By Iyaloo ya Nangolo
Maintenance of infrastructure is critical in achieving long-term sustenance of any asset. Within the built environment, particularly in Namibia, this fact can never be overemphasised. Maintenance is defined as work undertaken in order to keep, restore or improve every facility, i.e. every part of a building, its services and surrounds to a currently acceptable standard and to sustain the utility and value of the facility (Definition recommended in R. and D.
Bulletin Building Maintenance Department of the Environment of RSA). In this context, standards refer to the criterion, gauge or yardstick that can designate, in common, any measure by which one judges something as authentic, good or adequate.
All buildings require owners to pay attention to their maintenance needs. Since the life of a building can be maximised by regular service maintenance, this gives the users a comfortable environment to work in. I contend also that, a building is essentially an economic good or service rendered to its occupiers. Through the market pricing mechanism, the quality of a building as an economic commodity can be measured in terms of the level of satisfaction derived by its occupiers from their use of the enclosed environment. The degree of user satisfaction, in turn, is dependent on, amongst other things, the level to which the business has been maintained.
Tenant or owner expectations of maintenance have increased in line with standards of living, and because the standards of living have improved over the years, it is natural to expect an equivalent improvement in the buildings in which people reside. However, in times of financial stringency, there is a need for the highest quality and service, with the minimum cost levels. This requires good management, which is backed by efficient planning, programming and control procedures for maintenance work. However, research has shown that many organisations calculate the annual maintenance budget on the basis of the previous year’s expenditure plus a factor of inflation and growth. If the intention is to adequately maintain the organisation’s major capital asset, this is unsatisfactory and economically unsound. In particular, this approach does not take account of the evaluated workload and servicing arrangements. The basic tools or mechanism for forward planning of maintenance and replacement needs are not available and frequently considered unimportant. This results in a situation where the norm for building maintenance budgets, at least for building fabric repairs and maintenance, has been to rely on historical expenditures. However because buildings are wasting assets, periodic injection of capital are required to maintain capital value.
Significance of Maintenance
There are legal requirements to ensure that there is at least a minimum level of maintenance. These legal requirements require for instance, that a building should not reach a state that it is a fire hazard or represents a danger to its occupiers, neighbours and passers-by. In addition, building materials have a finite life, and as a result buildings deteriorate and this can be the source of defects and failure. Buildings where a policy of planned care and maintenance is adapted set a standard of condition and appearance which benefits the community and which affords a comfortable ambience to the people who use them.
Research worldwide has revealed that buildings are valuable capital assets, which appreciate in value and it is imperative to implement an appropriate maintenance programme so as to prolong effective life of the building.
Wherever possible the aim should be to extend the economic life of a building by making the structure adaptable and by careful management and control of the surroundings. The process of adapting and controlling the surroundings can only be achieved through maintenance.
Financial Control for Building Maintenance
A building maintenance budget represents the amount to be re-invested to preserve the built asset value. However, building maintenance generally attracts inadequate funding and buildings decay as a result of spending little or no money at all or spending money that is available, unwisely and wastefully.
The implications are obvious – priorities are low for building maintenance, and money is spent without any knowledge of how to budget for effective maintenance.
For effective management maintenance, the repairs and maintenance requirements of any organisation’s property, estates and equipment, including the necessary servicing arrangements to meet service and quality standards, must be adequately assessed and procedures established for appropriate estimating and financial control.
As an aid to effective maintenance it is important to establish a programme and an annual budget, which reflects workload requirements and expresses these on the basis of an acceptable level of labour performance and value for money.
A maintenance budget is the key instrument whereby maintenance managers can report to the decision-makers the significance of buildings as valuable assets. To the maintenance manager, the justification for maintenance expenditure is therefore crucial to the effective management of assets under his control. The resources available to any organisation, whether in the private or public sector, are limited. There are always competing or even conflicting demands. Money is one such resource and building maintenance is only one such demand.
The allocation of limited resources via a budgetary process dictates that building maintenance, as a function within an organisation, has to argue and justify its resource claims in competition with others.
This process implies that building maintenance budgets have to ensure that the work programmes are necessary, that the right provision is being made for it, that it can be justified against other claimants for funds, and that once initiated, control can be exercised upon it.
My experience tells me that pressure will always be exerted to keep down costs, at the expense of reliability. And, as demonstrated by facility management systems, there is no real saving at all. This implies that most property owners may resort to ”suffocating” maintenance work with an intention of saving. In the end an increased amount of resources will have to be spent on the neglected facility, or very little revenue will be realised as tenants, and customers will desert the facility.
Funds allocated for maintenance expenditure to sustain the quality of a building is generally an economic decision evaluated mainly on financial grounds by an individual owner or a body of owners with collective vested legal interest in the property. Recognising that the economic forces are the prime motivating forces influencing the expenditure for maintenance purposes, it is important that the formulation of maintenance standards reflect the economic realities under which the buildings are being managed, therefore the maintenance standards must be set by the industry itself.
Maintenance Policy
The importance of having a maintenance policy is to ensure proper formulation of a long-term maintenance strategy and prepare budgetary forecasts. James in Seeley (1976) identifies the following factors to be considered when formulating a maintenance policy:
– The aims of the parent organisation – the nature of the end product and how it is produced and the requirements in buildings and services.
– The standards required – influenced by aims of the organisation but may vary between different buildings.
– Legal liability – compliance with statutory requirements.
– Method of execution – such as direct labour or outside contractors, with particular attention paid to the effect on production.
– Cost and method of financing – with decisions supported by cost-benefit analyses where appropriate showing that previous criteria (1-4) have been considered and optimum solutions proposed. All this information can be translated into maintenance, cleaning and operating profiles for use not only in management of property but also for guidance of designers of new buildings so that the total cost concept may be used.
The objectives of formulating a detailed maintenance policy for a specific property are:
– Analyses of present condition of buildings, their nature and use, and estimated life cycle.
– Outline programme of work necessary to put and keep the building in satisfactory condition.
– Determine the method of implementing the programme.
– Calculate the estimate costs – total and annual. In the majority of cases two assessments are needed: first for the period while the buildings are put in repair – including the routine repair in this phase – and then the assessment of the cost of keeping them in that state.
The following four criteria influence building maintenance policy:
– Social ; entails provision of a faster service to high standards of quality.
– Financial; concerns investing funds in activities in the most efficient manner with due regard to the effects on debt charges, subsidies and rents.
– Technical; entails maintaining the property at a level deemed necessary after a thorough and regular technical survey; and
– To provide continuous employment to certain operatives within a fixed budget.
Conclusion
To conclude it is proper to say that when buildings are not properly maintained, their fabric first become unattractive, then unacceptable to the occupants and finally dangerous and uninhabitable. The responsibility vested in the maintenance manager is to ensure optimum levels of maintenance work on the fabric so as to preserve an acceptable environment within the buildings.
This task is a technical one that requires experience in facility management.
In the UK for example, a UK committee on building maintenance defines “acceptable standard” as “one, which sustains the utility and value of the facility,” and this is found to include some degree of improvement over the life of a building as comfort and amenity standards arise. Cleaning also constitutes part of building maintenance activities. BS 3811 sub-divides maintenance into “preventative” and “corrective” maintenance.
“Planned preventative maintenance” is work carried out within the life of the facility to ensure its continued operation, and unless such works are carried out a full value of these fixed asset can never be realised.
– Iyaloo ya Nangolo is a Registered Professional Quantity Surveyor, a Partner at Jordaan Oosthuysen Nangolo Quantity Surveyors and holds an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and the London Business School. He writes in his own capacity.