How SFG20 streamlines maintenance activity

For those that may not be familiar with SFG20, it is the industry standard for building maintenance specification, with an extensive library of schedules covering more than 70 different asset types, plus the fabric of the building itself. It was created in 1990 in response to the need for a standard that would drive legal compliance, and is used by organisations in a wide range of sectors — including healthcare, education, government, retail, residential, and many more — to ensure safe, legal and competent building maintenance. The system enables users to access asset-specific compliant maintenance schedules that ‘plug into’ their maintenance plans or Computer-Aided Facility Management system. These maintenance schedules can be used to considerably shortcut the research part of drafting compliant Planned Preventative Maintenance schedules.

Each schedule comprises asset-specific tasks that instruct the user on what action to take, when to do it, how long each task is likely to take, and the skillset required to carry out each job. Users simply need to upload their asset register into SFG20’s software solution, Facilities-iQ, and the software then maps the relevant maintenance schedules to their assets.

The resulting maintenance plan is then extracted to their CAFM via an API (Application Programming Interface) that provides a seamless data exchange, consolidating their workflow down into a single software solution.

Real-life example of the in-use benefits

To illustrate the in-use benefits that, say, an NHS Trust user of SFG20 can gain, I recently spoke to Mathew Houghton, IT lead for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, about his own experience.

James Weber (JW): “It would be great if you could start off by telling me a little more about you and the estate you manage, Mathew.”

Mathew Houghton (MH): “Sheffield Teaching 
Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s 
largest providers of integrated hospital and community-based healthcare. We provide a comprehensive range of local and tertiary services to the residents of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Mid Yorkshire, and North Derbyshire, alongside some highly specialist services to all parts of England.

“As the IT lead for the Trust, I’m in charge of the 
CAFM system used to manage maintenance workflows for the Trust’s estates, which include the Northern 
General Hospital, the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, 
the Jessop Wing (Maternity facility), the Weston Park Cancer Centre, and the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital. I maintain the actual system to keep people scheduled. This includes daily activities, PPMs, unplanned maintenance, and reactive works etc.”

JW: “A sizeable estate then. How did the Trust keep on top of its maintenance responsibilities prior to adopting SFG20?”

MH: “We were doing our best, but keeping abreast of all the latest technical updates, and of information about how all the various elements are maintained — assets, buildings, and the estate essentially, was proving difficult. Many people went off at a tangent dealing with their own particular asset ‘in silos’, rather than having one central repository of all that information, which is what SFG20 provides.

“We had an old system that was heavily paper-based, but clearly, we live in the digital age now, so when I joined the Trust in 2018, I quickly realised that the system was lacking in many of the features that modern organisations really need to be working with. That started the journey to getting a CAFM system, but when I was asked to keep up with legislation as well, I knew I couldn’t do it all myself; that’s a full-time job.

“Rather than pay someone to keep on top of all 
those HTMs, HBNs, and legislation etc, I thought there must be solutions out there which provide that service at a fraction of the cost that you would pay someone full-time. I thus embarked on some research around this — and that’s where the journey started that led me to SFG20 ultimately. It’s BESA (the Building Engineering Services Association) backed, and the industry standard; that’s what I saw it as. From my research, it seemed to be the product to go to.”

JW: “Well that certainly makes sense, but how did SFG20 actually address and solve your problems?”

MH: “SFG20 gives us easy access to all compliance information quickly, and the technical bulletins we get monthly keep us up to date so that we can quickly jump into the system, find any sort of schedule changes, and adopt them as quickly as possible. We conduct internal meetings to make sure that we have the capacity to handle those changes if necessary, but SFG20 allows us to be on the pulse. I estimate that the full process of checking the latest SFG20 technical updates and manually updating those maintenance plans in my CAFM took up around 20% of my time. Two of me would be a lot easier.”

JW: “So, you’ve essentially lost the requirement to hire an additional Compliance officer as well. Have you made any other cost savings?”

MH: “Many of our clients use the standard to figure out what they do and do not need to maintain legally, which can result in cost savings. We generally look at the statutory tasks — because obviously this is about legal compliance, and you can’t get away from doing that. We look at at the non-statutory tasks on a case-by-case basis, it we have the resource.

“When it comes to carrying out compliance checks, our primary focus is clinical areas, and then non-clinical areas. SFG20 has given us the knowledge that we are doing things correctly, as well as which tasks we have to focus on. We’re part of the NHS, so for us it’s all about prioritising the patient experience and saving money ultimately. We’re a non-profit organisation, so we aren’t focused on making money, but rather saving it.

“We’re still doing a large body of work to prove that we are actually making time and cost savings, but it’s a massive task, as we have two major hospitals that we manage, and the CAFM systems are not fully up to date, so it’s still an ongoing evolving process with that.”

JW: “So how are you finding Facilities-iQ, Mathew?”

MH: “For me, obviously the new layout was great. It’s more modern, refreshing, and easy to navigate through, and I do like the comparison feature, which makes it easy to compare old schedules to new schedules. It’s perfect; it does everything it needs to do, and saves me messing about printing out documents or getting multiple screens up and trying to read through and highlight certain areas. It does it for you, and it saves so much time.”

JW: “That’s great to hear, but how was the migration process from the old SFG20 software?”

MH: “For us, it was straightforward. We use SFG20 to understand the updates and then upload them into our system. There is a whole range of new features that I’m looking forward to exploring, such as creating custom schedules and adding assets to work out holistic timings over what it takes to maintain buildings, which is really going to help us calculate the labour resource required to maintain our hospitals. It’s easy, as I said; I found the search feature a lot better, things are quicker to find, the technical updates are there, and it’s saving me time — which is the biggest benefit for me.”

JW: “How was your experience with the onboarding process?”

MH: “Perfect, seamless. Lesley McKaskie, the SFG20 Customer Training lead, was very patient. We had the three-day training session, and I was part of the beta testing too, so I already had a decent understanding of it. It’s nice having my colleagues getting licences too; the new subscription model means it’s not all on me anymore.”

JW: “Was the software difficult to learn?”

MH: “No, it’s intuitive and simple. Navigation is there, the breadcrumb trail is there. You haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel too much, which is a good thing, because people are used to existing systems and established navigation styles.”

JW: “One final question, Mathew. How would you rate working with SFG20, and why?”

MH: “Working with SFG20 has been great. You’ve been professional, patient, and you’ve got the technical knowledge of what you’re doing, which gives us the confidence to trust you.”