Facility Maintenance Performance Perspective to Target Strategic Organizational Objectives

While facility design is increasingly playing a role addressing strategic organizational objectives, issues pertaining to facility maintenance have typically been left out of the decision-making process. Reasons include the traditional disconnection between facility design and facility maintenance, mainly originating from the lack of a modality to meaningfully represent facility maintenance information during design decision making. This paper discusses two sets of facility maintenance indicators that have the potential to bridge this traditional divide. The objective of this paper is threefold: (1) to illustrate how maintenance performance indicators can support higher-level decision making; (2) to explain how the methodology could be mapped across building sectors; and (3) to show how facility maintenance could play a crucial role in informing strategic decision making. Two types of indicators are introduced based on: (1) normative models in biophysics and physiology and (2) empiricist models of environment-behavior studies. Using examples from hospital, courthouse, and office building design, the paper articulates the manner in which facility performance indicators could be developed and used to support organizational strategic decision making. The paper demonstrates that facility maintenance indicators could be developed for all types of buildings and could be meaningfully represented for consideration during strategic decision making. Moreover, using an example of a healthcare setting, the paper emphasizes how facility maintenance strategies have an impact on higher-level organizational objectives, and vice versa, thereby underscoring the importance to consider maintenance performance during strategic decision making. The paper shows how the two sets of key performance indicators—the hard and the soft—are designed to address different scales of decision making, thereby allowing facility maintenance performance to be considered at all phases of a procurement cycle.