**1. Introduction**

"APPA—Leadership in Educational Facilities" defines maintenance as a combination of all the technical administrative actions taken during the service life of a building to retain its parts and functions [1]. Higher education institutions consist of different varieties of buildings in a large number compared to other organizations, which requires a more diverse approach in operational maintenance [2]. Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM) is one of the maintenance strategies that aims to increase the reliability or lifespan of equipment as time-based or condition-based; it refers to a proactive approach to maintenance in which maintenance work is scheduled to take place regularly [3]. Unplanned Maintenance (UPM) occurs on a random basis as reactive or emergency maintenance. An unexpected component (or equipment) failure can cost a significant amount of money or time to restore, which results in uncertainty in budget allocation in the facility management [4,5]. A study published by APPA identified a major problem in the facilities management for university premises in North America; there is a lack of planning to adequately fund FM activities in the entire building life cycle [6]. Another study identified that \$26 billion are needed to fix the accumulated deferred maintenance backlog (DeM) caused by the inability to

**Citation:** Pampana, A.K.; Jeon, J.; Yoon, S.; Weidner, T.J.; Hastak, M. Data-Driven Analysis for Facility Management in Higher Education Institution. *Buildings* **2022**, *12*, 2094. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings 12122094

Academic Editor: Fani Antoniou

Received: 27 October 2022 Accepted: 23 November 2022 Published: 29 November 2022

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fund capital renewal/replacement of building equipment, and \$5.7 billion are required to handle more urgent DeM [7]. As a result, insufficient facility maintenance, including DeM and UPM, have accelerated facility deterioration at most campus-sized institutions in the United States [7]. A study conducted in-depth interviews of 37 FM directors from Canada and identified that deferred maintenance of campus buildings resulted from declining financial aspects with growing institution size and concluded that there were insufficient funds, staff, and other resources to repair and maintain the built environment of campuses sufficiently [8].

Based on a case study [9], it was found that there is a need to improve communication between the university level facility maintenance and individual facility maintenance managers to track and implement programs, reduce redundancy, and strategically plan for the building as part of the overall campus. Unfortunately, the lack of a study exploring the status of PPM and UPM in the campus-scale higher education institutions is the primary barrier towards effective facility management. In addition, it remains unclear how the current standpoint can be analyzed based on quantitative and data-driven approaches. Therefore, there is a critical need to explore the current status of FM based on data-driven analyses.

In this context, this study analyzes the FM practices in the North American universities, with a particular focus on both PPM and UPM, based on the proposed systematic methodology. The objective was achieved via the following four steps. First, a survey was designed, distributed to facility managers at universities, and the results were analyzed to investigate the current status of PPM. Second, phone interviews were conducted to understand the overall FM practice. At this stage, natural language processing techniques (topic modeling and sentiment analysis) were used on the interview transcripts as an exploratory approach. Third, a database was developed based on the facility management data (e.g., work orders and labor hours) collected from eight universities. Fourth, three quantitative analyses (statistical comparison analysis, risk-profile analysis, and outlier analysis) were performed to analyze the database and identify critical information associated with PPM and UPM.

The results of this study are expected to facilitate the decision-making process of educational facilities by providing an understanding of various aspects of educational facility management trends and risks. It can allow administrators of higher education institutions (e.g., facility managers) to implement effective FM strategies systematically to establish long-term budgetary goals, which will lead to the enhancement of the asset value of the higher education institutions.
