A decision support system for maintenance benchmarking in big buildings

Maintenance has not traditionally been considered an important factor in the firm's productivity and competitiveness - until the past decade at least - so this function offers organisations considerable potential for improvement. The use of benchmarking in maintenance could consequently help firms gain a competitive advantage. This article presents a decision support system that uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy AHP and utility functions to carry out competitive and generic benchmarking in big buildings. Using data on the state of maintenance in firms in the big buildings sector and in firms with more than 500 employees in other industrial sectors in Spain, the author built discrete probability distributions for each criterion evaluated and each industrial sector analysed. All the information available from the sector is used in the comparisons rather than mean values. The decision support system is tested in two big buildings: a hospital and a department store. [Received 6 April 2012; Revised 25 February 2013; Revised 12 June 2013; Accepted 28 July 2013]