EcoCon: A System for Monitoring Economic and Technical Performance of Maintenance

Maintenance has been treated as a cost-center although it has obvious direct impact on company production, delivery on time, product quality and consequently company business. In this paper we develop and test a new system (EcoCon) for monitoring and assessing the economic impact of maintenance on a production process. EcoCon is tested using real industrial data collected over 3 years. The main findings are that by using EcoCon it is possible to assess maintenance economic impact on a production process. Also, EcoCon provides data for analyzing causes behind deviations in maintenance and production performance. It can be applied on companies of similar production process/machine. But, in some cases, the system demands marginal accommodation to suit the differences in the maintenance economic related factors among companies. EcoCon provides production and maintenance mangers reliable overview of maintenance importance through monitoring maintenance economic impact by linking technical production performance, e.g. downtime, to economic savings/losses generated due to maintenance performance and other activities.