An assessment of baby care room in Kuala Lumpur shopping malls according to facilities management overview

Abstract

Baby Care Room (BCR) is one of the facilities that is provided in the shopping mall centre to facilitate and attract the family group user to visit and spend. The primary functions of its provision is to serve as (i) baby feeding area and (ii) nappy changing area. In the highlight of this BCR facility topic, three issues have been identified which firstly (1) there is no specific guideline has been established in Malaysia on how to develop BCR in the commercial area. Secondly (2), lack input not been taken out from the Facilities Manager (FM) to be included at the beginning stage of any project design which will give effects to functionality and services of the building maintenance work after post construction. Thirdly (3), there is no studies and research have been done yet in understanding the BCR’s user (consumer) behaviour in our Malaysia environment and culture. In this regards, to bridge the gap on the issues that have been identified, there are three research objectives have been formulated which are; (1) to identify and examine what are the facilities that have been provided inside the BCR, (2) to assess BCR`s facilities condition after post construction in term of its functionality and services and (3) to understand and analyse what are Malaysian BCR`s user behaviour and main activities that have been done in the case study area. The case study area was at Shopping Malls in Kuala Lumpur and the methods of data collection that have been used are; (1) facilities audit, (2) facilities condition assessment and (3) observation on user activity and behaviour. The findings for this research is that most of the BCRs had provided essential supporting facilities to the parent in supporting the BCRs activities. However, there are many mistakes in locating the supporting facilities inside the BCR as it made the facilities provided less function and led to having maintenance work service issues in the future. Furthermore, the different space planning and zoning inside the BCRs also affect the BCRs user behaviour as we know that Malaysian is a multiracial citizen who has a different type of self-cleaning method according to the culture and religion. Therefore, to minimize the BCR’s issues that have identified in this research, it is recommended that the future study to be includes what are the opinion of shopping malls owner regarding to the BCR provision in their premises, what are challenges that is being facing by the FM in maintaining the BCR area, what are the basic guidelines that has been used by the architect in designing the BCR Malaysia and to understanding the needs of parents in BCR premises.