--
“Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation
that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all
about understanding how things break or fail”... Henry Petroski.
Henry Petroski is an American engineer specializing in failure
analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University,
he is also a prolific author. There must be hundreds of quotes on
engineering but when I have been invited to speak in front of teacher of
engineering students by my batch mate friends Vijay Kolhe & Rajesh Aghao, I
chose this one & there are two reasons for it. Well, one is its these
people who will be making an engineer out of young students & for them to
understand failure is important & second is the subject was about repairs
& maintenance of the structures, means again failures! And more
importantly I wanted to make them realize how this most untapped subject can
actually open many career opportunities as we all hate repairs & maintenance
& unlike Structures, Planning or Site Execution the maintenance engineers
never get lime light or glamour is also a fact!
Well, lets speak about this aspect of engineering in regards
with our real estate as we all know day by day its becoming more customer-centric (at last) & no more you can afford to build a home( flat/row house/
paint-house) with lots of repairs & maintenance to it, leaving an unhappy
customer behind! Gone are the days where the builders used to just give
possession of the flat & his job is done forever, so the flat holder is
supposed to take care of whatever maintenance of that home comes to him or her!
With RERA as well MOFA being implemented stringently by the authorities &
more than that with lots of options (of homes as well builders) available in
market, its only the good product which will survive is a fact which the real
estate (read as builders) is understanding, though slowly!And to make a home
with lesser maintenance is real challenge in front of engineers & I won’t
say maintenance free as just the way we know nothing is water-proof actually we
can make a structure water resistant, same way a home which is product made of
hundreds of agency’s workmanship, bound to have some maintenance or repairs
& all we can do is build it in a way which will need less or minimum
maintenance! And then to build a home with less maintenance first one
needs to understand maintenance of a home or what kind of repairs it may or
will require & here is opportunity for the civil engineers as to become a
builder you doesn’t need any technical qualification (rather any educational
qualification) but for being a maintenance engineer one has to have a civil
engineering degree or education is a fact & here is where education
field (read as industry) as well real estate industry both are lacking is a
fact!
And joke is the very same engineers we produce does wonderful
work in a country not far away from us i.e. Dubai but when its building
something here we mess it up is a fact & that’s why we get so many
complaints post possession.Actually there are two types of maintenance in buildings,
one is just like automobiles there is a routine maintenance like check up or
say servicing. And another is damage generated maintenance which is repairs
& I think it’s this second type which needs to be looked after carefully
though many a times the damage is outcome of not doing routine maintenance
properly or regularly! The missing link in all the maintenance is lack of
proper knowledge of engineering or say lack of proper application of the
engineering! And when studied in depth I, shortlisted the issue in ten
pointers, well there may be many but ten seems a good figure (read as catchy)
so restricted to that, lol!
1 Building a Building with Minimum Maintenance is an Art;
Engineering is a Tool to Master that Art… Again a quote or say philosophy which
is self derived from my years put on site or say actual construction as well my
maintenance engineering tenures outcome. I started my career as maintenance engineer
& I was ashamed of telling it as my friends used to tell their post with
pride i.e. structural engineer or planning engineer & here I was doing
petty repairs of flats like leakages of toilets or choke up of drainage lines!
But its these repairs which helped me a lot to understand how to avoid these
faults in first place & that’s why I realized building minimum maintenance
structure is an art & not just science, all you can do is make use of your
engineering knowledge which is a tool!
2 What we see in a land just two hours flight from us &
which was barren desert when we got freedom & which don’t have any IIT or
Engg College even today... Well, what else than place like Dubai where you get
the world’s engineering skills on display as from all over the world architects
& engineers come here to build structures which becomes icons of
engineering & when you building something like hundred storied tower then
you can’t afford repairs & the very same engineers going from our country
can make this happen.
3 And what we see here in our country where there are more
than 12 IITs’ & over 1000 engg colleges? Well, take any building (indeed
there are some good ones) in our Pune city which is more than just ten years
old & all you can see is black spots of fungus, leakages, cracks & even
the structures like bridges or dams too but let’s focus on buildings. Agreed we
have different pattern of weather & we do get heavy rains but then we know
it before building, isn’t it? And what about drainage line or plumbing faults, they
have nothing to blame on weather but our poor workmanship!
4 That’s why I have concluded that more than 90% maintenance problems
are outcome of Bad Planning & rest 10% are because of Poor Workmanship. Now, many
will say how planning can affect maintenance of a building? Good question but
only the person who has worked as maintenance engineer can understand or reply
this question because take simple example of roof tops or building terraces,
most top floor flats are un salable (or difficult to sale) because of fear of
leakage through roof, is a fact. This happens because we forget a simple rule,
give proper space & arrangement for the rainwater to flow & it won’t
bother you by leaking through your roof! And for that right in the planning you
have to mention this in drawings as well building construction manual which
hardly anybody cares! Simple thing like giving proper slope to the terrace
parapet wall tops & inside makes difference. And then we cast slabs of roof
to minimum thickness just as it doesn’t have more dead load but this less
thickness makes the roof slab heat up more in summer & that’s again a
complaint! On top of it we end up breaking water proofing of roof for hundreds
of reasons like erecting solar panels to dish antennas & result is
damage to water proofing, all this just because we don’t plan site activities
in sequence! See one simple aspect of roof slab & how we mess up the things
& there are hundreds of such aspects in building a home!
5 Key to solve maintenance problems is a good civil
engineer with logical mind looking for solutions… well, this is an endangered
species as how you define a good civil engineer in first place? Is it his
college marks or his ability to complete the task fastest or build something
with minimum expenses? By me, a good civil engineer is the one who understands
what & why he is building a building! We are building a
home where some family is going to stay for nearly fifty or more years &
the aim must be they should have minimum disturbance while they are living in
this home & what more disturbance there can be than regular repairs of all
sorts, may it be plumbing or waterproofing or electric short-circuit & list
is endless. So the sign of a good engineer is he understands this outcome
expected from the home & builds it accordingly by solving most maintenance
issues in advance!
6 Maintenance is in a way a door to Innovation… This is best
thing which maintenance can gift you as our country survives on “Jugad” i.e. a
popular term for making use of available means to solve the problem! Unless you
don’t come across a problem you don’t start working for solution is the way we
have been bought up & the more maintenance problems you face & solve
the better you became in innovation! For e.g. hair cracks in walls in Pune are
most common enemy of the buildings & reasons are multifold such as
percentage of clay in sand used for plaster as well masonry & extreme
temperature changes in a day, causing thermal cracks. And then the way we build
i.e. RCC frame & partition walls combination, forming dissimilar materials
joints. Now once you understand the reasons then you can innovate the ways to
overcome the restriction & from washing the sand properly to using
chemicals to minimize the cracks while plastering is on to use sealant on
joints of walls & rcc beams, many things you can try & at least
minimize the cracks! This is innovation & ever going process!
7 As I mentioned earlier, with RERA & MOFA in, as with
aware home buyers (clients) next future of opportunity in building industry is
Minimum Maintenance Homes & Allied Services; point is, are we ready for
that?… This is most important aspect as gone are the days where a non technical
builder can buy some land, gathers team of few “thekedars” (contractors)
& build something which eventually gets sold & show over as never after
possession the builder is showing his face to the residents! No sir, the days
are long gone, people (read home buyers) are smart, social media internet (read
Geo) is there & then in first place with bad maintenance buildings as your
history, you won’t be able to sale the flats. And if you are lucky & sale
then the laws & increased level of awareness won’t allow you to get away
with a bad workmanship building & no proper maintained or repair service
can send you even behind the bars! Here is where again a good
maintenance engineer can be a very good option of career with so many homes
still needed to be built!
8 Role of Real Estate Industry in training good
maintenance engineers is simple & that is, give respect to the
maintenance aspect of the building!Real estate is a service industry
now & just the way in any good restaurant its service is the key factor,
same way in real estate minimizing repairs & giving effective & timely
maintenance service is going to be the key! And for that we need to give
training to all of our engineers to handle the maintenance. It ensures two
things one is the engineer get to know how problematic his small mistake (read
as negligence) can be for the family living in the home he has build &
second is it helps you in developing communication skill with the customer, as
aspect where most civil engineers lack miserably!
9 At the same time role of Education Institutes in producing
good maintenance engineers is equally important & such seminar is
outcome of the awareness that education field has taken cognizance of their own
lacuna in making civil engineers which understands their job!
10 Lastly, role of Civil Engineer himself or herself in
becoming a good maintenance engineer is most vital as apart from
education it has great career potential also wit real estate industry
accounting for nearly a third of India’s economy just look at the volume of
money involved in repairs or even daily routine maintenance of all these
buildings! And more than that what you want to become in the end is the
question I will ask to every builder or engineer (well, it’s not from education
aspect but creation aspect) that when you will visit any building which you
been part of construction team, will you like to enter in its premise with head
high & pride or with head down & ashamed of looking at it because of
its poor maintenance, for which you only are the cause! The answer
to this question holds your own future as civil engineer or a builder & if
this much your engineering or real estate career hasn’t taught you then no one
can repair your career, not even the best of civil engineer, god bless!
Well, you can even watch the presentation at link below &
share if feel its worth…
--
Sanjay
Deshpande
Sanjeevani Dev.
Please view my sharing about real estate in Pune at U-Tube link below..
Please view my sharing about real estate in Pune at U-Tube link below..
Please do visit my blogs to know about our philosophy at Sanjeevani ! (Click the links below)
http://jivnachadrushtikon.blogspot.in/
Social Side of Sanjeevani ! (Click link below)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65629150@N06/sets/72157627904681345/
For any of your complaints about city, log in at link below
www.punecorporation.org
Social Side of Sanjeevani ! (Click link below)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65629150@N06/sets/72157627904681345/
For any of your complaints about city, log in at link below
www.punecorporation.org
Take your issues to
Hon PM at link below..
Think Green, Think Life
Posts
