Articles

Factory owners and vehicle manufacturers increasingly opt for predictive analytics to inform their decisions. While predictive analytics have been proven to provide insights into the initiation of maintenance measures before a machine actually fails, the right models and features could have a significant impact on the budget spent and resources allocated. This means that financially oriented questions need to at least partially guide the decisions in the planning phase of data science projects. Data-driven approaches will play an increasingly important role, but only a few of the firms that were confident performed logistic regression models for predictive maintenance. Also, from the available knowledge, data-driven classification models connecting vehicle component failures and the occurrence of delays at the assembly line have not been published. This paper utilizes a real-world data-driven approach using classification models in predictive analytics by vehicle manufacturers and thereby links the financial implications of such data science projects to their results. We expand the existing literature on predictive maintenance and possess a unique dataset of newly launched series of vehicles, presented as-is. Our research context is of interest to researchers and practitioners in the automotive industry that manage and plan the final vehicle assembly with just-in-time principles, factoring the consequences of component failures on the assembly process. Key findings of this paper highlight that while minor tweaking of the models is possible, their potential input in decision-making processes for budget optimization is limited.