The Study of Building Facility Management Practice in Higher Education Institutes

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.