The most important number in facility maintenance
Walk into a well-maintained Indian commercial property and ask the facility manager what percentage of their maintenance work is preventive versus corrective. If they say 70:30 or better, you are in a rare building. If they say 40:60 or 30:70, you are in a typical one.
The 70:30 ratio (70% preventive, 30% corrective) is the benchmark from international facility management literature. The reasoning is simple: a planned activity costs roughly one-third of the equivalent reactive activity. The math compounds across thousands of equipment items in a building.
For a 500,000 sq ft Grade A office building:
- Annual maintenance budget at 60:40 corrective-heavy ratio: ₹1.6-2.2 crore
- Annual maintenance budget at 70:30 preventive ratio for the same building: ₹1.0-1.4 crore
- Annual savings: ₹40-80 lakh
- Lifespan impact: building reaches major-overhaul threshold 12-15 years later
The savings number is immediate. The lifespan impact is the bigger prize but takes 20 years to show up.
Why most Indian buildings run corrective-heavy
Four structural reasons:
1. No equipment inventory
Most buildings do not have a clean, current inventory of every maintainable equipment item: every AHU, every chiller, every fan coil unit, every fire pump, every panel, every lift, every diesel generator. Without this inventory, you cannot schedule preventive maintenance. You can only respond when something fails.
2. AMC contracts done badly
The standard response to the inventory problem is to outsource maintenance via Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs) with vendor-specific contractors (lifts to Schindler, chillers to Trane, fire systems to Eureka Forbes). These contracts often cover quarterly visits and reactive call-outs. They do not cover the preventive work needed at specific running hours that should happen between quarterly visits.
3. Budget pressure from owners
Building owners under pressure to maximise yield often cut maintenance budgets. Corrective work is unavoidable; preventive work is "deferrable". So preventive work gets deferred, and corrective work eventually doubles.
4. No measurement
Buildings that do not measure their preventive:corrective ratio cannot manage it. The facility manager produces a monthly report on "tickets closed" but not on "preventive completed versus due". Without measurement, drift toward corrective is invisible.
What a CMMS actually does
1. Equipment master with PM schedules
Every maintainable equipment item has a record: make, model, serial number, location, capacity, year of installation, capex value, warranty period, current condition, and most importantly its preventive maintenance schedule. The schedule specifies what activities happen at what frequency (e.g. "AHU filter clean — monthly", "chiller condenser clean — quarterly", "lift safety check — fortnightly", "DG load test — half-yearly").
For a 500,000 sq ft building, this is typically 800-1,500 equipment items with 4-8 PM activities per year. The CMMS holds this map and generates work orders accordingly.
2. Work order generation
At the start of every week, the CMMS generates the PM work orders due that week, assigns them to the responsible technician or vendor, and tracks them through completion. Each work order specifies the equipment, the activity, the standard procedure (often a checklist), required spare parts, and SLA.
3. Tenant request workflow
Tenants raise requests via app, intercom, or WhatsApp bot. The CMMS auto-categorises (electrical, plumbing, HVAC, civil, IT, security), routes to the right trade, generates a work order, tracks status, and closes with tenant confirmation. SLA breaches escalate automatically.
4. Spare parts inventory
Maintenance depends on parts availability. The CMMS tracks current stock of filters, belts, motors, contactors, bearings, lubricants, cleaning chemicals — typically 200-400 SKUs in a Grade A building. Reorder points trigger purchase requisitions. Critical items (lift parts, chiller components) get higher stock buffers.
5. Performance reporting
The CMMS produces the monthly reports that matter: - PM compliance: % of due PM activities completed on time - Corrective volume: number of reactive work orders, by trade and root cause - MTBF (mean time between failures) for critical equipment - Tenant satisfaction score on request closure - Spare parts inventory value and turnover
The PM compliance number is the canary in the coal mine. When it drops below 85%, corrective work rises. When it falls below 70%, the building is heading toward avoidable major failures.
The transition from corrective to preventive
For a building currently running 30:70 (corrective-heavy), the transition to 70:30 takes 18-24 months and goes through three phases:
Phase 1 (months 1-6) — Build the inventory. Walk every floor, every plant room, every roof. Catalogue every equipment item. Set up the CMMS master. Define PM schedules per equipment type. This is dull work and most facility teams resist it. It is also the foundation of everything else.
Phase 2 (months 6-12) — Stabilise PM compliance. Generate PM work orders. Get them done. PM compliance starts at 40-50% and rises to 80%+ as the team adjusts. Corrective work begins to drop as equipment that was previously failing under-maintained starts running better.
Phase 3 (months 12-24) — Optimise. With a year of PM data, the schedule can be tuned. Some PM activities turn out to be unnecessary (eliminated); others are too infrequent and equipment is failing in between (frequency increased). MTBF improves. Spare parts inventory rationalises. The 70:30 ratio becomes the steady state.
By month 24, the building runs better, costs less, and pleases tenants more. The facility team has changed from a firefighting crew to a planned-operations crew. Headcount may not change; the work mix does.
The classes of equipment that benefit most
PM has higher leverage on some equipment than others. The hierarchy:
- 1Lifts and escalators — failure is catastrophic for tenant experience. PM at 70:30 typically eliminates 80% of unplanned downtime.
- 2HVAC (chillers, AHUs, cooling towers) — accounts for 50-60% of energy spend. Well-maintained HVAC saves 12-18% of energy versus poorly-maintained.
- 3Fire safety systems — failure is life-safety risk and legal exposure. Mandatory PM with statutory audit.
- 4Plumbing pumps and STPs — failure floods the building. Quarterly PM eliminates most failures.
- 5Generators — failure during a power outage is highly visible. Monthly run, half-yearly load test.
- 6Common-area electrical — panel maintenance, breaker testing, transformer servicing. Prevents fires.
- 7Civil and structural — annual surveys, periodic re-painting, terrace waterproofing every 5-7 years.
Implementation pitfalls to avoid
Five common failure patterns in CMMS implementation:
- 1Equipment inventory done by an external consultant in two weeks. The result is incomplete and inaccurate. The inventory must be done by the facility team that will use it, even if it takes longer.
- 1PM schedules copied from manufacturer manuals without local adjustment. Indian dust, humidity, and operating conditions often require more frequent PM than the manufacturer's "ideal world" schedule. Local tuning is essential.
- 1Vendor AMC scopes not reconciled with CMMS PM schedules. If the lift AMC vendor visits quarterly but the CMMS schedule expects fortnightly, you have a gap. Reconcile scopes during CMMS setup.
- 1Mobile-first workflow not enforced. Technicians on the floor cannot use a desktop CMMS. Mobile work order acceptance, photo upload, and digital sign-off are non-negotiable.
- 1Reporting too detailed. Producing a 40-page monthly report nobody reads is worse than producing a 1-page dashboard with the five key metrics. Less is more for management reports.
The bottom line
Property maintenance done well is invisible. When the building works, tenants are not aware of the maintenance team. When it does not, every conversation is about the broken lift, the smelly bathroom, the leaking ceiling. The difference between the two states is largely the preventive:corrective ratio, which is largely a function of having a proper CMMS and the discipline to use it.
For a commercial property over 100,000 sq ft, a CMMS investment of ₹8-15 lakh in Year 1 and ₹3-5 lakh annually thereafter typically saves ₹40-80 lakh annually in maintenance cost reduction and extends building lifespan materially. It is one of the highest-ROI investments in operating a real-estate portfolio.
