The Evaluating the Financial Impact of Predictive Maintenance in Manufacturing: An Integrative Literature Review

Even if measuring the ROI (Returns-on-Investment) of predictive equipment maintenance is essential for discerning whether the manufacturing entity is overspending or underspending on equipment maintenance, most manufacturing executives often do not bother to measure the ROI of their equipment maintenance. This affects decisions on the improvement initiatives that can be adopted. To address such a problem, this study used integrative review to evaluate insights from the existing studies about the techniques, values, and limitations of measuring the ROI of predictive manufacturing equipment’s maintenance. The research was a qualitative study based on content analysis of articles retrieved primarily through Google searches as the major search engine. After predictive maintenance, findings from the analysis indicated the financial metrics to measure the financial gains obtained since the introduction of predictive machine maintenance. It evaluates the benefits and advantages so far attained as compared to the costs incurred in the application of predictive maintenance. Apart from ROI, some of the commonly used financial metrics were found to encompass cost-benefit analysis and net present value (NPV). ROI analysis seeks to evaluate the benefits gained against the costs incurred in the use of predictive machine maintenance. However, findings indicated the major inhibitors of measuring the ROI of predictive machine maintenance to often arise from cost, poor data utilization culture, and ignoring predictive maintenance. Unless management is able to deal with such challenges, they may never get to understand the returns on investment generated from the expenditure on predictive equipment maintenance. From these findings, this study has contributed to changing the general perception of predictive maintenance as an expenditure rather than an investment.