 Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2014, 2, 127-132 Published Online September 2014 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/jss http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jss.2014.29022 How to cite this paper: Lu, S.-T., Shiu, J.-Y. and. Chang, D. -S (2014) Development of Management Support System for Prop- erty Management Enterprises. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2, 127-132. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jss.2014.29022 Development of Management Support System for Property Management Enterprises Shih-Tong Lu1,2, Jiun-Yi Shiu1, Dong-Shang Chang2 1Department of Banking and Finance, Real Estate and Risk Management Division, Kainan University, Taoyuan County 2Department of Business Administration, National Central University, Taoyuan County Email: stonelu8604@gmail.com, j iunyi@mail.knu.edu. tw, changds@mgt.ncu.edu.tw Received May 2014 Abstract With the information technology developing, it makes the enterprises to use long-distance opera- tion, video conference, intelligence management, electronic secretary, buildings automation, res- idents’ communication platform and customer service system and so on. Application of these sys- tems will also be the electronic trend for property management enterprises (PMEs). Owing to the competition in real estate market and large-scale buildings construction, the services and ma- nagements of the property are crucial to the future survival in this industry. Therefore, PMEs need to adopt advanced information technology such as facility management systems to promote their services quality, improve operation efficiency, reduce personnel cost and create professional im- age for achieving high competitive ability. This study is devoted to the service items for the devel- opment of a management support system (MSS). Based on the service items of property manage- ment identified through the literature review, a hierarchical structure of three dimensions and twenty sub-items is constructed, and a systematic approach with consistent fuzzy preference rela- tions (CFPR) was employed to assess the relative importance and ranking of these items. Discus- sion of the results is made and a brief conclusion is proposed. Keywords Property Management Enterprise, Management Support System, Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relation 1. Introduction With the development of information technology and internet, the technology of information management has been involved in every industry. From public administration units to private enterprises, manufacturing industry to service industry, people can enjoy the convenience of the application of the information technology. Since the evolutions of technology of real estate and building are more mature, this also induces the demand of property  S.-T. Lu et al. management to increase. Therefore, property management for buildings has become a very important and close- ly related industry with residents because the extents and benefits of direct relationship with public are more than in other industries. These make the development of management support systems (MSS) and provide its services for property management more urgent. According to the experiences of industry evolution of developed countries, the property management services in Taiwan and China will have very good opportunity to become a prosperous industry for implementing and adopting the MSS effectively. This study is to explore and realize the characteristic of property management and the needs of MSS for property management enterprises (PMEs). Then we apply the multiple attributes decision analysis (MADA) approach, consistent fuzzy preference relation (CFPR) which proposed by [1], to analyze the priority of key items of MSS. It can provide a good reference to PMEs or systems development companies in design of decision support system. 2. Research Method and Process 2.1. Identifying the Key Items of MSS of Property Management For the extent of services providing of a PME, the Council for Economic Planning and Development [2] pointed out that the property management refer to provide maintenance management and comprehensive operations ser- vices based on hardware of building and software of community and living environment. It divided property management into three categories, including the usage management and maintenance of the buildings and the environment, the support services of life and business activities and asset management services. It is shown that the PME belong to a kind of integrated industry, and its operating items are really complicated. The power supply, water supply, gas, fire, sanitation and security of buildings are covered within its scope of business. Therefore, the methods of professional business subcontracting and strategic alliance management are widely used by PMEs. Form this definition, the service scope of property management industry is quite broad, and no longer only limited to maintenance work on buildings, and even includes the various relative support services on residents’ living. According to literature reviews of [3]-[9], this study aggregates a complete service items of PMEs should in- clude the construction management services before the building is constructed, building management services and business support services after the building construction completed, and each of categories have six to eight items, and all functions are described as follows as shown in Table 1. Based on the hierarchical structure of Table 1, we apply pairwise comparison approach to measure the rela- tive importance of each item for realizing the relative importance of each service item in systems development process. The most famous pairwise comparison approach is analytical hierarchical process (AHP) which devel- oped by [10]. However, when evaluation items are more than seven, the AHP approach will become very com- plicate and it is not easy to maintain the judgments consistency of evaluators in evaluation processes. Reference [1] proposed the CFPR approach which can simplify and improve the problem of consistency of the AHP in more criteria or alternatives. In the traditional AHP comparisons, if the assessment has n items, pairwise com- parisons should be conducted for times. Reference [1] proposed the CFPR to simplify the compar- ison process to times and obtain the corresponding relative weightings. The benefits of using this ap- proach include not only the simplification of the questionnaires design and collection, but also preserved consis- tency of respondent’s preference. This approach also saves time to investigate the consistency on data collec- tions. This approach shows great advantages on efficiency and effectiveness especially when more criteria/al- ternatives are assessed. The concept and steps of using the CFPR is presents as the following subsection. 2.2. Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relations The consistent fuzzy preference relations were proposed for constructing the decision matrices of pairwise comparisons based on additive transitivity [1]. Fuzzy preference relations require a decision maker to assign values for a set of criteria. The value represents the degree of the preference for a criterion over another criterion. 2.3. Multiplicative Preference Relations Matrix shows the multiplicative preference relations of criterion/alternative centers on , where , is the preference intensity ratio of criterion/alternative to criterion/alternative . Reference [10] suggested to be scaled from 1 to 9. Herein, represents the existence of no difference  S.-T. Lu et al. Table 1. The service items of property management. Service Dimension Service Items Descriptions Construction Management Services Fund-raising services of real estate and land Land, buildings and other immovable property lending financial services Building planning and design services Property-related facilities planning and design services for the construction of buildings Interior design and planning services The building cases in door facilities, decor, design and planning service Energy management services Management services of water, electricity, gas and other energy-saving or planning Construction project management services Management services of water, electricity, gas and other energy-saving or planning Building renewal/maintenance planning services Undertake old building renovation and maintenance planning Building Management Services The lease planning and marketing Planning and marketing operations of buildings pace lease Administrative and accounting tasks Buildings administrative management operations and accounting tasks Cleaning and maintenance of public facilities Building cleaning and maintenance of public facilities management Landscape planning Inside the building or the surrounding greenery and landscape planning, design and implementation The structure of the building maintenance Maintenance of the structural safety of the building itself and the surrounding structure or appearance Subsistence system management Maintenance and management of building water supply, fire, generator, air conditioning, elevators, etc. Security management services The buildings surrounding households portal lanes and out of security maintenance and management Recreational facilities Management Recreational facilities within the building maintenance and management Business Support Services Legal advisory services Household legal advisory services Financial planning services Household financial management, tax consulting, insurance planning, financial services Marketing and leasing services Housing consignment, leasing and advertising services Administrative resources services General building (commercial buildings), General Services, for example: Procurement Accounting services The escrow accounting service commercial households or general households Logistics delivery services Building set of home delivery, enhance households send something convenience between criterion/alternative and , manifests that is absolutely important compared to . In this case, the preference relation is typically assumed to be a multiplicative reciprocal: { } 1 ,1,, ij ji a aijn⋅ =∀∈ (1) 2.4. Fuzzy Preference Relations The fuzzy preference relation on a set of criteria/alternatives is a fuzzy set of the product with membership function . The preference relation is represented by the matrix , where . Herein, is interpreted as the level of influence ratio of criterion/alternative over . If , it means that and are equally important/good (i.e. ); indicates that is absolutely important/preferred to ; shows that is more important/preferred to , i.e. . In this case, the preference matrix, , is usually assumed additive reciprocal, i.e.,  S.-T. Lu et al. { } 1 ,1,, ij ji p pijn+= ∀∈ (2) 2.5. Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relations A set of alternatives and is associated with a reciprocal multiplicative preference rela- tions for . Then, can use Equation (3) to obtain the corresponding reciprocal fuzzy preference relation for associated with A: ( )( ) 9 11 log 2 ij ijij p gaa ==+ (3) Herein, is considered because is between and . When the reciprocal fuzzy preference relation is additive consistency, there exist the relationships as Equation (4) and (5): (4) ( )( )()() ( ) 1 121 12 iiiij j pppjii j = ++− ++ +=−+∀< (5) 2.6. Determining the Relative Importance of Evaluation Items When we obtain the preference intensity ratio of criteria/alternative from experts’ judgments, Formula (3) can be used to construct a fuzzy preference relation for the set of n–1 values . Then the other preference relations values of the decision matrix, { } { } 12 231, , ,, ijijn n ij p pppp − =∉ B < , will be obtained by the Formulae (2), (4) and (5). However, after this calculation, all the necessary elements in the decision matrix may really not all lie within [0, 1] but will lie within , where { } { } 12 231, min,, , nn app p − = ∪B . Therefore, it can be obtained the consistent reci- procal fuzzy preference relation matrix by the transformation function . This process can make the decision matrix maintaining reciprocity and additive consistency. The transformation function is as follow- ing: [][] ()() () :,10,1,12faafxxaa−+→=+ + (6) 2.7. Integrated the Experts’ Judgments The pairwise comparison of sequentially adjoining is constructed by expert k with respect to evaluation item n, that is { } 12 231, , ,, kk k nn aa a − , then they have to transform to by the Equation (3). When there are m eva- luators, it needs to use geometric mean for mitigating the extreme values. Therefore, the integration formula is shown as following: () { } 1 12 ,1,, m m ijij ijij ppppi jijn=××< ∀∈ (7) Then, we can apply the Equations (1) to (6) to obtain the integrated consistent reciprocal relation matrix . Finally, it utilizes the normalization of row vector average method proposed by [11] to obtain the in- tegrated weights of each evaluation item , , as in following equation: ( ) 11 , nn iiji ii ji Dpn wDD = = ′ = = ∑∑ (8 ) The evaluation results can be used to determine the priority of the MSS development items on property man- agement services. In addition, information system developers or companies could recognize the relative impor- tance of service items of PMEs to determine appropriate systems development strategies. 3. Results of Case Study In order to investigate the priority of the MSS development of service items for property management in Table 1, fourteen industry experts, each with more than ten years’ working experience on PMEs, were interviewed to eva- luate the relative importance for pairwise service items of property management. A reciprocal multiplicative pre-  S.-T. Lu et al. ference relation matrix of relative importance for the listed service items was obtained from each of experts’ in- terviews. The reciprocal multiplicative preference relation matrix was then computed using Equations (3)-(6) to obtain a consistent fuzzy preference relations matrix and further use Equation (7) and (8) to determine the inte- grated weights of service items of property management. The relative importance and ranking of service dimen- sions and service items of PMEs should provide are displayed in Table 2. Among the identified three dimensions, “Building Management Services” was considered as the most impor- tant dimension to offer the services for residents or users of building by PMEs. “Construction Management Ser- vices” and “Business Support Services” are the second and third important dimensions to improve service per- formance of property management respectively. For the “Building Management Services” dimension, the “Administrative and accounting tasks” has the high- est relative importance among eight service items. “The lease planning and marketing”, “Security management services”, and “Cleaning and maintenance of public facilities” are another three service items with higher rela- tive importance among eight service items in this group. These results imply the PME is in great need to use MSS for administrative activities and accounting treatments of the company and the clients (condominium management committees). Among the “Construction Management Services” dimension, “Energy management services” is considered as the most important service item. “Building planning and design services” is another with higher important ser- vice item to management performance in this dimension. However, “Fund-raising services of real estate and land” is the least important service item in this group. In addition, for the “Business Support Services” dimen- sion, “Accounting services” and “Administrative resources services” are the two most important service items Table 2. The weights and rankings of service items of property management. Service Dimension Weights Service Items Weights Rankings Services 0.3357 Fund-raising services of real estate and land 0.1313 6 Building planning and design services 0.1777 2 Interior design and planning services 0.1578 5 Energy management services 0.1947 1 Construction project management services 0.1689 4 Building renewal/maintenance planning services 0.1695 3 Building Management Services 0.3966 The lease planning and marketing 0.1375 2 Administrative and accounting tasks 0.1567 1 Cleaning and maintenance of public facilities 0.1337 4 Landscape planning 0.1053 7 The structure of the building maintenance 0.1206 6 Subsistence system management 0.1224 5 Security management services 0.1372 3 Recreational facilities Management 0.0866 8 Business Support Services 0.2677 Legal advisory services 0.1636 3 Financial planning services 0.1520 5 Marketing and leasing services 0.1428 6 Administrative resources services 0.1826 2 Accounting services 0.2006 1 Logistics delivery services 0.1584 4  S.-T. Lu et al. among this six service items. This result indicates the PME can use the MSS to assist the residents to deal with the bookkeeping affairs or general affairs of their private business. 4. Conclusion This study adopted CFPR process model, proposed by [1], to determine the relative importance of the twe nty service items associated with property management on operation and management performance of buildings. The implementation of CFPR could benefit on the reduction of required pairwise comparisons, facilitate the de- velopment and response of survey questionnaire and remain the consistency of pairwise comparisons. The in- vestigation results indicate that the most urgent information modules are “Administrative and accounting tasks”, “The lease planning and marketing”, “Security management services” and “Cleaning and maintenance of public facilities “ in initiative of the PMEs conducting e-formalization, MSS development or software procurement. 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