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1. Introduction
Building services is a specialised area of the construction industry in terms of the nature of work, scope, technicality and the parties involved. The design and installations are different from the building structure and finishes and some important design information are often not received in good time or produced until the installation stage. Meanwhile, there is need to have a budget for building services to act as a guide for determining a fair price prior to awarding a contract (Swaffield and Pasquire, 2000). However, reliable estimation of costs of building services remains the most difficult to achieve at the early stage of building design process (Aibinu et al. , 2015). Industry stakeholders expect the cost of building services to be effectively managed because of the increasing complexity of modern buildings, which has tremendously increased the significance of building services and their relative cost to the total cost of building projects (Yong et al. , 2004; CIDB, 2009a, b; Kumar, 2009). The increase in the cost and complexity of building services systems has also increased the range of options available to designers (Churcher, 2009; Cartlidge, 2011; Yik et al. , 2013). As a result, building services costs have gone up from the traditional 10-30 per cent of total building cost to between 10 and 70 per cent of the total cost and unless this increase is effectively managed, it will expose clients to a significant cost risk (Langdon, 2010; McCaffrey, 2011). Therefore, detail measurement and quantification of building services is required to improve both clients' satisfaction and the reliability of building services early budget estimate (Babalola, 2012; Ashworth et al. , 2013). This may require the input of specialist building services quantity surveyors (RICS, 2000; McCaffrey, 2011).
Following on from that, measurement and quantification of building works based on the rules of standard method of measurement (SMM) is one of the most important traditional role of quantity surveyors (Ashworth et al. , 2013), but this is rarely used for services elements (Swaffield and Pasquire, 2000; Sabaria, 2009; CIDB, 2009b; Babalola, 2012). The rules for measuring building services are contained in sections Q (plumbing and mechanical installations) and R (electrical installations) of the existing SMM used in Malaysia (SMM2). These rules are not adopted...