The Building and Construction Authority of Singapore is piloting a new voluntary Maintainable Design Appraisal System to assess building designs’ degree of maintainability.
As part of the initiatives to uplift the Facilities Management (FM) sector – a key focus under Singapore’s Real Estate Industry Transformation Map – BCA brought together the industry, unions, and other public agencies to form a FM Implementation Committee (FMIC) to develop, oversee, and review the implementation of the sector’s transformation plans. FMIC identified Design for Maintainability (DfM) as a key pillar in transforming the FM sector.
DfM is the practice of integrating operations & maintenance considerations into project planning and design to achieve effectiveness, safety, and economy of maintenance tasks. Traditionally, maintenance operations and requirements are often only considered when the building is handed over to the FM service providers. This could result in the FM personnel having difficulties in carrying out maintenance activities efficiently and cost-effectively.
BCA has worked with the industry and two tertiary institutions – SUTD and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) – on a new, voluntary Maintainable Design Appraisal System (MiDAS), which assesses the degree of maintainability of building designs from the lens of labor efficiency and cost-effectiveness of downstream maintenance regimes. MiDAS identifies critical (cost and labor intensive) maintenance items that are influenceable by design and presents a set of design strategies and best practices to address them. The scoring framework covers the key disciplines – architectural, mechanical, electrical, and landscape – and also comprises an innovation section to promote adoption of technologies. The MiDAS score is expected to enable designers and developers to make more informed design decisions upfront and take a life cycle view of the development.
MiDAS will be piloted in about 10 public and private projects including the new Surbana Jurong Campus, Ascendas Singbridge’s integrated development, Ascent, and PSA’s new office building at Pasir Panjang.
(Source: Building and Construction Authority of Singapore)
