Maintenance Management Model For Local Municipal Services

In Palestine, municipalities are responsible for providing public services to local communities; these services include but not limited to water, waste water, electricity, road network and solid waste collection and disposal. Also, Palestinian municipalities are responsible to lead local planning and development. Since maintenance plays major role in controlling quality of services provided to the public, the researcher in this research spots light on this issue by diagnosing service-maintenance current practices in Palestinian municipalities and, accordingly, proposing proper maintenance management model supported with procedures and tools to be adopted by local municipalities. The researcher has adopted a practical methodology summarized in reviewing related literature, having a look on regional/international best practices, diagnosing current practices in local municipalities and consulting with related bodies and officials, an exploratory sample of municipalities was selected for structured interviews; the selection criteria took in consideration type of municipality, size of locality, type of service provided to the public, and the geographic location. As a result of the diagnostic research, it is found that almost all Palestinian municipalities practice corrective maintenance rather than adopting proper maintenance management systems to maintain service delivery to the public; this of course affects negatively the quality and cost of service. Most municipalities don't have proper maintenance–related documentation systems. Also, most municipalities don't have clear figure about their annual cost of maintenance; this is basically due to the unclear relation between maintenance activities and spare parts consumption. Moreover, Palestinian municipalities don’t have separate Maintenance Department to manage all maintenance activities related to the different services provided by the municipality; instead each service department has a maintenance unit/team to maintain its services. It was clear to the researcher that the current maintenance management practices in Palestinian municipalities lead to less quality and more costly municipal services; therefore it is worthwhile to develop a proper maintenance management model MMM that suites the conditions of local municipalities. Actually, this Research proposes such a model to institutionalize service-maintenance operations for better quality and less cost, the proposed MMM covers both corrective and preventive maintenance, the model is also supported with the necessary procedures and tools to facilitate its implementation in local municipalities, the proposed model has no implications on municipal organizational structures and can be easily implemented by current related staff, the validity of the model was checked through direct consultation with relevant key staff at Nablus municipality. Furthermore, a proposed Structure to Computerize the MMM is presented in this Research. Computerizing the MMM will make it easier to document and retrieve maintenance-related information; this of course will strongly support the maintenance-management decision making process.