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PurposeAsset maintenance activities need to be prioritised as budget and planned outage time is often limited for all maintenance work to be carried out. The purpose of this paper is to develop a technique for prioritising maintenance work that maximises the return on investment under the constraints of budget and time.Design/methodology/approachThree indices are proposed to be used as indicators for prioritising maintenance. These indices are termed: maintenance investment index (MII), time index (TI) and budgetary index (BI). These indices permit prioritisation of asset maintenance based on the required emphasis on return on maintenance investment, time and budget respectively.FindingsIt is found that approaches to prioritising maintenance which integrate the critical dimensions in the decision making process are lacking in the literature. There is a need for such an approach to assist decision makers to ensure enterprise's objectives and targets are maximised with given budget and planned shutdown time.Practical implicationsThe proposed techniques will assist engineers and mangers to develop their maintenance plan according to the enterprise needs and constraints and allowing management to make a better informed decision in maintenance.Originality/valueThis paper provides a new technique for ranking maintenance that maximises return on investment.

One key objective of good plant asset management is to prevent undesirable failure that may cause loss of life, destruction of asset, loss of economic benefit or damage to the environment. In order to deploy strategies that prevent failure, one needs to first understand the processes leading to failure, and definitions used for describing the failure of physical assets. A number of different definitions for the same terms related to equipment failure can be found in the literature. The looseness of terminology and often overlapping shades of meaning lead to ambiguity and confusion. This paper aims to offer clearer definitions derived from examining a generic failure development process exhibited by physical assets (herein referred to as "equipment").

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PurposeThe boiler pressure parts are a major asset of a power station, and the maintenance cost is often accountable for a huge portion of the annual budget. In the power generation industry, the outage costs due to loss of production, both planned or forced, are very significant and thus it is of interest to seek for a meaningful approach to the management of boiler pressure parts maintenance such that the enterprise performance is optimised. This paper aims to do this.Design/methodology/approachThis paper proposes a framework that introduces the division of the enterprise objectives into the three decision dimensions. The framework is applied to the case of power station boiler pressure parts maintenance to optimise maintenance outages decisions for Loy Yang, a power station in Victoria, Australia.FindingsThe study finds that the framework provides meaningful approach to optimising maintenance decisions and is generic for application in different cases.Originality/valueThe paper provides a new insight and integrated approach to optimising asset maintenance for an enterprise with the use of a case study.