The Issue
A higher education client engaged RCRProjects to strengthen their approach to Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM), covering statutory compliance, reactive maintenance, and repair works across their estate. With over 250,000 assets spanning 16 campuses in London — some dating back over 70 years — the client faced the challenge of ensuring their estate remained compliant, efficient, and aligned with Net Zero policies.
This engagement followed a major project in which RCRProjects delivered a fixed M&E asset collection and a comprehensive statutory compliance review across the estate.
You can read more about our asset survey services here.
Review
RCRProjects began with a detailed review of the client’s existing maintenance and compliance arrangements. This included auditing historic PPM delivery and statutory records across all campuses and assessing their existing compliance audit system for consistency and completeness. We reviewed the client’s Net Zero strategy to align maintenance planning with sustainability and carbon reduction goals to enable us to map maintenance requirements across 250,000+ assets, ensuring full visibility of statutory tasks and resource allocation.
In response to the initial brief, RCRProjects developed a comprehensive programme of works to integrate with the client’s existing management processes. This involved a meticulous review of their compliance audit system, providing a full year’s tracking system for planned maintenance tasks across all assets. We also created a model to monitor task efficiency. RCRProjects scheduled regular maintenance tasks throughout the year and clarified the competency levels required for engineers to complete these tasks, using guidance from industry standards and other industry guidance.
Advise
Based on our findings, we provided clear recommendations and tools to improve the client’s PPM framework by:
- Developing a one-year compliance tracking system, ensuring all statutory tasks were monitored and completed on time.
- Providing a new model for measuring task efficiency, including tracking of resource hours and cost. Giving guidance on the competency requirements for engineers, referencing industry standards and other industry best practice.
- Advising on integrated sustainability measures into ongoing maintenance, particularly around air quality and energy efficiency.
Support
RCRProjects worked in partnership with the client’s estates team to implement the recommended improvements, providing scheduling of planned maintenance tasks across the academic year and ongoing technical oversight to ensure compliance levels remained high. We offered regular reviews to verify performance against statutory, and client-specific requirements, and continued advice on optimising resource efficiency and reducing unnecessary expenditure.
The Outcome
Through this structured approach, the client is now consistently working towards a target of 95% statutory compliance or higher across all campuses. In addition, they now benefit from:
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Greater visibility and control over their maintenance operations.
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Improved resource and cost tracking across 16 locations.
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Alignment of maintenance delivery with Net Zero and sustainability objectives.
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Confidence that their estates are being managed to high standards of safety, sustainability, and affordability.
By applying our Review > Advise > Support approach, RCRProjects delivered a clear, practical, and sustainable framework for PPM compliance that continues to add value to the client’s estate management strategy.
