Sustainable Maintenance - Potential and Fields of Action

The importance of maintenance in the producing industry keeps increasing. Maintenance costs in the old EU countries have doubled every decade; according to estimations, they amount to about 9,000 billion Euros per year. Long considered a sleeping beauty, many companies have recognized the importance of a holistic management of availability. However, the potentials and field of action in sustainable maintenance are widely unknown. The VDMA, the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (Dortmund) and the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) of the RWTH Aachen University of Technology have conducted a study to investigate the status and the potentials of maintenance in German companies. The study has been supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Problems and solutions as well as their implementation potential have been analyzed in the field of technology, strategy, organization, and business models. The study confirms that optimized maintenance makes substantial cost reductions possible.