Decision making in maintenance using analytical hierarchy process and time-driven activity based costing

Decision‐making in maintenance is typically a complex and confusing exercise, characterised by trade‐offs between strategic objectives, quality of products, and economic impacts. This paper proposes a cost‐benefit study, which simplifies distinctness between competing alternatives of maintenance performance improvement and associated gains. The methodology followed in this paper is based on using two major parts. The first part deals with the use of multi‐criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method especially the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The second part concerns the cost‐benefit chapter which is approached by time‐driven activity based costing (TDABC). The selection of appropriate actions for maintenance improvement involves multiple criteria decision making such as cost, benefit, reliability and safety. Some of those criteria cannot easily be condensed into a financial value, which complicates making comparisons and trade‐offs. The proposed model can be used to support managers to control different sub‐processes of maintenance, also to improve decisions using ranking of proposed actions. This model gives also an idea on actions possible of each action using time‐driven activity based costing. This paper is one of few papers in maintenance proposing a set of improvement actions accompanied with their weight and their estimated gain. The research findings are experimented in a heavy industry company based in Morocco. Further researches could experiment this model in a maintenance department of a different industry type.