A maintenance prioritisation approach to maximise return on investment subject to time and budget constraints

Abstract

Purpose

Asset maintenance activities need to be prioritised as budget and planned outage time is often limited for all maintenance work to be carried out. The purpose of this paper is to develop a technique for prioritising maintenance work that maximises the return on investment under the constraints of budget and time.

Design/methodology/approach

Three indices are proposed to be used as indicators for prioritising maintenance. These indices are termed: maintenance investment index (MII), time index (TI) and budgetary index (BI). These indices permit prioritisation of asset maintenance based on the required emphasis on return on maintenance investment, time and budget respectively.

Findings

It is found that approaches to prioritising maintenance which integrate the critical dimensions in the decision making process are lacking in the literature. There is a need for such an approach to assist decision makers to ensure enterprise's objectives and targets are maximised with given budget and planned shutdown time.

Practical implications

The proposed techniques will assist engineers and mangers to develop their maintenance plan according to the enterprise needs and constraints and allowing management to make a better informed decision in maintenance.

Originality/value

This paper provides a new technique for ranking maintenance that maximises return on investment.

Citation

Tam, A.S.B. and Price, J.W.H. (2008), "A maintenance prioritisation approach to maximise return on investment subject to time and budget constraints", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 272-289. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552510810899472