On the identification and utilisation of relevant data for applying cost-effective maintenance

Abstract: With the global and continuously changing environment of today's companies, competitive strategies of cost minimisation and differentiation, and the ability to use the available resources in a cost-effective way have become important. The major focus should be set on the areas of business where the possibilities for strategic advantages and savings are high, whereas maintenance is one area of business that recently has been considered as an activity contributing efficiently to the companies' strategic objectives of profitability and competitiveness. To be able to effectively support the role of maintenance as a profit contributor and to communicate the strategic importance of maintenance to other areas within the companies, modern tools are needed in form of IT systems that provide the users with relevant data and decision support. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the history and current state of maintenance management IT support and to give suggestions of how IT for supporting the maintenance decision making process could be enhanced in the future. Two research questions are addressed: Do cur-rent maintenance management IT systems provide the basis for supporting the strategic decision making process at all levels of maintenance management? and In what way can IT systems used for maintenance purposes be improved in order to strengthen the role of maintenance as a profit generating activity? By literature surveys, case studies and artefact building, the author defines the state-of-the-art of maintenance management IT used in Swedish industry and suggests improvements for utilising IT for reaching cost-effective maintenance in form of database models and computerised decision support. The main results are 1) a model for identification of relevant data need for maintenance problem tracing and localisation and maintenance decision making, 2) a database model showing minimum relevant data need for maintenance decision making and 3) a conceptual maintenance decision support model that is based upon a holistic view on maintenance with regard to other business activities and translates tech-nical impact into financial terms. The thesis concludes that current maintenance management IT systems provide low support for strategic maintenance manage-ment. A small and flexible database integrating relevant data from different rele-vant working areas would enable the strategic maintenance decision making and by including functionality in maintenance management IT for positioning main-tenance with respect to companies’ overall business goals, the strategic impact of maintenance could be shown.