The Cinderella Of The Building Industry Construction Essay

Building maintenance normally regarded as the Cinderella of the building industry. The maintenance of the built environment affects everyone continually, for it is on the state of our homes, offices and factories that we depend not only for our comfort but also for our economic survival. Maintenance of the building will start from the day the builders and contractors leaves the site of the construction or after the construction is fully completed. Normally, all the building owners wants their building will keep the maintenance to a minimum cost and need the maintenance in a good and effective maintenance. In order to get the effectiveness of the maintenance, organizing maintenance work is required for the maintenance. Organizing maintenance work is to examine how work will organized to best effect. Consideration will give particularly to the place of statutory control and guidance and the involvement of contractors. The value of the supervision and inspection will explore. The overall aim is to expose methods that are most likely to achieve the desired end-result of satisfactory buildings in which to live, work and play.

Organizing is the managerial function of arranging people and resources to work toward a goal. The purposes of organizing include but are not limited to determining the tasks to perform in order to achieve objectives, dividing tasks into specific jobs, grouping job into departments, specifying reporting and authority relationships, delegating the authority necessary for task accomplishment, and allocating and deploying resources in a coordinated fashion (Anton, 2010). As a word, organization can mean an organization that is the process of getting something organized. Different organization will organize building maintenance differently. For example, two different local authorities will not organize their building maintenance work in the same way unless two different organization of the building maintenance will organized the building maintenance work in the same way is if they outsourced the provision of the service to the same company of the outsource contractors (Wood, 2009).

British Standard Institution (1964) defines maintenance as work undertaken in order to keep or restore every facility such as every part of a site, building and contents, to an acceptable standard. The British Standard further explain that where there are statutory requirements for maintenance, the acceptable standard must be no less than that necessary to meet the statutory requirements, and maintained is defined in the Factories Act (1961) as maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair (Seeley, 1976).

ORGANIZING MAINTENANCE WORK

MAINTENANCE PLANNING

The Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines a plan as a method or procedure for doing something on the design, scheme, or intention. In term of building maintenance management, maintenance planning has both a narrow and wide definition. The narrow definition relate to preventive maintenance in the form of planned maintenance programmed. While, wide definition maintenance planning as an essential management tool for controlling all aspects of a building maintenance management operation and will include planned preventive maintenance programmed, planned levels of expenditure on day-to-day and reactive maintenance, disaster planning, and planned strategies of asset management in conjunction with a business plan or corporate plan (Wordsworth, 2001). The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ Guidance Note on Planned Building Maintenance defines the maintenance planning under five categories that are determining the policy for maintenance, deciding and preparing maintenance programmes and obtaining funds for them, getting the work done, controlling progress of work and budget expenditure, and monitoring the effectiveness of the programme (Wordsworth, 2001).

The nature of the maintenance planning in the building maintenance involves determining systems and sequences of operation. This noted that maintenance planning must necessarily involve a level of prediction. The prediction is not only focus on the building stock and the deterioration, but also focus on the future policy of the owners or users of the buildings. The maintenance manager or maintenance department can deal with these uncertainties with a twofold oncoming, which are by collecting and analyzing sufficient information to place as much degree of certainty on the variables as possible and by recognizing that a level of uncertainty will remain and introducing flexibility and review options within the plan (Wordsworth, 2001). The collection of the information is to assist the maintenance manager to predict with some degree of confidence will be in the form of condition surveys of the property, details of costs and cost trends in building, and information related to the wider policies of the owners and users of the building. Care in such information gathering will enable the maintenance manager or the person who responsible for the maintenance of the building to reduce the uncertainty and permit effective planning to proceed (Wordsworth, 2001).

In planning maintenance, an aim of the maintenance manager is to match the available resources with the workload. The effectiveness planning is difficult with this category of work because of the large number of uncertain factors involved. In view of the uncertainties, maintenance planning must be formulated at different levels and constantly revised according to the new information that is put into the system. Long-term programmes medium-term programmes and the short-term programmes were identified as a level of the maintenance planning (Seeley, 1976).

SUPERVISION OF MAINTENANCE WORK

Supervision is a management activity carried out to ensure that the work as in a plan will carry out correctly and expeditiously as what in the maintenance planning (Wood, 2009). Furthermore, the supervision of maintenance work was executed is to ensure that is of a satisfactory standard and in accordance with the drawings and specification. With the larger contracts, it is customary to employ a clerk of work who is constantly in touch with the job in order to supervise the maintenance work. Besides that, the clerk of work also is responsible to ensure that the maintenance is work as a planning. However, with the smaller contracts or smaller jobs periodic supervision only can be obtained often through the medium of architects, surveyors, inspectors or other supervisory staff (Seeley, 1976).

Clerk of work must have an extensive practical knowledge of building materials, principles of construction and the execution of techniques in all trades. As a supervisor in the maintenance work, they need to ensure that all the materials and workmanship are in accordance with the drawings, specification and any other relevant documents. Furthermore, the clerk of work must to avoid their self from making any exorbitant demands or altering details or materials without getting the approval from the architect, surveyor or maintenance manager to whom he is responsible (Supervision of Maintenance Work, 1976). Besides that, the clerk of work will also responsible to prepare reports for consideration by the architect, surveyor, or maintenance manager. The preparation of the reports might be in the term of weekly reports, periodic reports or special reports (Seeley, 1976).

Site meeting is also one of the supervision of maintenance work. This is one of the way to organizing maintenance work. Site meetings will hold regularly on larger jobs and are generally convened by the architect, surveyor, maintenance manager or any person who responsible for the supervision of maintenance work. The main objective of the site meetings is to ensure that satisfactory progress is maintained and to provide the opportunity for clearing outstanding points. Supervision of maintenance work is important for the all parties to get involves in the site meeting including subcontractors (Seeley, 1976).

Adequate supervision of work to the new construction and of alteration and repair work need as one of the way in the organizing maintenance to ensure that the materials and workmanship comply with the contract particulars and relevant statutory requirements. In the absence of such strict supervision in the maintenance progress, inferior materials, poor workmanship and the omission of important details can occur resulting in subsequent trouble and expense to the building owner (Seeley, 1976).

PLANNED INSPECTIONS

A planned inspection is a formal systematic check carried out at predefined regular intervals against a detailed list of plant, equipment and activities (Code of Practice on Planned Inspections, 1993). According to the Baiche, Walliman and Ogden (2006) work needs to check regularly to ensure compliance with legislative requirements (Wood, 2009). The purpose of the planned inspections is been carried out is to ensure the systematic examinations of all locations, facilities, tools, plants, materials and to observe how these are used by employees and contractors. By carrying out the planned inspections and through taking follow up action on any defects or unsafe working practices noted, the maintenance manager or the person who responsible to maintain the building. Critically, planned inspections can effectively contribute to the provision of the safe working environment and reduce the risk of injury to persons, damage to equipment, buildings and to the environment (Code of Practice on Planned Inspections, 1993). Furthermore, planned inspections are carrying out for a variety purposes including preparation a schedule of the facilities that need to maintain and their present condition, detecting misappropriation from predetermined standards and incipient faults that may result in such deviations developing before the next inspections. Other purposes are ascertaining the cause of the misappropriations, the extent of the remedial work necessary to restore to the required standard and prevent a recurrence of the defect, and the relative urgency of the work. Checking that previous work was done in accordance with the instructions and that the work specified was adequate also is a purposes and the reason why the planned inspections is required to carrying out in the organizing maintenance work (Wordsworth, 2001).

The complicated design of the buildings and the great variety of the possible defects makes it necessary fully preplan the inspections and to provide comprehensive checklists to ensure that no part of the building is missed from the inspections. Appropriate criteria also should be laid down for each element, components, or equipments and the types of the inspections needed fully defined and documented. Planned inspections also include details of the form of the inspections. For a greater consistency in organizing the maintenance work, special program macros should be prepared for each element and sub element, setting down the essential information required by the inspector with space to record the result and the recommendation of the inspections. For the later processing, a location code is required to assists and gives some information. To facilitate retrieval and computer processing of inspections, the facilities and elements should be grouped according to the location and the periodicity of the inspections.

SCHEDULING

CONCLUSION