What is Engineering and maintenance department in the hotel?

The Engineering department is one of the 6 major operational departments in any 5 star or 5 star deluxe category hotel. It has 3 major functions:

1. Property operations - includes running the utilities like HVAC plant and machinery, water treatment and distribution, boilers and water heating, sewage treatment, external and common area lighting, fountains and water features etc. This is carried out by a dedicated set of personnel working in shifts to cover 24 hours of the day as per a predetermined time schedule. Operations will also include minor trouble shooting and technical support required for guest room snags and banquet setup.

2. Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM): This is one of the most important functions of Engineering and often cited as the most critical from longtime building asset maintenance point of view. The philosophy is to regularly carry out a set of preventive actions for every machine in the building rather than allow it to run to failure and then tackle expensive breakdown maintenance costs. A PMM schedule is drawn at the beginning of the year and a team of dedicated persons execute it accordingly. In some cases like elevators and kitchen equipments, temporary downtime may be required which is planned in coordination with the affected user departments.

3. Fire and Life safety: Engineering is also responsible to ensure a safe building for its inhabitants. This includes ensuring 100 percent up-time of all the fire pumps serving the sprinkler and hydrants around the building, the Fire Alarm system consisting of smoke detectors, manual call points and alarm bells, egress lights, emergency backup power gensets, inverters, UPS, public address system, CCTV cameras, fire doors, bollards and boom barriers etc. They work hand in hand with security personnel in carrying out evacuation drills and safety checks of the property.

Apart from these lately a new area of focus called Environmental and Energy Management has increasingly taken priority. This includes energy conservation, waste management, recycling and using green measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the building. Some measures would be like replacing incandescent lamps with fluorescent lamps or LEDs, economisers in boilers, heat recovery from AC condenser water etc.

The Engineering expenses including the energy cost and repairs and maintenance expenses accounts anywhere between 10 to 18 percent of the revenue depending on size and external environmental factors of the building. This lays added emphasis for accurate budgeting and efficient spares and consumable inventory management. Chief Engineers (or Director Engineering in larger hotels) would spend most of their time planning, budgeting or doing complain analysis to figure out medium and long term solutions for the hotel's technical challenges.