Predicting Life Cycle Costs For Maintenance Management

By Anita Vuorenmaa and Riina Brade, Elomatic

How does one achieve optimal plant operation in relation to maintenance? Production would like to maximize equipment performance and management would like to minimize maintenance costs. Although operational reliability is important for all, maintenance actions are often postponed, and preventive maintenance and change planning are cut in the name of cost-efficiency. Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is a tool that can be used to predict life cycle costs as part of maintenance management and investment planning.

One cornerstone of long-term maintenance is the identification and optimization of the life cycle costs of investments as part of purchasing decision-making. The predictability of costs and the profitability of production can be enhanced by using the techno-economic LCC model for production lines and equipment.

LCC is a highly useful tool for making investments and selecting equipment and systems, as the model takes into account both the investment cost and the life cycle costs, allowing the option with the lowest overall cost to be selected. The life cycle profits of technical solutions should also be included in the comparison, if the options being compared differ in their operational reliability, capacity or quality of production.