Editorial

Citation

Lai, J.H.K. (2014), "Editorial", Facilities, Vol. 32 No. 5/6. https://doi.org/10.1108/F-01-2014-0008

Editorial

Article Type:

Editorial

From:

Facilities, Volume 32, Issue 5/6

Attaining a sustainable built environment necessitates not only construction of buildings with sustainable design but also proper upkeep of their facilities. Effective maintenance and performance assessment, therefore, are essential for the existing buildings. This is the main theme of the seven papers in this issue.

In many developed cites such as Hong Kong, the building maintenance sector has continued to grow and there has been an increasing attention to the safety problems of the repair, maintenance, alteration and addition works for buildings. Hon, Hinze and Chan, by doing a questionnaire survey and some statistical analyses of the collected responses, revealed that the likelihood of work injuries can be lowered by a positive workforce safety attitude and acceptance of safety rules and regulations. With the perceived levels of safety climate varying among the surveyed workers, supervisors and managers, it is recommended to promulgate specific safety measures to different levels of the practitioners.

Another paper, also focusing on building maintenance in Hong Kong, was from Tan, Shen, Langston, Lu and Yam. The study reported in this paper identified from the literature a range of factors affecting the success of the business of building maintenance, followed by carrying out a questionnaire survey to solicit the factors’ importance levels perceived by building contractors. Using ranking and factor analyses, 12 critical success factors were identified, with most of them being related to two principal factors: maintenance service, and organization and project management. While these findings may serve as reference for maintenance contractors in Hong Kong, further insights could be obtained if similar findings from other places are made available for comparison.

With its research approach akin to that of the above paper, the study of Tucker, Turley and Holgate examined the critical success factors of repairs and maintenance service for the social housing in the UK. Among the 11 factors that the authors identified as critical to the success of the service, nine were indicated by the survey respondents as “always” implemented. Sustainability and innovation are the two factors regarded as the least important, and the respondents perceived them as being only “occasionally” implemented. These findings are somewhat intriguing and they lead to the questions of what were the implementation barriers and what needs to be done to overcome such barriers.

In order to show the existence of limited research on the impact of facility management on the logistics and operational performance of warehouses, Mangano and De Marco conducted a literature review on the relevant facility management research areas, which include, inter alia, performance measurement, maintenance of built assets, outsourcing as well as contract management. A major finding is that facility management is of significant importance to logistics operations. This supports the needs of implementing effective facility management strategies for maintaining building and service components of warehouses.

Further to an earlier literature review that formed part of the work for establishing key performance indicators for facility performance measurement, Lavy, Garcia and Dixit continued to carry out that work, as reported in two parts in this issue. The purpose of Part I was to identify and categorize the core indicators for assessing facility performance. The outcome of this part includes a list of the indictors, with the variables required for their quantification described. In Part II, the authors derived the equations for calculating the core indicators that had been identified in the preceding part, and discussed the information needed for input to the equations. In addition, the aspects that need to be covered for identifying the necessary qualitative performance indicators were discussed. Validation of the equations, as the authors mentioned, needs to be done in order to complete the establishment work.

Although it is not explicit from the title of the final paper, maintenance, which falls within the focus of the current issue, is unarguably central to building conditions. Reported in this final paper is a study of Hopland, which aimed at investigating the link between the technical and subjective measures of the conditions of public schools in Norway. Based on two data sources – one from the government reports on the conditions of the school buildings and the other a survey of the students there, the technical measure was found to be significantly correlated with the subjective measure. The finding that the correlation is far from perfect warrants further studies to be pursued in future.

Joseph Lai
Co-Editor