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Building Maintenance Cost Planning and Estimating: A Literature Review

Conference Paper · September 2018

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BUILDING MAINTENANCE COST PLANNING AND
ESTIMATING: A LITERATURE REVIEW
An Thi Hoai Le1, Niluka Domingo2, Eziaku Rasheed3 and Kenneth Sungho Park4
1, 2, 3
School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, Auckland 0632, New
Zealand
4
School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

There always exists budget constraint and competing priorities in maintenance needs
for existing buildings. The purpose of this article is to conduct a critical literature
review on: various maintenance types; and existing maintenance cost estimating
models to develop a framework for maintenance budget allocation. A comparative
study of current categories in maintenance works and maintenance cost models
identified crucial factors that are considered in the decision-making of maintenance
cost. Preventive and corrective are main strategies for building maintenance.
Performance of these strategies suffers from the allocation of the maintenance budget.
Cost estimation models for the different types of maintenance have not been
developed yet since lack of a reliable data system. The findings highlight the
importance of information system to support inspection building condition, monitor
maintenance works and recorded data of building maintenance.

Keywords: cost estimating, cost planning, maintenance management

INTRODUCTION
Building maintenance is considered as a major activity in the construction industry
because it is essential whether the buildings are large or small, simple or complex,
located in urban or suburb. They must be well maintained to ensure their functionality
and services during their life cycle. Traditionally, maintenance is defined as work on
existing buildings undertaken to keep, restore or improve every part of a building, its
services and surround to its original level and not to fall below the minimum
acceptable level (British Standard 3811, 1993). Over the past, stakeholders of
building asset have required the outcomes of building maintenance to meet certain
criteria including re-instating physical condition to a specified standard; preventing
further deterioration or failure; restoring correct operation within specified
parameters; replacing components at the end of their useful/economic life with
modern engineering equivalents; making temporary repairs for immediate health,
safety and security reasons; and mitigation of the consequences of a natural disaster
and assessing buildings for maintenance requirements (Queensland Government 2,
2017). Maintainability is an inherent characteristic of system design and installation
with major maintenance implications as follows (Dell’lsola and Krik, 2003).
· The choice of exterior and interior finishes.

1
[email protected]

Le, A T H, Domingo, N, Rasheed, E and Park, K S (2018) Building Maintenance Cost

Planning and Estimating: A Literature Review In: Gorse, C and Neilson, C J (Eds)
Proceeding of the 34th Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2018, Belfast, UK,
Association of Researchers in Construction Management, 707-716.
Le, Domingo, Rasheed and Park

· Selection of light fixtures, floor covering materials and interior elements.

· Plan for and implement a maintenance program.
· Perform most or all maintenance with full-time staff, or to contract for the
services.
The quality of maintenance activities is significantly influenced by the amount of
budget allocated. A common challenge is recognised in allocating maintenance
budget with the argument during the process of formulating the maintenance funding
(Lee and Scott, 2008). It is evidence that the cost of all maintenance works annually
will exceed yearly budget and then the decision makers have to decide which tasks
should take priority this year to maintain the building within the funds available and
what could be delayed to the following year (NWS Heritage Office, 2004). Therefore,
a proper maintenance cost plan would enable building owners to get optimal of
maintenance outcome.
The cost plan will provide an available maintenance budget distribution among the
elements, functions, or floor areas of the building resulting in providing a work
breakdown structure and a cost breakdown structure that will help to control and
monitor the maintenance cost (RICS, 2015). Cost estimation methods are vital
components in determining the expenditures using in maintenance strategies and
plans. Overestimation or underestimation of maintenance cost could affect negatively
on decision making of the hierarchy of maintenance tasks as well as prevent using the
maintenance budget effectively. However, preparing estimates for maintenance cost
allocation is depending on various factors that makes the task to be complicated and
challenging (Shah Ali, 2009). Although there are different approaches to estimate the
cost, each method has its limitation to different types of maintenance works (Haroun,
2015; Raiborn, 2013; Maher et al., 2011).
This study will analyse different methods to calculate maintenance cost to find out the
better alternative for building maintenance costing. To achieve the aim, the paper
tries to provide a systematic overview of maintenance work classification and existing
cost models using in estimating maintenance cost. Based on an analytical comparison
between these approaches, future work for cost planning and estimating for the
maintenance is proposed appropriately.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Maintenance Work Types
Maintenance can be categorised according to answer questions why and when it
happens. Figure 1 below present a summary of categorisation of maintenance work
classification which enables organisations to provide consistent services to customers’
satisfaction. There are two common terms of maintenance types: planned/preventive
maintenance and corrective/unplanned maintenance with other categories as shown in
Figure 1. Commonly, planned/preventive maintenance aims to prevent major
breakdowns to ensure a building continues at peak efficiency through regular
inspection and repair (Madureira et al., 2017). Preventive maintenance is planned,
based on cyclic maintenance actions such as cleaning, local repair and local
replacement/treatment to prevent deterioration in advance (Ruparathna, Hewage and
Sadiq, 2018; Queensland Government 2, 2017; EU Standard, 2009). Statutory
maintenance, time-based, condition-based, predictive, reliability-centred maintenances
are sub-categories of planned/preventive maintenance (Queensland Government 2,
2017; Ruparathna et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2014).

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 Building Maintenance Cost Planning and Estimating

Although well-planned, maintenance work must always be ready to respond to

unexpected breakdown. Corrective/unplanned maintenance consists of repair and
replacement elements due to the failure of preventive maintenance or natural wear and
tear that sometimes is called reactive maintenance (Ruparathna et al., 2018;
Queensland Government 2, 2017; EU Standard, 2009; Muyingo, 2009). There will be
preventive and corrective maintenance work in any maintenance strategies. The
planner should ensure that there is no conflict or duplication between reactive actions
and planned operation. The proposed planning of maintenance activity should base on
the estimated service life of building properties, cost rationalisation and users’
satisfaction.

.
Figure 1: Types of maintenance (Chanter and Swallow, 2007).
The preventive maintenance is justifiable for health, safety and environmentally
significant components/items for both items whose condition can or cannot be
monitored. The corrective maintenance is appropriate for non-significant
components/items and other items which the cost of applying time-based preventive
maintenance is less than the cost of applying corrective maintenance (Horner, El-
Haram and Munns, 1997). Based on the advantages and disadvantages of the above
maintenance types, Table 1 categorises the maintenance hierarchy for building
components/systems.
Table 1: Maintenance hierarchy for building components

Source: Ruparathna et al., (2018).

The overall maintenance plan must provide information to allocate and prioritize
sufficient resource and funds for the maintenance operations. The annual list of
required maintenance with an estimated cost in the five-year programme usually
follows. Alternatively, the repairs will be carried out in order of priority. Therefore,
some maintenance will be deferred since the resource is limited. It should be noted

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Le, Domingo, Rasheed and Park

that the buildings will require a certain of level of maintenance whatever the current
economic situation.
Maintenance Cost Planning and Estimating
Maintenance cost includes all costs of keeping the building up to an acceptable
standard. It relates to the direct cost of maintenance such as spares, labours,
equipment and tools as well as indirect costs such as administration, management and
the inevitable overhead costs (El‐Haram and Horner, 2002). When the demands of
maintenance are identified, cost of the maintenance should be a prior estimate to
measure resource availability and how much work should be scheduled in each period.
Although cost estimates for building maintenance are normally prepared over the
period to predict the likely cost of such works over the life of the buildings, they can
be considered in a single annual maintenance programme. The main purposes of a
cost plan for building maintenance are defined as listed below (RICS, 2015).
· Determine the target cost limit for maintaining programme works.
· Inform setting the annualised maintenance budgets and available funding
constraint.
· Provide cost information to assist decision makers to make informed decisions.
· Inform what asset investment are funded or not funded and then revise life
cycle cost plan.
· Ensure the employer is provided with best value for money from maintenance
spent.
Like any program or plan, maintenance budgets will be subjected to change and
adjustment and it must be based on forecasting or predicting aiming to best utilise
fixed maintenance resource to meet the fluctuating maintenance workload (Al-Fares
and Duffuaa, 2009). Total maintenance cost is the sum of the cost of preventive
maintenance and corrective maintenance as shown in Figure 2. Having a proper
preventive maintenance strategy can reduce corrective maintenance cost, leading to
reach optimal maintenance zone. The optimal zone is where the two costs are
balanced. Once funds are approved for the maintenance budget, efficient use of this
money requires wise internal allocation of the funding at the operational level or
locating this optimal zone.

.
Figure 2: Total of maintenance cost (Douglas, 2017).
Douglas (2017) also summarised five stages in the optimisation process, that should
be embedded in the design phase but will offer benefits to any state of a building
lifecycle: (1) identify critical functions/elements/areas; (2) understand the failure
models and effects; (3) evaluate existing maintenance; (4) apply predict maintenance

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 Building Maintenance Cost Planning and Estimating

technique; and (5) recommend changes to maintenance strategy according to findings

of best practice.
Cost planning and estimating of maintenance work require detailed information such
as maintenance requirements or the employer’s brief for maintenance work throughout
the life of the building over the short, medium and long-term. Some agreements
remain as maintenance works can be challenging to cost accurately due to lack of
reliable information required as listed below:.
· Type of buildings/asset/facility and the functional usage.
· Occupancy details: tenure detail, hours of operations, usage of space.
· A statement of building/asset/facility (age of the building, last major
refurbishment, etc.).
· Location and building description.
· Aims of the maintenance programme, maintenance strategy.
A limited number of the building components such as roofs, paintwork, woodwork
and building services play a large part in maintenance cost (Straub, 2003). Therefore,
identifying significant factors affecting the maintenance cost and the relationship
between the factors such as building characteristics, tenant factors, maintenance
factors, political factors might help to control the factors to optimise the maintenance
cost. While planned maintenance works have different technical specifications
resulting in differences in requirements for maintenance resource, leading to different
approaches to calculating the costs for specific scheduled maintenance work
(Mirghani, 2009), the unplanned maintenance costs usually are budget based on
historical data showing by percentage of actual breakdown cost and total cost of
maintenance.
Existing Cost Estimating Models for Maintenance
Table 2 presents a summary of cost estimating models for building maintenance,
which is produced in recent years. Batalović et al., (2017) produced the models
basing on historical data of buildings in the University of Osijek to predict
maintenance cost models over the periods, which used multiple-regression and
Stepwise analysis to identify the relationship between the variables resulting in three
models.
Li and Guo (2012) developed research to show how to establish a cost prediction
model of maintenance for university buildings in Taiwan that used historical data on
maintenance to predict the model, using three different methods: simple linear
regression (SLR), multiple regression and a back propagation artificial neural network
(BNP). Au-Yong, Ali and Ahmad (2013) established six significant characteristics
that are correlated to the cost performance of high-rise office buildings. ASHRAE
Owning and Operating database is a database of information on equipment service life
and annual maintenance costs for a variety of building types and HVAC systems. The
ASHRAE maintenance cost model is based on commercial office buildings in the US
aiming at providing accurate and usable building owning and operating cost data to
building owners and managers in respect of strategic decisions involving the life cycle
and functionality of their buildings.

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Le, Domingo, Rasheed and Park

Table 2: Comparisons of Cost Estimating Models for Building Maintenance.

.
All the cost estimation models discussed above have not considered the type of
maintenance that limit the effectiveness of internal budget allocation. Once funds are
approved for the maintenance budget, efficient use of this money requires wise
internal allocation of the funding at the operational level.

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 Building Maintenance Cost Planning and Estimating

Therefore, with different maintenance strategies, different cost estimation approaches

should be applied to calculate more accuracy maintenance costs. According to the
Figure 1 and Figure 2, annualised maintenance cost [AMC] can be calculated as:.
AMC = Corrective maintenance cost + Preventive maintenance cost [1].
Preventive maintenance cost can use traditional order costing to estimate the cost
since the maintenance works are scheduled in time, resource and scale. A framework
for costing planned maintenance can be referred to Mirghani (2001). Emergency
preventive, predictive and corrective maintenance occur randomly, so recorded
information about previous corrective maintenance cost plays a vital role to predict the
cost for future. The dataset of information should be updated regularly to be used in
statistical analysis or simulation such as Monte Carlo method to estimate the uncertain
maintenance such as failure by natural disasters. In the scope of this study, there is
not any cost model that has been developed for the uncertain maintenance types.
DISCUSSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
This paper has identified the most widely used approaches for maintenance
classification of building maintenance. Many researchers pointed out that although
corrective maintenance is rational when the impact of failure is rather than small,
carrying out the corrective maintenance required performing immediately. Otherwise,
higher costs than expected may be consequences when these faults happen in
unexpected ways and at the wrong time, causing inconvenience to users and downtime
independent components or systems. The authors also stated that preventive
maintenance is justifiable if the consequence of fault is high about the cost of doing
something that in advance reduces the risk for the fault (Lind and Muyingo, 2012).
However, limitation of this maintenance approach is redundant tasks may be carried
out or manufacturer's recommendation has limited local conditions and the actual
process.
The literature review also indicates that to develop a rational maintenance plan
requires both building inspection data and recording data on previous conservation
works. Without this information, it is hard to decide on a maintenance policy or
estimate the expenditure for a budget. Traditionally, to the asset, the building
condition usually by visual only hardly to discover all problems. However, new
methods and technologies such as a 3D scanner and Building Information Modelling
have not been applied widely yet in the areas. Additionally, failures of maintenance
sometimes have occurred since lack of communication between different management
levels of maintenance and lack of previous maintenance knowledge of building
manager and in-house staff whose responsible for maintenance activities in the
building (Yin, 2008; Shah Ali, 2009). One idea can support the issue is knowledge
management system which is discussed in Zavadskas et al., (2010). Key questions of
the system are what components/systems should be monitor automatically and how to
get lesson-learned from previous conservation and similar buildings.
The estimations will not only predict the cost of maintenance but also play an active
role in shaping the role construction management which provides input for taking
action (Georg and Tryggestad, 2009), The proposed framework for future research is
developed by process mapping using IDEF0 method. Akasah et al., (2010) stated that
IDEF0 is identified as the most appropriate technique for modelling a process that
involves functions and activities as found in the maintenance management process of
buildings.

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Le, Domingo, Rasheed and Park

.
Figure 3: Proposed framework for future research.
In the method, maintenance cost planning is an activity, inputs are the data or objects
to be transformed into outputs; outputs are data or objects produced by the activity;
controls define conditions require to produce the correct output and mechanism are the
means used to perform the activity (Erdogan, 2008). The elements in Figure 3 are
proposed based on the literature review. The outputs of maintenance cost planning
and estimating is the amount of maintenance cost that considers the dynamic and
strategic role of building maintenance. The estimations will also propose cost
management plan for maintenance work to get value for money. The cost plan is
expected to adjust funding requirements since new and more users and
functions/elements/areas can emerge during the service life of the building. Building
conditions including innovation design and equipment; budget availability align with
organisation goals and regulations such as building act or government strategy are the
inputs of the cost plan. There are various factors control the maintenance cost
planning and estimating. Well communication of building stakeholders will develop
proper maintenance methods which are outsourcing service or in-house staff and
maintenance workflow. A budget monitoring system will ensure the process
standardised and transparent. Data needed including materials and labour costs,
historical data and specifications should be gathered using innovation of information
technology for knowledge management. Estimation technique and building inspection
methods leading to the certain amount of maintenance cost will help the building
owners make informed decisions. The framework aims to develop a cost plan for
building maintenance in order to aid building owners to allocate the maintenance
budget reasonably, thus allowing them to monitor/control the funding for maintenance
in a standardised manner.
CONCLUSIONS
The literature review reveals that maintenance decisions made have a significant
implication on maintenance cost. Good estimating of the anticipated cost of
maintenance contributes to performing the tasks within the overall period of the
budget. Especially in public sector, since almost public buildings use public funding,
it requires that effective allocation practices be adopted to optimise the efficiency of
the funds. However, lack of the needed data is considered as a reason to prevent the
effectiveness. A framework should be developed to assist building stakeholders in
inspecting the building, monitor the maintenance, collect and record the required
information. Future research focuses on the development of case studies to test the
proposed framework. Based on the information provided by the dataset and validated
model, building owners and designers should pay more attention to the

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components/systems that have a significant maintenance cost and best practice to

adjust the current maintenance strategy toward an optimised state.
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