Building maintenance management in Malaysia

Abstract

Investment in building maintenance is huge all over the world. In most countries, it represents almost 50 per cent of the total turnover of the construction industry. The value of buildings depends on the quality of the maintenance invested in them. Maintenance management involves obtaining maximum benefit from the investment made on the maintenance activities. Maintenance in buildings in Malaysia is on the increase regardless of size, type, location, and ownership. The current maintenance management procedures in Malaysia are, however, condition and reactive based. The weaknesses in the current procedures are the primary problems because they do not explicitly link maintenance needs with building performance with respect to the building users. The building users measure the performance of a building with various criteria. The condition of a building is just one of those criteria. This research establishes the need for a building maintenance management system that is based on the concept of value in the effort to lead towards the optimisation of building maintenance programmes. Maintenance management that is value based allows users to be proactively put at the centre of maintenance management during decision-making processes and takes into consideration both the objective and subjective requirements of users. © 2009 Palgrave MacMillan.