THE FACILITY MANAGEMENT OF THE NEWATER VISITOR CENTRE

Abstract

The Public Utilities Board (PUB) education facility, the NEWater Visitor Centre (NVC) main objective is to educate visitors on the importance of water to our community and it aims to gain acceptance from the locals in using and consuming the NEWater confidently. The NVC also hopes to establish Singapore as an international water hub by showcasing our expertise to foreign delegates and dignitaries. The dissertation examined the effectiveness and efficiency of the present management practices of the NEWater Visitor Centre and also probed into the existence of a performance monitoring system to measure the performance of the NVC management team as well as their service providers and contractors. Due to the small sample size, a qualitative survey was applied through the means of personal interviews. It was discovered that the NVC management team has to juggle two main tasks namely the marketing of the visitor centre and NEWater and the maintenance of the facility. It was therefore recommended that PUB bundled their various management and maintenance contracts into two main contracts; adopting the concept of partnership. There were also no defined method of measuring the performance of the NVC management team or their service providers and contractors. The only indicative means of measuring the performance of the NVC team was by the number of visitors it attracts yearly to the centre. A set of non-financial and financial indicators was devised based on the theory of the Balanced Scorecard by Amaratunga, Baldry and Sarshar (2000) while for the two service contracts, Service Level Agreement (SLA) were developed which include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to clearly delineate specific performance criteria. Space improvements were also made to the NEWater Visitor Centre focusing only on the administration office. As of present, the office is shared by two management team from different departments; namely the NVC team and the process plant team. It was recommended that they occupy separate office space due to different department goals, objectives and targets. The NVC team was recommended to share their office with their main service provider, SDC (Singapore Discovery Centre), as a close working partnership would result in a more seamless management of the visitor centre.