Equipment servicing progression management overview

Social landlords have a legal responsibility to ensure that the gas supply and all linked appliances provided within their housing stock are in a safe condition, underpinned by an annual safety check conducted by a Gas Safe registered engineer. This obligation extends to all gas pipework, cookers, boilers, fires and water heaters, except those that are owned by the tenant. Likewise for electrical safety, they have a duty to make sure the wiring in rented homes is sound and that any electrical appliances they provide are safe to use. Arranging regular basic safety checks for fixed installations and appliances such as washing machines and fridges is a key requirement, not just before a tenancy begins but throughout its duration. Agreed best practice recommends periodic testing of rental properties at least every five years or to coincide with a change of tenancy. The core function of servicing plan progression is to manage the regular servicing and inspection obligations for the varied types of gas and electrical equipment located across the housing stock. Identifying the target subset of assets is achieved using custom criteria, where any combination of conditional expressions can be composed using the Advanced Statement Builder. The retrieval of all potential assets matching these criteria is controlled using the system scheduled task 'Service Program Order Generation'. In addition to the rules set out within the service plan criteria, a number of qualifying conditions must also be satisfied:

• Management Episode - An asset must be defined as being managed by the housing organisation.
• Asset Reference - A unique reference must be established in the asset record, linking to its counterpart in the underlying asset management configuration database.
• Service Type - An equipment item catalogued against an asset must match the service type set within the plan - the link between equipment items and service types is defined in the underlying asset management configuration database.

Depending on the attributes configured for the service plan - the optional and inter-related choices of Generate works orders and Issue works orders - the outcome of the scheduled task can be controlled in a number of ways:

• A list containing matching assets only can be returned in the summary view, ready for subsequent manual creation of the required works orders.
• A list of matching assets can be returned in the summary view along with the automatically generated works orders.
• A list of matching assets and their corresponding works orders can be returned in the summary view along with the assigned contractors.

Integral data export opportunities also support the transfer of works order summary information compiled within each service plan, in preparation for external reporting and analysis using Microsoft Excel, or similar.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of equipment servicing progression management, including:

• To generate bulk orders for an equipment servicing programme
• To issue equipment servicing orders to a contractor
• To update the status of an equipment servicing order
• To export an equipment servicing order summary to MS excel
• To analyse the service due date for all equipment items

In addition, separate help articles focus on the prerequisite activities that are required in order for asset records to be included within a service plan, specifically:

• To create a management episode for an asset
• To add a new asset reference
• To add a task to a scheduled timetable