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1. Introduction
The Facility Management-Vocabulary standard defines facility management (FM) as an:
[…] organizational function which integrates people, place, and process within the built environment with the purpose of improving the quality of life of people and the productivity of the core business (ISO 41011, 2017, p. 2).
FM integrates management practices with technical knowledge to plan, provide and manage effective built environment (Chanter and Swallow, 2008) with three main goals:
increasing productivity;
minimizing cost; and
providing information supporting strategic planning (Teicholz and Techolz, 2001).
FM practices constitute 60% of the building costs in its entire lifecycle (Guillen et al., 2016) with more than 65% of it being associated with maintenance costs (Chen et al., 2018; Becerik-Gerber et al, 2012). Operation and maintenance (O&M) practices generate a large amount of data requiring facility managers (FMs) to develop plans for collecting, processing and managing the data to support the organization’s goal. This is a key challenge in maintenance management (Chanter and Swallow, 2008), which may lead to poor facility performance when planned ineffectively (Besiktepe et al., 2020).
Prioritizing and processing work orders comprise a significant part of FM practices that generate a large number of orders in daily operations (Mo et al., 2017). User-driven approaches (UDAs) including manual work are currently more prevalent in processing work orders. Overcoming the challenges of managing work orders manually requires a team of specialized and experienced staff. Such approach brings additional challenges in FM practices that mainly include lack of consistency (Lukens et al., 2019) and subjectivity (Cao et al., 2015). To propose solutions addressing these challenges, more applied studies are required to reveal the industry practices, determine the gaps and challenges and identify best practices.
This paper provides a brief background on challenges and gaps in existing practice for processing maintenance work orders based on literature review and interviews conducted in prior research (Ensafi et al., 2023). It is important to acknowledge that the comprehensive literature review conducted in the previous study lays the background of the problem with revealing challenges in existing practices such as lack of data requirements and inconsistency in data collection, cognitive workload and biases and inconsistency among FMs. The paper presents the findings of an online survey...