Enhancing building maintenance cost performance with proper management of spare parts

Abstract

Purpose – Scheduled building maintenance requires appropriate and adequate spare parts to replace existing parts on a regular basis. Management of spare parts is seen as an important criterion to ensure the efficiency of scheduled maintenance. The purpose of this paper is to identify the contributors of spare parts management and investigate the relationship between these contributors and maintenance cost performance. Design/methodology/approach – This research adopted a quantitative approach, which utilised questionnaire surveys to study the relationship between the contributors of spare parts management and maintenance cost performance. The data were analysed through descriptive analysis, correlation, and regression analysis. Additionally, a case study was examined to validate the results obtained from the survey. Findings – The results of this research demonstrated that the quality of spare parts (QSP), budget allocation for acquisition of spare parts, and level of stocks were significantly correlated to the maintenance cost variance (MCV). Moreover, the results of the regression analysis indicated that the QSP was the significant predictor of MCV. Originality/value – This research highlights the importance of spare parts management in building maintenance. It recommends that maintenance management set up a spare parts management department for updating stocks frequently. Meanwhile, the management should avoid ad-hoc acquisition of spare parts, as this is always more expensive. The management should also select spare parts based on quality instead of lowest cost. In addition, building managers should also apply the developed regression model in practice to predict and improve maintenance performance.

Building Maintenance Practices towards the Common Defects and Resident’s Satisfaction of Elderly Homes

“…The maintenance personnel should take the responsibility to execute their tasks promptly, as the elderly who stay in the dwelling unit most of the time are more prone to be affected by the defects. Preventive maintenance or regular inspection is recommended to ensure that all the defects can be rectified timely (Au-Yong et al, 2016).…”

“…This type of approach is further broken commonly into two forms: scheduled preventive maintenance and condition-based preventive maintenance. Scheduled preventive maintenance is carried out on the item or component based on a scheduled period, which could be usage or time based (Au-Yong et al, 2016), while condition-based preventive maintenance is initiated based on the actual condition of the item or component as recorded from constant monitoring (Au-Yong et al, 2014a).…”

Modelling Smart Buildings Using Fault Maintenance Trees

“…Following the same goal, in this section we extend the HVAC to include spares in some subsystems. Redundancy is a common practice in high-resilience or safetycritical systems: RAID data storage uses extra disks to keep system availability high, cars come with a spare wheel, all modern air-conditioned buildings have spare air filters [3], etc. In HVAC-3 we use spare gates (SPARE) to implement cold spare components (whose degradation starts only after a fault occurs, [20]) for the valves in the water circuit, i.e.…”

“…We add a SPARE with one spare component for EBE 6, and another (independent) SPARE with two spare components for EBE 7 2 . Spare components are assumed identical to main components, and as soon as the main component fails, the corresponding SPARE will switch to a spare without incurring system downtime 3 . When the main component and all spares have failed, the SPARE fails and propagates a signal to the rest of the FMT.…”

Maintenance Interval towards Different Facilities and Services in High-Rise Housing

“…Various researches have proposed the scheduled maintenance as a strategy to improve the maintenance performance (Au-Yong et al, 2016;Flores-Colen & De Brito, 2010;Forster & Kayan, 2009). Meanwhile, Hameed et al (2016) noted that systematic inspection and maintenance interval helps to mitigate unwanted failure, maintenance cost and risk exposure.…”