ABSTRACT
There are two primary areas in which more objective financial considerations can be brought into engineering decisions. The first is the design phase – when equipment or projects incorporate many cost-benefit assessments, trade-offs and comparisons of alternatives. The second area of difficulty lies in the identification and solving of operating & maintenance problems. Industrial cost optimisation covers initiatives in this area – building the cost-benefit equation into all engineering and operating decisions. The urgent requirement for better decision-making is the correct inclusion of all the factors involved – quantified and assessed on a payback basis. More common are decisions that involve some form of investment in order to generate a rate of improvement or benefit. Such decisions include most planned maintenance strategies, condition monitoring, inspection and shutdown frequencies, as well as equipment or component life cycle analysis. The variable and approximate nature of engineering decisions can be transformed into a systematic and business-oriented science.
