Framework for ensuring effectiveness of maintenance in building services

Abstract

Maintenance management of building services has become one of the critical issues among building sector professionals recently. The interruptions or damages to the building services extensively affect the core operation of the business. Therefore, appropriate maintenance management arrangements are required to sustain a proper building services system. Building practitioners tackle various issues and seek a variety of alternative solutions to deliver an effective maintenance strategy for the building services. However, the lack of consideration on the overall effectiveness of maintenance services has faced frequent problems such as human errors, health and safety issues, resource scarcities, and time delays. In order to address those problems, this research has been carried to develop a framework that ensures the effectiveness of maintenance activities of the building services in Sri Lanka. An extensive literature review was mainly carried to discover the impact of effective maintenance activities towards the building services. Afterwards, a preliminary experts’ survey was conducted to obtain the factors affecting to effectiveness of maintenance activities. Subsequently, a questionnaire survey was conducted among maintenance personals to rank identified factors according to their impact. Further, semi-structured interviews have been carried out mainly to identify the limitations of maintenance work. The framework highlights the factors that affect the effectiveness of maintenance activities of building services. Further, the framework facilitates to address the limitations of maintenance activities of building services. The framework can be used as clear evidence to convince both top management and owners of organisations to ensure the effectiveness of maintenance activities as well.