Maintenance agreement review & management

A defensible agreement defines scope and exclusions explicitly, sets separate response times for breakdowns and entrapments, specifies preventative maintenance frequency and the tasks in each visit, names which components are covered and which are charged as extras, and states how performance is measured and what happens when it is not met.

Most disputes we review are not about whether work was done but about whether the contract required it. Vague scope, silent exclusions, uncapped escalation and automatic roll-over provisions are common and are almost always resolvable at renewal, but only if they are identified before the agreement is signed.

The labels are not standardised between contractors, so they tell you very little on their own. What matters is the exclusion list.

Broadly, a basic or preventative agreement covers scheduled servicing and lubrication, with repairs and components charged separately. A comprehensive agreement adds a defined set of repairs and replacement components. A full comprehensive agreement extends that further, sometimes to major components. Two contracts carrying the same label from different contractors can allocate risk entirely differently. Always read the exclusions and the definitions before the inclusions.

Monthly to quarterly preventative maintenance is the Australian norm for lifts in commercial and residential buildings, with the interval set by equipment type, age, usage and the manufacturer's recommendations.

In practice a quarterly cycle is common in apartment buildings and monthly attendance is common in higher-traffic commercial installations. What matters more than the stated frequency is whether attendance actually occurs and what is performed during it. Both are auditable against the agreement you are already paying for.

Measure five things: attendance against the scheduled preventative maintenance program, callback frequency and repeat faults on the same unit, response times against the times in your contract, defect close-out rates, and the proportion of attendances that are reactive rather than scheduled.

Each is verifiable from records the contractor already produces. Where those records are not being supplied, or cannot be reconciled to the contract, that is itself a finding. Records only take you so far, though. Some of the defects that matter most never present as a fault: ropes that are not being lubricated, for example, will corrode and rouge quietly for years, and the problem surfaces on physical inspection long before it would ever be visible to a building owner, by which point the remedy is replacement rather than maintenance. Measuring the paperwork and inspecting the equipment belong together. LML measures these on a consistent basis so performance can be compared across time and, for portfolio clients, across buildings and contractors.

Almost always, yes. The terms of your existing agreement determine when and at what cost, so check three clauses before giving notice: the term and expiry date, the notice period, and any automatic roll-over provision.

Automatic roll-over clauses are common and are the usual reason owners find themselves locked in for a further term. Notice periods can be lengthy. Some agreements also contain early-termination charges or provisions dealing with proprietary tools, software or access codes on the controller. That last point is worth checking early, because it affects who can realistically maintain the equipment after a change.

Proprietary and closed-protocol are not the same thing, and the difference matters. The major manufacturers supply only their own proprietary equipment, but most of that equipment can still be serviced by other contractors, including Tier 2 firms. The usual constraints are sourcing spare parts, which have to come from the manufacturer, and equipment-specific expertise, rather than an outright technical lock-out. Genuine lock-out does exist, though: where controllers, diagnostic tools or access codes are restricted to a single authorised supplier, it becomes impractical for anyone else to maintain or fault-find on the equipment, and competition at each renewal is materially reduced.

This is one of the most significant long-term commercial consequences of a modernisation decision, and it is generally settled at specification stage rather than at contract stage. Where an owner wants a contestable maintenance market for the next twenty years, the requirement for non-proprietary or open-protocol equipment must be written into the specification before tendering, not raised afterwards. What we care about is the optimisation of vertical transportation: improving the safety, reliability, performance and longevity of the equipment.

Define the scope first, then price it. A tender that asks contractors to quote against their own standard agreements produces submissions that cannot be compared.

LML's process establishes the required scope, service levels and reporting obligations in a single specification, issues it to a recorded tenderer list, manages questions and issues addenda to the full list so no tenderer holds a different document set, and produces a written assessment and recommendation. Where the recommended tender is not the lowest, the assessment says so and explains why.

As a working benchmark, a well-maintained lift in a commercial or residential building would be expected to record in the order of 0.5 to 2 breakdowns per lift per year. Service and industrial lifts typically run higher. Where a unit is recording substantially more than that, the cause is usually identifiable and often correctable.

These figures are industry rules of thumb rather than published Australian statistics, and they should be read with care. Callback rates are affected by usage, age, environment and how the contractor records events: some log every reset, others do not. The useful signal is not the raw number but the trend, and whether the same fault recurs on the same unit.

On most installations the largest single source of breakdowns is the doors and door operator, followed by control system faults and worn components approaching end of life.

Recurring faults are diagnostic. A unit that fails repeatedly in the same way is usually telling you either that a component is at end of life and is being repeatedly reset rather than replaced, or that a maintenance task is not being performed. Reviewing the fault history alongside the maintenance records and a physical inspection will normally identify which.

Industry estimates put entrapments at roughly one in five lift breakdowns. Entrapment frequency is therefore a direct function of overall reliability.

This is the metric most likely to generate complaints from residents and tenants, and the one committees are most often asked about. It is also the strongest practical argument for treating a rising callback rate as urgent rather than routine.

Escalate it from a service issue to a technical one. Persistent faults that survive multiple attendances usually need root-cause analysis rather than another repair.

That means reviewing the full fault history rather than the last few callouts, inspecting the equipment independently, examining what was actually replaced on previous attendances, and determining whether the fault is a component at end of life, a maintenance deficiency, or a design or installation issue that was never resolved. The outcome is a corrective action plan the contractor can be held to, with defined items and dates.

Yes, if you want us to. Many clients engage LML specifically to take the technical conversation with the contractor off their desk.

That can range from reviewing and responding to quotations, through managing defect close-out and performance issues, to acting as the owner's representative for the duration of a project. Where an ongoing arrangement is in place, we hold the contractor to the measured performance obligations in the agreement rather than to a general expectation of service.