Factors affecting the number of building defects and the approaches to reduce their negative impacts in Malaysian public universities’ buildings
Journal of Facilities Management
ISSN: 1472-5967
Article publication date: 21 October 2021
Issue publication date: 21 April 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The largest share of a building maintenance budget goes towards preventing or repairing building defects. Also, building defects shorten a building’s lifetime, impact the user’s safety and health, prevent the buildings from performing their functions well and repairing building defects generates waste. Therefore, this study aims to specify the factors that affecting the number of building defects and how to reduce their negative impacts.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study was used as a research strategy and convergent parallel mixed methods were used as research design. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected concurrently, followed by independent analyses of the quantitative and qualitative data, and then merged the two sets of results according to the procedure of using the convergent parallel design. Descriptive statistics analysed quantitative data, whilst qualitative data was analysed by the content analysis technique.
Findings
The findings of this study explored the factors that affect the number of defects in buildings, the significant factors were related to the building’s life cycle in terms of design, construction, operation and maintenance phase; relevant attributes were construction teams, building users and maintenance teams. The study also addressed the approaches to minimise the negative impacts of those factors. Their negative impacts mainly contributed to increased building defects that increase maintenance costs, affect users’ safety and health, reduce buildings’ lifespan and cause environmental impact due to resource extraction.
Originality/value
The existing studies have not adequately addressed the significant factors that affect the number of building defects. Also, emerging technologies and environmental sustainability considerations related to building defects have not been linked in previous related work. Therefore, the present study has contributed to filling this gap.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their sincerest thanks to the UTHM Maintenance and Devolvement Department for providing the database of past defects, to the interview participants and to the Research Management Centre (RMC) of Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia for financial support under the grants GPPS No, H383 and TIER 1 No, H187.
Citation
Hauashdh, A., Jailani, J., Abdul Rahman, I. and Al-Fadhali, N. (2022), "Factors affecting the number of building defects and the approaches to reduce their negative impacts in Malaysian public universities’ buildings", Journal of Facilities Management, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 145-171. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFM-11-2020-0079
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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