MAINTENANCE PRACTICE AS TOOL FOR EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC BUILDING FACILITIES
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Maintenance is defined as work undertaken in order to restore every facility, that is, in every part of site or building to an acceptable standard (BSI, 1964). According to Seeley (1976), maintenance is defined as ‘work undertaken in order to keep, restore or improve every part of a building, its services and surrounds, to a currently acceptable standard, and to sustain the utility and value of the building. Maintenance is defined as the combination of all technical and administration actions, including supervision actions, intended to retain an item in, or restore it to a state in which it can perform a required function.
Maintenance practice as tool for effective management of public building facilities in owerri municipal Buildings have been considered as one of the most valuable assets of a nation to provide people with shelter and facilities for work and leisure. As time passes by, maintenance of buildings becomes an invaluable process in retaining the value and quality of a building. The maintenance of buildings plays an integral role in the whole design and construction process of buildings (Lam, Chan, & Chan, 2010). Therefore, maintenance management is important for manufacturing plants, electricity generation plants and distribution systems, airlines operations, for facilities as buildings, roads and bridges. Lack of effective maintenance management will effect the performances of financial as stated by (Sinha, 2015″)
Maintenance management encompasses many operations and functions and can be described as the effective and efficient. Use of resources to make sure that the process and its facilities are kept to comply standards requirement assigned by the users (Allen, 1993). According to (Shohet & Leibovich, 2002) building maintenance is gaining a central place in the construction activity worldwide. (Allen, 1993) defined building maintenance management is a practical technique that is fragmentary and uncoordinated, reflecting the range of contractors which are involved in maintenance works. The quality and efficiency of a building maintenance management operation depend on how information on the condition of the building, the needs of the users, and the works carried out is collected and used.
In order to identify the effectiveness of maintenance management factors, key performance indicator is the best strategy to measure the performances of the building. Therefore, key performance indicators for each process are proposed to measure if requirements of each process are satisfied stated by (Cholasuke et al., 2004) this statement is in line with (Weber & Thomas, 2005) which affirmed that key performance indicator is a fundamental principle in maintenance management. In this study, the building is refers to public hospital. As proposed by (Hazilah Abd. Manaf, 2005), routine monitoring and supervision is one of the key elements to assess and identify the performance of organization in implementing plans, policies and procedures of maintenance management that relates to maintenance management. It will indicate the gap between the current performance and expected performance which could assist the organization to identify the opportunities for process improvement. The proper supervision should be implemented in order to ensure that the maintenance work is performed in accordance to the work order conditions and based on standard maintenance procedures (Wireman, 2005).
Besides that, routine monitoring and supervision need to be supported by task planning and working schedule. According to (Allen, 1993) maintenance plans and schedules help in scheduling maintenance work and allocating the resource for each work. However, task planning and scheduling need to be provided and managed by first line maintenance foreman or supervisor as well as responsible in providing the feedback to the maintenance planner to ensure that the proposed job plans are relevant, efficient and effective (Weber & Thomas, 2005). The lack of planning and scheduling will definitely restrict a maintenance operation to meet its objective in delivering the optimum service as planned by the organization. As mentioned by (Cholasuke et al., 2004), proper work planning can lead to high responsiveness, less unplanned work and less unplanned overtime with consequences of minimizing the overall maintenance cost.
In addition, (Wireman, 2005) suggested that information management system also a necessary elements of key performance indicators that provides the link between the current statuses of maintenance function in relation with the maintenance objective. Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) can be used to support the organization to automate the preventive planned maintenance (PPM) function and as an aid tool to control the maintenance inventories and material purchase for the purpose of maintenance works. CMMS is acknowledged as an effective tool that has capabilities of reporting the analysis that relates to overall maintenance management aspects quicker and accurate compared to than manual techniques. On the other hand, accessibility and accuracy of information can provide more reliable and decisions in proper maintenance work (Irajpour, Fallahian-Najafabadi, Mahbod, & Karimi, 2014). Therefore, the above elements could be classified as individual factors because all the factors are concern about managerial aspect which influenced by a building maintenance leader. The practice of maintenance approach is recognized as a factor that highly affect the maintenance performance. For instance, (Cholasuke et al., 2004) mentioned many organisations tend to adopt the proactive maintenance philosophies such as total productive maintenance (TPM) and reliability centered maintenance (RCM) since these approaches are committed to the long-term improvement of maintenance management. The distinction result between reactive and preventive planned maintenance (PPM) approach where the maintenance work planning program for preventive planned maintenance (PPM) approach drastically reduce errors in day-to-day operations, as well as increase the overall preparedness of plants in the case of an emergency.
The maintenance engineer, reviews spare parts policies for plant equipment. This review is to ensure that the right parts are in stock in the right amounts stated by (Cholasuke et al., 2004). Another aspect that related to maintenance approach is the type of maintenance work’s contract, either it is conducted by in-house or apply outsource strategy which award the project to the third party. According to (Aghghaleh, 2015), it is found that world-class maintenance organisation will out-source 30 percent of their jobs. However, in the matter of contracting out, it is how well world-class maintenance companies manage the contracting out task and “how much” benefit they gain out of this activity. It does not depend on how much company’s contract out. Yet, for the outsourcing strategy, it still depend on how well the maintenance organizations manage the contract and task as well as how much benefit they gain out by applying the outsourcing strategy. The factor of maintenance approach, spare part management and outsourcing maintenance works could be summarized as a technical aspect as it involves top management who responsible to setting up the overall maintenance approach as well as the organization has to deal with third party for outsourcing maintenance works.
The factors that lead to the continuous improvement of maintenance are the effective use of performance measurement, management commitment and the adoption of proactive maintenance. In conclusion, the factors of policy deployment and organization, human resource management, financial aspect and continuous improvement could be summarized as an administration and organizational factor as all the factors are under the control of top management
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