Design-Phase Maintenance Checklist for Electrical Systems

Research has established that early attention to maintainability concerns during the design development and review stages provides a potential for delivering high levels of comfort to building occupants and reducing maintenance budgets. This paper seeks to identify and assess the set of electrical systems' design defects that are attributed to a lack of the maintenance manager's engagement with the design team. The research confirmed the importance of all the identified design defects based on the assessment of domain experts in the 13 public Saudi Arabian universities that operate and maintain considerable infrastructure in their campuses. The paper presents two sets of validated maintainability design review checklists for consideration by design professionals at the 60 and 90% design completion stages, in order to reduce the probability of occurrence of the identified defects. This paper serves to promote awareness among the various stakeholders in building projects about the earned benefits of maintenance managers providing their knowledge and experience of the operation and maintenance of existing facilities to design teams. It is of practical value to design professionals aiming to design maintainable, cost-effective building projects, and to have maintenance managers resolved to provide effective service to occupants and property owners.