Facilities Management (FM) in Industrialized Building System (IBS) Projects in Malaysia: Challenges and Strategies for Improvement

Facilities management (FM) involves the amalgamation of organizational procedures towards upholding and developing services to better the efficiency of its core activities. FM plays a significant role for success in projects whereby it offers a better working environment, value for money, cost and risk management, etc. which is all important criteria for achieving a successful project. This paper, therefore through literature reviews, explores the elements of FM, its practices in the construction industry including in Malaysia from the perspective of IBS projects. Further to that, interviews were also conducted with five (5) experts of the Malaysian construction industry whereby each of them possesses a minimum of 10 years of working experience towards getting an insight into their understanding as well as to gain information from their vast experiences. They were also asked to highlight the challenges and difficulties that were faced as well as to propose ways forward to improve the scenario. In short, respondents generally had different point of view regarding the FM practices but agreed that the structural design of the building highly influences the building FM practices. The findings also showed that while conventional projects offer more opportunity to save cost; performing FM in IBS project makes maintenance works quicker although it also requires higher quality and lifelong span of services under efficient management. In overall, performing FM in IBS projects have its own advantages and downfalls which need to be well considered beforehand.