ANALYSIS ON THE EVALUATION OF PROJECT EFFICIENCY BASED ON BUDGET EXECUTION: PLANNED OUTAGE MAINTENANCE (POM) FOR ELECTRICITY POWER PLANT

With rapid industrialization, electric power consumption has been increasing every year in Korea and in other countries. The provision of additional power stations to produce more electricity is one possible response to this steady increase in consumption. Another alternative is to improve the efficiency of existing stations through timely and effective maintenance works. Since the construction of a new power plant involves a large amount of capital as well as difficulties in the selection of sites, the improvement of existing power stations' efficiencies is often a preferred solution. Therefore, this paper focuses on maintenance project management to address this issue. Among several types of maintenance works, this paper concentrates on planned outage maintenance (POM). This focus arises from the critical impact of POM on other maintenance work, as well as the entire process of electricity production. Unlike other maintenance work, POM is done on the basis of mid and long-term plans. In addition, only POM works are conducted during the outage of all power plants. To evaluate the efficiency of POM works, budget data relating to 164 POM projects between 2001 and 2008 was collected from 7 sites in South Korea. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was selected as a methodology for evaluation. From this analysis, comparative study was used to determine the categories of projects that had performed well, and those with the most optimized budget structures. Moreover, through discussion with industry, this research develops a feasible proposed method by which to enhance the efficiency of POM projects.