The Execution Of Maintenance Work Construction Essay

Building maintenance is synonym with the building. Building maintenance will be start after the construction of the building is fully completed. After the completion, most of the building need to be maintained because that will be use the building for the long term and maintenance also is implement is to provide and ensure the condition of the building is in a good condition and give comfortable to the users of the building. The building condition in terms of the design, materials, facilities, painting, cleaning and so on in the future either in a good condition, maintain without any changes or the building become worse or not well maintain will depend on the maintenance management. In order to ensure the building in a good maintenance, the organizing maintenance work is an important part in the maintenance of the building. The purpose of the organizing maintenance work is to examine how the maintenance works are organizes in order to maintain the building in a good organizing maintenance. Therefore, these study presents the results of the ways in organizing maintenance work.

INTRODUCTION

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.

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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 (Seeley, 1976). Maintenance is also defined as any activity such as cleaning, painting and minor repair carried out systematically, on a planned cycle and based on regular inspection (Dann & Timothy, 2007).

It can conclude that 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 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, Planned Inspections, 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, Planned Inspections, 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, Planned Inspections, 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, Planned Inspections, 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 (Seeley, 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, periodic 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. 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. 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 (Wordsworth, 2001). 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 (Wordsworth, 2001).

EXECUTION OF MAINTENANCE WORK

Building maintenance is not a single industry and it can undertake by the outsource labor such as contractors, direct labor that is the in-house maintenance department of the building or combination of direct and outsource labor will maintain the building by own. The decision in choosing the labor either direct or outsource of the maintenance labor will depends on the number of criteria. The criteria is might be in terms of the design of the building, materials of the equipment, size of the building, number of the staff and so on. The structures of the maintenance organizations will examine together with programming and operational activities. Finally, the training of maintenance staff and the operation of incentive schemes are considered.

Direct, outsource or contract, or combination of the both labor of the maintenance also one of the way in organizing maintenance work. The decision in choosing the type of the execution of maintenance work should compare the costs and services provided by contractors with the own directly employed labor forced, taking into account the availability of labor and the type and the location of the buildings that need to maintain (Seeley, 1976).

Direct Labor

Most public bodies have directly employed staff of their own specifically available to undertake building maintenance work compared to the private organizations. These may range from general, multi-skilled, or unskilled, handyman or repair person to a team of operatives with a range of skills. Direct labor usually provide a 24/7 service, or maybe the work from Monday to Friday (Wood, 2009). These individual normally known as a direct labor because the staff employed to execute the maintenance work directly employed as part of the client organization (Wood, 2009).

The advantages of direct labor in organizing maintenance work are direct labor allows full control of activities of the maintenance. This type of the execution also should ensure good standard of workmanship by craft operatives who enjoy continuity of employment but recruitment may be a problem. Maintenance manager also can introduce and operate incentives scheme by using the direct labor in their organizing maintenance work. Last but not least, the advantages of the direct labor is particularly well situated for execution of emergency repairs as labor force is familiar with location of switches, manholes, operational services and services requiring particular or unusual skills for which employees can be trained (Seeley, 1976).

On the other hand, the establishment of the direct labor maintenance force will require the provision and administration of supporting facilities such as stores, workshops, and transport. Besides that, a high standard supervision also required in order to ensure the quality of the maintenance services and the productivity of the services. Then, the experienced and efficient management also required in order providing effective labor relations and communications. Accounting procedures of direct labor organizations vary considerably and some rationalization would facilitate statistical analysis to general advantage. Nevertheless, direct labor has no debts, no costs of tendering in competition. However, on the other hand, often has a high rate of sickness and its higher ratio of staffs to operatives may exceed the contractor’s profit element (Seeley, 1976).

Outsource or Contract Labor

Outsource or contract labor play an important role in maintenance work for keep the building in repair and maintain, and for the larger periodic works. Maintenance of lifts, swimming pools, fire extinguisher and other sophisticated plant mostly required special outsource or contract labor to execute the maintenance work (Seeley, 1976).

Outsource or contracts labor will engage and employ when the maintenance work requires a particular skill, experience, or qualification. Furthermore, outsource or contract labors are contracted when the maintenance work cannot be entrusted to an unskilled person as the job or its outcome would be dangerous, potentially destructive or otherwise unacceptable, if not done correctly (Wood, 2009). Most of the construction work including repair and refurbishment will carry out by outsource or contract labor either as small firms or self-employed individuals (Wood, 2009).

The advantages by employ outsource or contract labors are they are more professional in the attitude and skills due to expert in the field. Besides that, contract labor also more expose to the new technology skills and knowledge. Contract labor will equip with computer hardware and software packages. Furthermore, reduce the work on the maintenance work. This is because, by employ the contract labor, maintenance manager will not force to the staff and materials to be used in the maintenance work.

Finally, it can conclude that it may preferable to confine direct labor to little more than emergency and schedules maintenance, and to use contractors for the seasonal, major and specialist work, although many efficient direct labor organizations would quarrel with this approach. Contractors need long term contracts to give the employer good service on advantageous term.

CONCLUSION

Building maintenance work is most important thing after the builders leave the site of the construction. The maintenance work is required to keep and maintain the building in a good condition, under control and supervision. The maintenance is not only for the users and for owner comfort but it is also for the economic survival. However, the effectiveness and the quality of the maintenance is depends on the organization of the maintenance in the building to organize the maintenance to best effect. Different organization will organize maintenance work differently unless the different organization will transfer the responsibility of the maintaining the building to the same contract labor of maintenance.

Maintenance manager is the person who responsible in organizing maintenance works to best effect to ensure that the building is under the effective maintenance. Maintenance manager also must consider and implement the best way and approach in organizing the maintenance work. This study shows that maintenance planning, supervision maintenance work, planned inspections and execution maintenance work is a best approach to be used in organizing maintenance work by the maintenance manager.

It can conclude that, organizing maintenance work will best effect by organize with the maintenance planning, supervision maintenance work, planned inspections and execution maintenance work. Organizing maintenance work will more proper, well organized and more effective and efficient by having the maintenance planning that is the maintenance manager can prepare the plan in long-term, medium-term and short-term levels of planning. Furthermore, supervision also can supervise the maintenance work during the progress. Then, the planned inspections can assist the maintenance manager to recognize the problems on that building. Lastly, execution maintenance work can assists the organization of maintenance building in order to keep and maintain the building more effective and organize by separated and grouping the tasks between direct and contract labor of maintenance.