Monday, April 30, 2007

Putrajaya & Maintenance Contract

Entrepreneurial Development and Cooperative Minister Mohd Khaled Nordin said: "The standard of maintenance of Putrajaya buildings may have to be further enhanced.

According to Khaled Nordin government buildings in Putrajaya should be more sophisticated than elsewhere in the country and it is reasonable for JKR to re-look into the maintenance contract to see if all steps are taken to detect any defects or wear and tear in the building.

Does the government understand what is maintenance and what is maintenance management?

Maintenance of public buildings would have to deal with preservation and restoration of the facilities and infrastructures.

Maintenance management is basically concerned with the establishment of a framework for the maintenance of facilities, and it’s role is to set a standard of best practices on the management of building facilities, utilities and the upkeep of the building conditions.

It is a principle of conservation that work on a significant building should be based on a proper understanding of the building & its problems.

JKR and those responsible for maintenance management must have a Maintenance Management Framework (MMF) which consist of processes that assists them in establishing a framework for the maintenance of buildings. The primary objective of MMF is to achieve consistency in the planning, implementation & reporting of building maintenance and upkeep.

The establishment of condition standards for building is fundamental to the maintenance management process. It provides a statement of the desired condition to which assets should be maintained to enable a department’s service delivery requirements to be achieved effectively. The standards must be adequate to reflect the asset performance required to meet service delivery demand.

The application of condition standards to building involves a systematic process of reviewing all assets & nominating condition ratings that can be related to each element of each asset within the department’s asset portfolio.

Building condition standards must be articulated to the maintenance service provider & documented in procurement arrangements such as a SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT (SLA). Top level management must endorsed it. The standards will be used as referenced by the service provider within the day-to-day maintenance delivery process.

Dear Khaled and Samy Vellu, do you think JKR and Putrajaya maintenance department understand all this? Did they have the knowledge of maintenance management or are they supervisors of defects, ie wait till those plants, equipments and fittings fails or fails to work and then get the workers to repair them? This is repair management and it is damage control system, not maintenance management fundamentals.

Apart from this, do you all know how the government outsource their maintenance management and what was the criteria in the selection of contractors processes?

I once talk to a contractor who was awarded a contract for maintenance and he told me that he had sub-contracted it to another with a "nett" profit of 30%.

Dear Khaled and Samy, please go and check all your contractors and you will know almost all of them are "Ali-Babas" with 30% mark-up in their contract sum.

Paying a heavy price for lack of maintenance or the lack of a competent maintenance contractor?

The cost of maintaining Ijok is nothing!!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The 'fountain-in-the-buildings' are more likely caused by poor design/material? Proper maintenance might be able to detect them early but, by boleh standard, be prepared for more such miraculous fountains!

Semi should patent such innovative design! Well done, jkr.

Anonymous said...

semi value said ' you entreprenuer minister shout your mouth. what do you know about construction. anyway, it is not the fault of JKR or the Works Ministry. please check with EPU as all the contracts are handled by them"

Anonymous said...

Poor design and poor supervision will definitely result in higher maintenance costs. Poor maintenance will again result in even higher maintenance costs. I think this is the stage we are at now. With Semi Value at the helm, the policy is protecting poor design, poor supervision and poor maintenance but talking a lot as though he the the single most authority in construction and maintenance in the whole world. Talk and talk, no action at all. He is a true bred NATO member...No Action, Talk Only.

Unknown said...

I don't think the blames all goes to contractors. If the workmanship is not according to the spec how can it get CF in the first place?

From what I see is the spec is not good enough for the water pressure from the PJH's spec.

Monsterball said...

Semi-Value was too busy campaigning in Ijok to notice..

On a more serious side, it could be a combination of poor construction workmanship and poor maintenance. Designing plaster ceilings isn't rocket science, but you CAN go badly wrong during installation if the workmanship was shoddy. Combined with lack of maintenance, and you have a disaster.

Maintenance work in government (sometimes private companies, too) is usually given to well-connected companies. Its an effective form of rent-seeking. Instead of a one-off project, you have a long-term stream of profits. Sometimes these guys have no core competency in the maintenance operations at all, they just re-contract it to someone else, who does it for a very thin margin. Don't be surprise to find a ChinaBeng who actually does the job.