Condition based maintenance: A cross-industrial benchmarking

Abstract

Condition based maintenance distinguishes itself from traditional preventive maintenance in that, it prevents faults before it occurs and effectively reduces some of the ineffective preventive maintenance activities and thus is increasingly favored by industrial practitioners. However, despite potential benefits, CBM itself also bears risks and implementing it exists varieties of challenges. The current scholar flourishes in study on technical challenges, mathematical- or technical-oriented, while the operative and organizational aspects are scarcely explored. Few literatures demonstrate empirical practices that have been taken to facilitate implementation and overcome challenges. Thus, more empirical-oriented studies are needed to identify the real world practices and explain the factors that affecting these choices by practitioners. This thesis contributes to knowledge sharing and diffusion among industries through the synthesized results by applying the CIMO model.

The research consists of a literature review and five cases benchmarking. The benchmarking emphasizes operational and organizational perspective, and technical and economic aspects are included in comparison on general level. A benchmark framework was developed, consisting of seven primary categories and thirty-five dimensions, from an iterative process between literature review and empirical data. The seven primary categories are CBM adoption, CBM infrastructure, analytic capabilities, organizational capabilities, operative capabilities, outcome and value realizing.

The findings reveal versatile practices that enable adoption and implementation of CBM and ten contextual factors that affect choices of these practices are identified and recommended to evaluate when considering transfer practices across industry. These contextual factors are, regulation, equipment deterioration mechanism, equipment and system complexity and criticality, technology competence, equipment value, business impact (financial investment justification), business strategy, operating environment, business model (sell maintenance as service) and maintenance operation model (in house or outsourcing). The results contribute to enrich the empirical practices that are lacking in the current research and have important implications and referential experiences for the practitioners in the field.