Challenges and Gaps in Facility Maintenance Practices

Abstract

Facility management involves a variety of processes with a large amount of data for managing and maintaining facilities. Improved and emerging technologies available to facility managers have provided opportunities for easier access and management of the data allowing for more effective and efficient operation and maintenance. The concept of big data can help with extracting meaningful and valuable information from the available data. Current facility management practices and processes have many data management challenges, including data loss, time wasted for searching information, lack of interoperability, and so on. Lack of proper decision-making approaches and lack of maintenance planning can increase the cost of operation, influencing the quality of facility management. To effectively overcome these challenges and gaps, proper data management approaches and tools should be implemented. A structured literature review was conducted to identify challenges and gaps in three key facility processes: processing work orders, timely access to relevant data during field maintenance operations, and quality control/quality assurance of field tasks. This paper provides an overview of the three key processes, summarizes the challenges and gaps identified for each key process and proposes a framework to improve on the execution of these processes and enhance facility management decision making.