When you don’t plan for maintenance — you are inherently planning for repair.

[Erich Friend]

Records of the use, abuse, and upkeep of your equipment can help you to plan for the eventual periodic maintenance or replacement of equipment.  If you don’t keep any records and just wait for it to fail, then you may have to spend money (and frequently in a big hurry) to repair or replace the damaged device.

Chaos, Panic, Mayhem – my job is done here.

Chaos, Panic and Mayhem are the result of emergency actions.  Actions that were not planned-for.  The down-time to fix the problem wasn’t planned-for; the money to pay for it wasn’t budgeted, and the manpower may not be available to perform the work.  All of these can cause cost over-runs and heartburn.

Be realistic:  You can’t expect anything to last forever; and the higher the technology, the shorter the useful life it will probably have.  As your venue manager, or someone on which they rely for solid information, you should continually be evaluating your equipment and keeping a record of its current replacement cost and projected useful life.  You do this already on a small scale:  Gaffer’s Tape — You know how much you use per show (or per month), you know how much a roll (or case) costs, and you project that you will need to budget X$ to keep it in stock each month.

You can do the same for larger items.  Look at your Stage Draperies, for example.  You know that the panels will need to be cleaned each year or so, and this means down-time for the stage to remove them, ship them off for repair, cleaning, and possibly re-application of the fire retardant, then to have them returned and re-hung.  You also can project that they will last 2, 4, maybe six cycles before they are too worn-out for re-use.

Why concern yourselves with such trivial things?  Because it will make your life easier.  Armed with maintenance and replacement cost projections, you can inform you managers and operating board of directors about the long-term costs of operating the theatre plant.  If they know thy will need $10,000 and a dark week each year for drapery maintenance, then they can plan this into the budget.  It allows them to proactively raise the money, schedule the staff, and work-out show schedules.

Combine this information with other related issues.

So, you’ll have the stage stripped of the drapes in mid-May?  This would be a good time to re-hang the draper tracks that are bent, and/or repaint the stage floor, or maybe paint the grid-iron deck white (so the crew gets less nervous up-there), or maybe dust the stage walls and grid deck to tidy-up.  Get maximum benefit from the drapes being gone.  This is efficient use of resources.  It looks like you are a good planner to the board, and they may just decide to keep you around another season.

The long term is the development and implementation of a maintenance plan.

The plan starts with an inventory list.  You can’t track it if you don’t know you own it.  A comprehensive list of all your equipment is useful for many things.  You can show that the equipment was accounted-for for insurance purposes, you can depreciate the value of the equipment for tax purposes, and you can use it to project the periodic maintenance costs and the end-of-life.

A good resource to include in your planning is the manufacturer’s Preventative Maintenance (PM) schedule.  Know what it is for each piece of equipment and follow the recommendations.  By planning for a PM, you can schedule the work to be done on your slower days and avoid having a piece of equipment unavailable during peak activities.  If your venue’s show schedule is very seasonal, then you may want to plan a PM of all your critical equipment before the start of your peak season.

A good maintenance plan also includes a comprehensive training program for your crew.  They should be taught the basics about how to inspect and safely operate each piece of equipment.  The program should be documented and taught by a trained instructor.  The “inspection before use” training should include a segment about recognizing potential problems and a means of reporting damaged or broken equipment.  If a device is unsafe for use, then it should be “red-tagged” and set-aside in a designated ‘to be fixed’ area so that it can be worked-on.

All equipment should have serial numbers on them to allow them to be uniquely identified.  This may take different forms for various types of objects:  Big boxy things can get a stick-on ID tag, where smaller items may require a bar-code or QR code sticker, and fabric goods may require an RFID tag or a sewn-in label.  Once you have items inventoried, it is a simple step to insert record fields that contain pictures, links to on-line owners manuals, and contact information for specialized service companies.

Red-tagged equipment should have the serial number logged so that there is a record of when and why the device was removed from service, who fixed it and what they did to effect repairs, and when it was returned to service.  This kind of record keeping allows you to see if a particular product, or product group, is presenting problems that will affect your long-term budgetary planning for periodic repair costs and /or a reduced life-span projection.

OSHA is another good reason to keep repair and training records.  Should there be an accident or injury they will request to see any maintenance records you have that pertain to the products involved and the training that your crew received regarding the equipment.  In May of 2011, a federal district court ruled that OSHA has the right to subpoena safety audits and other records prepared by an employer’s insurance carrier.  The court also ordered the carrier to testify about the records.  The court’s decision serves as a reminder that OSHA continues to aggressively wield its enforcement authority, and that safety audits, internal safety reports, and related documents – even when prepared by an insurance company or an outside consultant – may eventually end up in OSHA’s hands.

Short-Term Readiness

The short-term Plan is a contingency plan that details the action steps to take when something does break.  The two parts of this plan include seeing to the repair of the item and then deciding how business will be maintained.

Spare parts fall into the short-term plan.  Do you carry the recommended spare parts or only a partial quantity?  Spare parts can be expensive and many companies reduce the recommended lists to what they perceive as critical, or what they had budgeted.  Spare parts are intended to minimize downtime by being available when needed.  Don’t expect that your serviceman will have all the components on his truck to fix your equipment.  They service too many types of equipment to have all needed parts on their trucks.

As spare parts are consumed, they should be replaced.  Sounds simple but too many companies don’t replace spares or they delay replacement because “it just failed – it won’t break again right away.”  Ordering the spare at a later date may not happen and the part won’t be available when needed.

Your comprehensive plan should include a short-term contingency plan spelling out what to do when equipment goes down.  The plan should answer:

• Who is qualified to do the repair?
• What tools will they need?
• How long will the equipment be out of commission?
• Do you need to rent or borrow equipment to cover the device that is out of service?
• Does this device create any safety hazards by being out of service?
• How will the safety hazards be addressed?

A good, well thought out maintenance plan will help reduce the chances of a breakdown in your systems.  More importantly, it will minimize the impact of a breakdown when (not if) it does occur.  And it will.