Unleashing the Power of Existing Maintenance Data: A Systematic Improvement of Practice: A Systematic Improvement of Practice

As production facilities grow in size and complexity, maintenance systems grow alongside them. When a facility increases by just one piece of equipment, the maintenance system must adjust multiple elements to keep up. Elements such as
plant documentation and preplanned maintenance need to be updated, and everyone in the maintenance organization needs to adjust to the new constraints. This introduces complexity that makes it difficult for maintenance organizations to
gain an overview of the maintenance system, leading to inefficient and poorer decisions and long development times for the maintenance activities that make it difficult to move past the fire fighting stage.

To move toward a controlled maintenance system, this thesis presents a datadriven, systematic approach. The introduction of architectures, platforms, and modularization principles supports the systematic standardization of a maintenance
system. The goal of standardization is to improve the ability to control not only short-term problems but also to ensure informed, controlled decisions throughout a maintenance system. Data are the foundation of the systematic approach and support the scalability and quality of the implementation maintenance. Through this systematic approach, the usability and trust of data are increased, unleashing the untapped value hidden in the existing operational data.

This thesis presents nine peer-reviewed papers that have studied Data-Driven Modular Maintenance. Based on the work of the papers the thesis moves towards extending technical system definitions to maintenance systems. These definitions are the baseline for understanding the implementation of and the value achieved from Data-Driven Modular Maintenance.

Applying Data-Driven Modular Maintenance approaches in a case company, the company achieved faster, higher quality maintenance processes. Especially decisions that require identifying patterns and overlaps in the maintenance activities were improved through the standardization of the elements in the maintenance system. By introducing standardized descriptions of the maintenance activities, overlaps in maintenance worth up to 4,6% of the total planned work hours
was identified as superfluous. Studying the processes, up to 12% of costs on certain maintenance types were saved from ensuring the right people were present at the right times.