Abstract:
Building facility management is a management system used to operate and maintain the
buildings of an institution to create an environment that strongly supports the primary
objectives of that institution. Due to the absence of building facility management
practices and regular infrastructural maintenance plans, many buildings of public
institutions are losing their economic value, leading to significant cost during
maintenance and posing a great risk for the occupant.
The objectives of the research were to study facility management practice in higher
education buildings and determining factors affecting the facility management practice.
The questionnaire survey was performed on different purposively selected higher
education building to observe their awareness and how they practice facility
management. The research adopts a mixed type of research, both qualitative and
quantitative. This research focuses on four selected universities located in the SouthWestern part of Ethiopia.
The research finding indicated that there is lack of building operation and maintenance
policy that are used in the practices of building facility management, professional experts
in building facility management, organized facility management, training for building
maintenance staffs, regular building condition survey, technologies like computerized
maintenance system to simplify building facility management practice and the result
showed that corrective maintenance was found to be in use and was ineffective in
ensuring prompt remedial works. 40 % - 50% of their response shows faults on buildings
(physical problems) were mostly noticed by physical reporting and maintenance
requisition forms. The main problems found in the university building maintenance were
due to lack of trained staff, insufficient budget and too many calls for service. The
plumbing Cleaning and lightening system in the studied university facilities were the
major sources of complaints. Proper maintenance culture, Bureaucratic reporting
process inadequate training is a major cause for maintenance problems.
