Advanced Maintenance in Manufacturing

Abstract

The costs of maintenance and the potential effect on maintenance costs from adopting predictive maintenance techniques is not well documented at the national level. A number of data items need to be collected to estimate the costs and losses associated with maintenance. This paper examines the current literature on maintenance costs as it relates to advanced maintenance techniques and discusses the feasibility of collecting data to measure the relevant costs and losses. Discussions with manufacturing maintenance personnel suggests that manufacturers are willing and able to provide estimates or approximations of the data needed for estimating the manufacturing costs/losses relevant to advanced maintenance techniques. However, some discussants expressed uncertainty about the willingness to provide some of the data. Some items were not tracked; however, most believed that an approximation could be provided in these cases. In order to estimate maintenance cost for the manufacturing industry as a whole , a sufficient sample size is needed. Depending on the standard deviation, confidence interval, and accepted margin of error, a needed sample size of 77 is estimated, but could reasonably be as low as 14.