What Maintenance is Worth the Money? A Data-Driven Answer

For many industrial and commercial operations,maintenance accounts for a large part of operating costs (e.g., 15%-60% of the total production costs in manufacturing plants). Even with maintenance cost being such a substantial part of the overall cost, maintenance managers have little visibility into whether maintenance expenditure is money well spent or not. They also do not have standard quantitative methods to answer even simple questions such as, does it make any difference if one does preventive maintenance every six months on a piece of equipment, or whether a particular maintenance action is improving the performance of an equipment or not. In this paper, we formally define the problem of estimating the effectiveness of a single or a group of maintenance actions, and propose a systemic way of solving the problem. We also present a benchmark to evaluate the proposed methods and demonstrate how they can accurately identify effective maintenance actions.