Maintenance management - an AHP application for centralization decentralization

The decision to centralize or decentralize different functions of a maintenance department in a plant has not been traditionally made on a systematic and quantitative basis. This paper proposes a systematic model for evaluating different maintenance organizational structures with respect to the objectives of a maintenance department. Based on a group decision process, the model provides step-by-step guidelines for the maintenance management and decision makers to go through the evaluation process. A case example is shown, which involves four alternative organizational structures. Examples are given to show the calculation process for grouping the assessments of individual team members and for final analysis towards the evaluation of the organizational alternatives.