A SIPOC based model for the sustainable management of facilities in social housing

Following the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the former Soviet Republics took over a significant number of real estates and social housing. In order to optimize the management of these properties and their facilities, the requirement arose for the development of intelligent sustainability management schemes. In process improvement, a SIPOC (suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, customers) is a tool that can summarize the inputs and outputs of one or more processes in table form, and is considered to be one of the most important tools that can be used to identify at a high level the potential deficiencies between what a process expects from its suppliers and what customers expect from the process. The purpose of this study is to present a SIPOC based model for the sustainable management of facilities in social housing, focusing on the case of Lithuania, an EU member and a former Soviet Republic. The case of Lithuania is of a great significance, as it combines in its building stock elements of the architecture of the former USSR, as well as it complies with the current EU legislative requirements concerning the energy and sustainability performance of the building sector. In this study, the major steps for the development of a SIPOC system for assessing the facilities management, focused mainly on social housing, are presented. The rationale behind the selection of specific requirements is elaborated and analysed. A total of 30 requirements, categorised in legislative, municipality-driven and additional requirements, were selected. The survey conducted among 43 experts for the selection of the SIPOC model requirements is presented. This study also presents the definition of the relevancies of the assessment criteria by pairwise comparison based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (APH) by using pairwise comparison matrices, completed by experts, which resulted to the rating of the criteria. The findings of this study aspire to deliver a comprehensive model, which may be applied for the assessment of facilities management in EU member states, as well as in former Soviet Republics.