Enhancement of maintenance management through benchmarking

The market-oriented competitive environment in electric utilities has forced many power plants to become more conscious of the role of maintenance management in enhancing their equipment performances and consequently improving the quality of their services. Good equipment maintenance practices can improve the reliability of the power system; maintenance has become the prominent management issue for electric utilities. In recent years, power plants have started using benchmarking to identify the best practices for enhancing their maintenance works. In this paper, a case on benchmarking for maintenance management in a large-scale power plant is analyzed. Benchmarking is used to search for optimum methods for maintenance management practices in order to improve the overall effectiveness of the operations and maintenance of the plant. By adopting the best practices appropriately, benchmarking could help plants to become more cost-effective in maintenance. However, for plants looking for breakthrough improvement in maintenance, on top of benchmarking, other means, i.e. intelligent decision support system (IDSS) for maintenance, are required as well.