Maintaining a university
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Maintenance
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The University of Auckland owns and leases 200 buildings with roughly 500,000 m² of gross floor area, making it one of New Zealand’s major property owners and developers.
Nearly 40,000 students and over 6,000 staff access buildings across The University of Auckland’s four major campuses in Tamaki, Epsom, Grafton and Auckland City, and two outlying campuses in Whangarei and Leigh. The University owns 175 buildings and leases an additional 25 buildings across these campuses, with the largest number of buildings situated at the University’s city campus.
A unique building stock
The University of Auckland is not only New Zealand’s largest university but also the only New Zealand university to rank in the Quacquarelli Symonds Top 100 World Universities, currently sitting at number 68. In 2010, the University had a total income of just under $900 million, nearly a quarter of which was derived from research revenue, principally in the science and medical science areas. With a building replacement cost in excess of $1.5 billion, a high level of maintenance of the University buildings is critical in retaining its status as New Zealand’s premier university.
The University’s buildings are generally highly complex with significant mechanical and electrical infrastructure to service teaching and research laboratories, as well as other intensively used teaching and learning spaces. The University’s buildings range in age from the historic wooden Government House constructed in 1856, to the large Owen G Glenn Building on Grafton Road, which was completed in 2007 and includes 5 levels of underground car parking and a 7-level tower containing lecture theatres, other teaching and learning spaces and hundreds of staff offices.
Much of the city campus and the Epsom campus construction took place in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and both campuses contain buildings of varying ages and condition. In some cases, so-called temporary low-storey buildings that were designed for a limited lifespan continue to be used alongside more robust buildings with an expected life of 50 years or more. Accordingly, there is a wide range of maintenance needs across all campuses that must be catered for through careful planning, budgeting and programming to suit the University’s business requirements.
Diverse maintenance requirements
The University has a particular interest in ensuring the most economic and efficient operation of its capital stock over the life of each of its buildings. This is particularly important given that the whole-of-life maintenance and operating costs can be 5–10 times the initial capital cost of a building, depending on the building’s complexity.
Maintenance operations are constrained by sensitivity to noise disruption, security concerns and lack of unoccupied spaces inside and outside the buildings. Many of the buildings include teaching and research activities that must be carried out in highly specialised spaces, including chemical, biomedical or other biological specialised laboratories and teaching rooms. Other specialist spaces requiring particular care and planning are server rooms, laser laboratories, MRIs, public contact areas and libraries. Planned maintenance can often only be carried out over the short summer semester, which has a lower teaching density, and reactive maintenance poses challenges with these restrictions.
Designing for maintenance is vital
In some cases, the long-term maintenance needs for even some of the u University’s newer buildings were not fully considered during design, thereby adding to the maintenance costs of those buildings. Now the University’s mandatory design requirements require architects and engineers to consider not only the current use and future adaptability and flexibility of the building in question but also prove to the University that the building design takes into account life cycle operating and maintenance expenditure.
For instance, the preconcept design of a new building must minimise the maintenance requirements of the building’s exterior façade and ensure floor-to-floor heights are sufficient to meet the building’s current and future infrastructure needs. This includes providing space for data and electrical cabling, replacement light fittings and mechanical ventilation, in particular, providing adequate space for ventilation ducts and access to all necessary valves, filters and associated pipework.
Depending on the size and shape of the building, good-sized vertical duct spaces and plant rooms may be provided in the basement, floors or roof. These enable easy installation and maintenance of plant items, such as air handling units, boilers, chillers and cooling towers.
The University’s Facilities Management team reviews the internal and external components of a new building project and participates in all the concept and design reviews during the building’s development. This process ensures that the team charged with managing and maintaining the building in the future has a strong input into its design.
Emphasis on strategic asset management
The University is moving towards a strong emphasis on strategic asset management with a deep understanding of the whole-of-life operating and maintenance requirements. It has led the tertiary sector in terms of its energy and water management systems for over a decade, and it manages its building stock through a combination of a very large building management system (BMS) and Maximo software, which provides detailed cost, management and maintenance information on all of its buildings.
As part of its strategic asset management, Facilities Management carries out over 40,000 routine preventive and reactive maintenance tasks per year and has an active programme to tackle deferred or backlog maintenance – the scourge of most tertiary educational institutions in New Zealand and Australia.
In recent years, the University has produced a separate budgetary provision for such maintenance, which is augmented with additional funds if they become available during the year.
In 2006, Facilities Management undertook a major review of its building stock to identify the condition of each building and its major components. It used this review to develop a 10-year rolling programme of desired and necessary maintenance and allow for it in the annual budget.
Software tools to manage maintenance
The University’s main maintenance software tool – a Maximo database – contains over 50,000 building and plant assets with comprehensive information about the age, condition, remaining life, replacement value and expected year of replacement of each asset. This information is used to inform the capital renewal programme and to reduce the university’s risk of asset failure.
The University’s BMS is incorporated into the design of all new and refurbished buildings. It now has over 20,000 individual monitoring points, which provide performance information about plant and space conditions. It automatically sends alarms to call-out staff for priority work and can provide trend data about plant performance. A big advantage of a large BMS is the ability to control plant when buildings are unoccupied to prevent wasting energy. Occupancy sensors are incorporated into building design so that unoccupied spaces can be turned off.
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