Assessing and benchmarking maintenance performance in a manufacturing facility: A data envelopment analysis approach

Maintenance effectiveness in manufacturing facilities is a critical factor in achieving significant competitive advantage. Consequently, attaining higher levels of maintenance effectiveness has recently become a primary goal for managers of world-class organizations. This paper presents a study, which will demonstrate how managers can identify best in class performers in terms of maintenance and how to conduct an improvement analysis using data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. Data on 13 paper mills collected from a large U.S manufacturing company are used to identify low performers and determine which high performer plants to benchmark in order to improve their efficiency. A discussion of results is also presented. The emphasis of this paper is on the application.