Maintenance Resources by Building Use for Installations in Germany

Maintenance and repair (M and R) cost estimates are needed during planning, design, and operations/maintenance of Army facilities. During planning, life cycle costs are needed to evaluate alternative ways of meeting requirement (e.g., to lease, undertake new construction, or renovate existing facilities). During design, M and R requirements for various types of components, such as built-up or shingle roofs, are needed so that the life-cycle cost can be minimized. Once the facility has been constructed, outyear predictions of maintenance and repair costs are needed to help program enough funds so that Army facilities are maintained properly and do not deteriorate from lack of maintenance. The assembly of a single centralized maintenance and repair data base for use by designers was coordinated. One of the first tasks in the research effort was to determine if reliable data bases existed in government or private industry. Research showed that comprehensive data bases of maintenance costs for government and private sector facilities did not exist. The little data available always depended on widely varying standards of maintenance was used to maintain only those facilities for which the data was collected. Such data was unreliable for prediction purposes. The Facilities Programming and Budgeting Branch of the Facilities Engineering Directorate asked USACERL to develop prediction models for outyear maintenance requirements of the Army facility inventory. USACERL was also asked to provide methods and automated tools to help installations perform economic analyses, and also to allow analysts to obtain future maintenance cost data.