Strategies, Facilities Planning, and Innovative Ideas for Educational Organizations

The date of manufacture is a pretty poor indicator of useable life. Many of the district staff I have met with recently are senior staff with significant experience. Like me, these professionals have seen a lot of action and created a lot of value for their organizations. If school districts treated their staff accomplishments like the military, the combat ribbons would fill the left side of the uniforms of their senior staff. More than anyone, you would expect that these individuals would realize that “old” doesn’t mean useless. In a recent article in Talent Management magazine seasoned professionals were called the “moneyball play” for human resource departments because their value to an organization far exceeds their cost.

So why is it then that when it comes to roofing materials, the same senior facility managers tend to discard and replace serviceable components based upon their date of manufacture, rather than their condition?  The collective wisdom seems to be that once a roof reaches a certain age, it is time to plan for its replacement. I guess part of the reason is that up until now, it took a substantial amount of time and money to accurately forecast the remaining life of a roof in place. It was much easier and less risky to discard useable material, than to restore an older roof. New technology and better roofing materials make that task much easier than it was in the past. For just a few cents a square foot a national asset management organization that I have found can not only predict a roof’s useable life, but can also pinpoint the areas of roof that require attention. This firm is not your typical roof consultant. In fact they don’t see the preparation of bid documents as a core business, preferring not to profit from their recommendations. Their work is state of the art and comprehensive – the moneyball play for roof asset management.

As you can imagine, the implications of this are huge. It means that for the cost of replacing just a few roofs every year and risking the failure of all of the others,  you can put your entire roof inventory under warranty and into an annual preventive maintenance program. This is a far more effective approach to a component of the building envelope that carries significant risk for facility managers.

You can’t fix what you don’t know about. It’s time to take your roof management program into the 21st century.