Facility management for factories
Maintenance planned around production, cleaning inside shutdown windows, and records several authorities can read.
A factory buys FM to protect output and to stay licensed. Planned work has to fit production windows, cleaning has to survive an inspection, and the evidence has to satisfy the industrial licence, the landlord authority, the environmental permit, Civil Defence and your customers' auditors.
What a plant manager is actually managing
Downtime is the currency. Every planned intervention competes with output, so maintenance that cannot state its duration does not get a window, and maintenance that overruns does not get another one. At the same time the plant carries a compliance load that has nothing to do with production: an industrial licence from the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, an environmental permit, Civil Defence requirements, whatever your industrial city requires as landlord, and a customer audit programme on top. Several bodies, several formats, none of them accepting another's paperwork. The facilities team ends up assembling evidence several times over from the same underlying work.
- Access windows are short, fixed and set by somebody other than the facilities team
- The asset that stops the line is rarely the asset with the best records
- Utilities, compressed air and effluent are production issues that arrive as FM tickets
- Contractor access, permits and inductions multiply during a shutdown and stop being tracked
- The evidence exists but sits in four systems, so producing it takes a week each time
Where we start on an industrial site
Usually with the asset register and the shutdown, because those two decide whether everything else is possible.
Planned maintenance
Criticality set against what a failure costs the line, and tasks placed in the windows production actually gives.
Read moreFMIndustrial cleaning
Shutdown packages with a method statement, an hour by hour timeline and a handback time.
Read moreFMMEP
Electrical, mechanical and plumbing works under permit and isolation, with the paperwork issued before the day.
Read moreFMPest control
A mapped monitoring programme, which on a food or pharmaceutical plant is a prerequisite programme rather than a service.
Read moreFMVendor management
One register for the lift company, the generator specialist, the waste contractor and everyone else who comes through your gate.
Read moreSystemsEvidence OS
The record that lets you answer several authorities from one source instead of several.
Read moreWho asks you for what
The FM scope does not create any of these obligations. It decides how painful they are to evidence.
| Requirement | What it means on site |
|---|---|
| Industrial licence | Issued by the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources. Facility condition and safety provisions sit behind it, and the evidence for them is maintenance evidence. |
| Your industrial city | In Dammam 1st, 2nd and 3rd the landlord and licensor is MODON. Inside Jubail and Ras Al Khair it is the Royal Commission, which runs its own environmental regime on top of the national rules. |
| Environmental permit | The National Center for Environmental Compliance outside Royal Commission cities. Waste routes, effluent and emissions evidence come partly from FM records. |
| Civil Defence | Fire and life safety provisions on the premises. Detection and alarm maintenance records are the part of this that sits with us. |
| SFDA | Applies if the plant makes food, feed, cosmetics, drugs or medical devices, and it changes the cleaning, pest and water records from useful to licence critical. |
| Customer audits | Usually the most frequent visitor. Buyers in the Aramco supply chain routinely require ISO 9001, and multinational buyers audit their suppliers' facilities directly. |
What plant managers ask first
Can you work around our shutdown calendar rather than proposing your own?
That is the only way it works. The planned schedule is built after we see your production calendar, and where a task cannot fit a window we tell you at scope rather than discovering it in month four. Some tasks then have to be bought as shutdown packages instead of routine maintenance, and it is better to know that in advance.
Do you isolate our production equipment?
No. Your authorised person isolates and we work to that isolation under permit. We do not accept verbal confirmation that a machine is safe, and we will not touch a system your team has not formally handed over.
We are inside Jubail. Is that different?
Yes, materially. Inside a Royal Commission city the RC is landlord, municipality, environmental regulator and permit authority at once, and RCER requirements apply in addition to national ones. A provider who treats Jubail like Dammam finds that out on the first mobilisation.
Our records are spread across three systems. Do we have to migrate?
Not necessarily. The requirement is that closure produces evidence and that the evidence can be found by asset. If your existing system does that, we work in it. If it does not, migrating to a tool that does is a smaller job than most people fear, and the asset register is most of the work either way.
What does a typical engagement look like?
A building materials plant in Dammam 2nd Industrial City loses a day of output when a compressor and a transformer room fan fail in the same week of July, and its maintenance records live in three spreadsheets. The survey classes the compressor, the main LV board, the transformer room ventilation and the dust extraction fans as class A, with readings every visit and spares on site, and sets dust-driven filter intervals short. Intrusive work goes into the Friday and Eid windows, and the HV specialist and the crane inspector move into the vendor register as managed specialist work. The plant ends up holding an asset register with criticality, a calendar built around its windows, a vendor register with inspection dates and one monthly pack that answers its customer auditor and its insurer from the same record.
Can you support a customer audit at short notice?
The point of building the record continuously is that short notice stops mattering. What we will not do is assemble a retrospective evidence pack for work that was never recorded, because that is manufacturing, and both of us would be able to tell.
Part of one system
Every division keeps records to the same standard, so the second one you need works the way the first one did.
Book a site survey
On an industrial site the asset register is the most useful thing the survey produces: the list, the criticality and a draft schedule that fits your production calendar.