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Hotels are increasingly outsourcing engineering requirements.

The concept of outsourcing engineering functions within a hotel is growing exponentially, leading to better maintenance practices, says Arvind Sinha.

Hotels encompass a myriad of facilities and services, one of them being the rarely feted engineering division, which performs an invaluable role in ensuring a guest’s comfortable stay.

With the evolution of hotel building design and the ever growing range of features and facilities being incorporated, the scope of outsourcing the engineering function in hotels is expanding exponentially.

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In India today, body shopping is quite common, where hotel managements sub-contract the manpower requirements for resources like housekeeping boys and technicians, who are hired through third party vendors.

In such a model, the accountability and risk of delivering services doesn’t get transferred to the sub-contractor but remains with the hotel management.

The responsibilities of an outsourcing service provider would be to maintain the hotel building and its diverse range of assets – this would typically include walls, ceiling, floor fixtures therein, electrical distribution to the hotel, sewage and water systems, fire-alarm systems and safety methods, air-conditioning, heating and ventilation, elevators, and kitchen and laundry equipment.

To manage the equipment and systems listed above for building operations like hotels, a Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) approach is well suited, which logically incorporates preventive, predictive, and corrective practices into one comprehensive maintenance and operations programme.

The RCM process is focused on reducing levels of disruption, and improving reliability and energy efficiency of critical hotel systems and equipment.

The process is supported by computerised maintenance management systems, optimising preventive maintenance schedules in order to reducing reactive maintenance requirements, thereby extending the operating life of all equipment systems.

The appropriate tasks and frequencies must be evaluated using a value and risk-oriented approach that considers the type and age of the equipment; the manufacturers designed application; the cost of replacement and availability of replacement equipment or spare parts; and the critical nature of the functions that the equipment supports.

Traditionally, preventive maintenance regimes have assumed that equipment failures are based largely on age or use, and parts should be replaced based on associated probabilities.