RAAC & Hazardous Materials

For those of us who have worked within the Facilities arena for many years, it is sadly unsurprising to see the recent issues concerning RACC that has plagued the start of a new academic year for many of the country’s schools.

It was probably around 20 years ago that we, at MASS, created an integrated solution into our Workplace Management System for the control of hazardous materials within public buildings. At that time, we (via our clients) were specifically focused upon identifying the location of Asbestos within their built environment. Through a mixture of survey data input, floor plan highlighting, and picture attachments, organisations were able to ensure that workers were both suitably informed and notified of any potential Asbestos issues as part of their maintenance tasks and schedules. The management of Asbestos was later expanded out to include all hazardous materials, as the focus on safety standards related to an organisations facility also expanded.

The uptake of such systems within Universities and Hospitals was far reaching and highly successful in mitigating risk, however, one key demographic where we struggled to gain any traction was within Schools and Colleges. Unfortunately, most of the organisations we spoke to were critically short on both finances and time, such that the idea of implementing a large and expensive Enterprise IWMS solution was simply too much of a stretch on resources to consider.

Of course one aspect of managing the maintenance of an organisations Estate and Buildings is that they represent a long term asset. As such significant, structural issues are rarely of imminent concern, but rather grow iteratively over time through either ‘push back’ or continued, unresolved, neglect. Great for short term financial savings and budgetary control, but unfortunately, as has been highlighted by the recent crisis over RACC, not so good when big issues occur. When they do it is in a big way, with big consequences. And worse there usually are no short-term fixes to such long standing structural concerns.

The point here is not to point the finger of blame, but to highlight that the most important part of any mistake is to learn from it. Today MASS has solutions that have been tailor made with smaller organisations in mind, aimed at helping them to avoid future catastrophes within their Facilities infrastructure in the future.

MASS are implementation specialists of Gravity Workplace, an IWMS that has been specifically designed as a low cost, rapid roll out solution. Our aim is to provide a full suite of Maintenance Management systems, covering both Reactive (Helpdesk) and Planned & Preventative Maintenance (PPM) but at an access point that we believe is more reflective of industry needs.