Methodology for Fact-Based Support in Maintenance Management Decision-Making

Abstract

Equipment maintenance is an essential part of any industrial plant. While fundamental, evaluating its impact quantitatively is a great challenge. Companies usually find it hard to obtain reliable financial support figures to justify the replacement of ageing equipment. Gassco AS identified this matter and provided the basis for this master thesis. This work’s objective is to provide a methodology that supports decision-making for maintenance management in a factual manner. Such feature was done after an exhaustive survey of current methods.

Equipment reliability is an essential part of determining potential losses. A system’s losses due to unreliability depend on subcomponent interdependencies and individual failure rates. A model combining two existing ones was developed: EVA (Economic Value Added) and CoUr (Cost of Unreliability). A real case concerning the potential replacement of UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) units was used to test the suggested method. A tool based in a spreadsheet software was developed in able to easily use the recommended model for analysis purposes. The results obtained deemed such investment as non-justifiable financially. The proposed tool is a cornerstone towards better decision-making support. Nonetheless, it still has room for added robustness.