both now and when students finally return.

We’re hearing from more and more Facilities Managers who are expressing concern about hazards like fire, mold, and more. Here are 3 ways a CMMS can help your team be prepared now and in the future:

SMARTPRINT can show you the exact locations of your assets, sorted by System and Type. Customizable annotation layers allow you to mark certain areas of your facility and provide measurements to ensure compliance with state and federal guidelines.

1. BLUEPRINTS
Using blueprints within your solution, your facility team can track equipment in relation to combustible items. Ensure a safe distance of at least 5 feet or better yet, ensure your mechanical rooms don’t have any combustibles stored in the same room.

2. PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE SCHEDULES
Use preventive maintenance schedules to complete periodic inspections of doors, windows, pipes, mechanicals, etc., Inspections can be set up to a specific frequency depending upon the requirement of your insurance company or regulatory agencies. Specifically, we recommend inspecting fire sprinklers, exits, etc,. on a weekly frequency.

3. CATEGORIES AND REPORTING
Create a category type of “shutdown” and update all assets that will be shut down during this time. In addition, using your asset tracking detail organizations should store proper start-up procedures on the asset so when ready all team members follow the appropriate procedures. Using the robust reporting engine in your CMMS facilities team members can easily identify all assets that need to come back online.

These are just 3 ways to ensure the buildings on your campus stay in operational condition during these difficult times. FacilityONE offers many additional features within our UNITY™ platform that can help support these efforts.

Does your current CMMS?

If not, feel free to reach out so we can help keep your buildings safe and secure.