Siveco China has been actively advocating the critical (yet often ignored) role played by maintenance best practices in sustainable development. Siveco's GM Bruno Lhopiteau wrote articles and spoke at several conferences on the subject in the past few months, contributing real-life experience and advocating an approach adapted to the specificities of Chinese market. The article "Green buildings: the operation and service perspective", initially published in the June 2011 issue of Siveco's "Maintenance in China" newsletter, was widely reprinted in the Chinese media.

Bruno was recently quoted in Shanghai Business Review and Connexions, the magazine of the French Chamber of Commerce in China. Excerpts below.

"Sustainable development is too often limited to design and construction, with the goal of obtaining a green certificate: maintenance aspects are too often ignored in spite of their considerable impact. In China more than anywhere else, buyers like green technologies, although experience have shown their limitations.

In the context of "maintenance with Chinese characteristics", the implementation of best practices is a challenge both for building owners and their service suppliers. Technology can be, on the other hand, a powerful catalyst, with significant results in terms of energy savings and longer lifetime of the buildings.

This approach has been employed by Siveco working with Chinese developers. Thanks to their financial reserves and a long-term view that multinationals cannot have, local developers play a pioneering role in the utilization of new technologies for operation and maintenance, which many Western observers will find surprising."

"Bruno Lhopiteau, general manager of Siveco, a construction maintenance company, works with industry certifications such as the popular American Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). 'It's all driven by image, but companies also understand that this is good practice,' he says. 'I do see a growing awareness of how to use these standards as a tool for improvement.'

Lhopiteau describes a similar trend in terms of certifications. 'We see domestic companies such as Vanke with really great practices, and many of their projects are being certified. They totally understand what to do, how to use certifications in a practical way to improve operations.' He also sees this approach supported at the administrative level: 'Incentives encourage projects to earn certifications — for example, the government is aiming to certify a large number of government buildings over 2011–2015.'"