The Identification of Design for Maintainability Imperatives to Achieve Cost Effective Building Maintenance: A Delphi Study

Abstract

Incorporating maintainability during the building design is essential to increase overall performance of the building including quality and cost as; the management and operation process of facilities can have a significant impact on cost, health and safety, energy and quality. As a result, a more effective and efficient building facility will be turned over during the post occupancy stage. Literature review reveals that there is a need to implement maintainability during the building design phase; mainly due to the increasing life-cycle cost of the building facilities. A critical review of the literature has been carried out to explore the consideration of maintainability during the building design and subsequently identifies a set of criteria and indicators to be applied during the building design phase to achieve cost effective building maintenance. Thus, this paper opted a four-round Delphi questionnaire survey to identify the relevant design for maintainability criteria and indicators to achieve cost effective building maintenance. 8 designs for maintainability criteria along with the indicators for each of the criterion have been identified. These design for maintainability indicators help the building architects to incorporate maintainability practice during the building design phase and thus help to achieve cost effective maintenance. This paper aims to address the long pending quest of incorporating maintainability during the building design phase and consequently achieve cost effective building maintenance.

Building maintenance practices in Malaysia: a systematic review of issues, effects and the way forward

“…Quality standard verification of maintenance works and spare parts to meet quality standards level is a method to solve low-quality maintenance work. Maintenance management should always give important consideration for the procurement of quality to fulfil the requirements of excellent specifications (Ganisen et al, 2015a;Omar et al, 2107;Au-Yong et al, 2017;Soh et al, 2019). Also, Au- Yong et al (2017) recommended that the use of spare parts of low quality must be avoided.…”

Bibliometric review of improvements in building maintenance

“…Another factor that several authors identified Meier and Russell (2000), Fitzgerald (2001), Molinari (2002), de Silva et al (2004), Ganisen et al (2015) is maintainability, namely the ease of performing maintenance operations, which helps to eliminate maintenance costs, reduces downtime, and increases safety. As such, buildings should be designed taking this factor into account.…”

How Lack of Knowledge and Tools Hinders the Eco-Design of Buildings—A Systematic Review

“…This strategy is about involving the facility manager, or facility management knowledge in the design phase. Important criteria in designing for maintainability is durability of building materials, easy access and performance of cleaning, repairs and replacement of materials and components [99]. Only one paper addresses the environmental benefits of applying this strategy showing that the use of durable materials show promise in terms of reducing embodied impacts.…”