CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

Facilities management aims to provide competitive advantage to an organisation’s core

business, by reducing costs, improving flexibility, enabling the delivery of effective and
responsive services and creating a better built environment. Barrett and Baldry (2003) defined
facilities management as ‘an integrated strategy to maintaining, improving and adapting the
buildings of an organisation in order to generate an environment that extremely supports the
main goals of an organisation’. Facilities management should be implemented in the early Commented [T1]: Meaning of the field or industry that related
to the topic
phase of the project, and the facilities management team is accountable for all tasks relating to
the design, operation, construction, finance and monitoring of the building’s physical resource. Commented [T2]: Process / flow/ stages of the topic

One of the facilities management function is Operations and Maintenance (O&M), which
encompasses all services required to ensure the facilities in the built environment is able to
perform the functions it was designed and constructed for (Mohammed and Hassanain, 2010). Commented [T3]: Process/ flow / stage that is critical or need
attention. Choose one only.
Silva et al. (2004) reported that by improving maintainability at the design stage of a building,
the procedure will significantly improve the O&M of the building in the later stages of its life.
However, most of the time, a lot of consideration is given on building a facility with the lowest
initial building cost, rather than the lowest life cycle cost. This leads to the inadequate
consideration on maintainability at the design phase (Chew, 2010). Commented [T4]: What is lacking in the choosen process/flow
or stage? Must have evidence (cited in article) that there are lacking
some thing in this area.

Therefore, maintainability should be considered earlier on in the initial stage of design

and construction. Chew and Tan (2003) defined maintainability of buildings as ‘attaining the
optimum performance throughout the life span of a building within a minimum life cycle cost’.
Chew (2010) and many other scholars have recognised the importance of maintainability to be
considered right from the early stage of design and construction. Therefore, to reduce Commented [T5]: Explanation on the definition/ scope/
concept of your topic specifically
maintenance and replacement activities, it is important to incorporate maintainability attributes
in design stage so that it can lengthen the building’s service life and to maintain building
components at a minimum time, cost and effort. Commented [T6]: Explanation on the benefits or importance of
your topic

Realising that maintainability is an important aspect to be considered in design stage, a

detailed study on this aspect needs to be carried out. The study’s outcome should be able to
ensure the minimisation of building maintenance requirements in the future and also ensure a
successful implementation of maintainability attributes in design stage, particularly for future
projects in Malaysia. Commented [T7]: Explanation on the outcome of the research