Façade material selection criteria for optimising building maintainability

Maintainability of building facilities partially relies on the materials selection as their potential to resist defects from common deterioration, ease maintenance, and minimise maintenance cost can be improved throughout their designed life. Therefore, it is highly critical that during the design stage, scores of material options are identified and analysed for their suitability to achieve maintainability during post construction occupancy. This article identify a set of criteria to evaluate facade materials as to their potential contribution to post construction maintainability in built environment. Ten maintainable façade material selection criteria which is durability, cleanability, material sustainability, compatibility and suitability, health and safety, material economy, material availability, functional performance, thermal performance and acoustical had been identified by using NVIVO and content analysis on 40 selected articles. This initial findings will provide a review on the maintainability attributes that needed during selecting façade material to ensure successful implementation of design maintainabilit

Facility management variables that influence sustainability of building facilities

Incorporating facility management (FM) knowledge in the building design is essential to increase overall performance of building including quality and cost as; the management and operation process of facilities can have a significant impact on energy, cost, health and safety, and quality. As a result, a more efficient and sustainable facility will be turn over during the post occupancy stage. Thus, this paper explores the consideration of FM during design stage and its influence on achieving sustainability of building facilities in post occupancy phase, and subsequently identifies a set of criteria to evaluate the potential of FM to achieve sustainability of building facilities. A critical review of the literature has been carried out for the purpose of identifying the said variables. Literature review reveals that there is a need to review FM potential of the design during the design phase; mainly due to increased life cycle cost, environmental impact, impact on health and safety and quality of the building facilities during the service life. This paper aims to address the long pending quest of poor awareness of the FM function among the designers and forms the basis for achieving FM sustainability of building facilitie

Critical success factors for low cost housing building maintenance organization

Building services are the elements within a building which supports the fundamental operation of a building. Efficient performance of building services able to facilitate and avoid an unnecessary aggravations to the end users. Thus, the role of building services maintenance (BSM) organization is vital during the building operation phase in order to be responsible for overall performance of the building and its services. However, in recent years the maintenance performance provided by BSM organization is lack on many aspects. In Malaysia, the performance provided by BSM organization especially in low cost flats are considered to be poor. Hence, this paper focuses on identifing the BSM problems, the cause and consequently identify critical success factors (CSFs) to be applied by the BSM organization to overcome those problems. Reviews on literatures, questionnaire survey and interview were conducted to collect the valuable data for the study. The data obtained was analyzed using frequency, mean, standard deviation and content analysis. The findings indicatethat the common BSM problems occur in low cost flats are refuse disposal, rain water disposal and fire fighting system. While, lack of expertise, long duration taken and limited numbers of staffs are among the factors identified as the causes of those problems. 10 CSF namely clear goals and objectives, workforce development and training, effetive monitoring and feedback, project team competence, dedicated resources, management planning, taking account past experience, good interdepartmental communication, education on new technologies and clients expectations are identified to solve the challanges facing by the maintenace organization which causes various BSM problems. The 10CSF identified based on the opinion given by 24 interviewees from various Local Authorities. A low cost flat managed by Kuala Lumpur City Hall located at Cheras was used as case study. This study expected to help respective parties to overcome the BSM problems in the low cost flats