Smart Maintenance: a research agenda for industrial maintenance management
Journal article, 2020

How do modernized maintenance operations, often referred to as “Smart Maintenance”, impact the performance of manufacturing plants? This question is a pressing challenge for practitioners and scholars in industrial maintenance management, in direct response to the transition to an industrial environment with pervasive digital technologies. This paper is the second part of a two-paper series. We present an empirically grounded research agenda that reflects the heterogeneity in industrial adoption and performance of Smart Maintenance. Focus groups and interviews with more than 110 experts from over 20 different firms were used to identify contingencies, responses, and performance implications of Smart Maintenance. The findings were transformed into a contingency model, providing the basis for a research agenda consisting of five principal areas: (1) environmental contingencies; (2) institutional isomorphism; (3) implementation issues related to change, investments and interfaces; (4) the four dimensions of Smart Maintenance; and (5) performance implications at the plant and firm level. The agenda can guide the field of industrial maintenance management to move from exploratory work to confirmatory work, studying the validity of the proposed concepts as well as the magnitude and direction of their relationships. This will ultimately help scholars and practitioners answer how Smart Maintenance can impact industrial performance.

Smart Manufacturing

Industry 4.0

Digitalization

Industrial organization

Maintenance

Manufacturing

Author

Jon Bokrantz

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Anders Skoogh

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Cecilia Berlin

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Design and Human Factors

Thorsten Wuest

West Virginia University

Johan Stahre

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

International Journal of Production Economics

0925-5273 (ISSN)

Vol. 224 107547

SMASh – Smart Maintenance Assessment

VINNOVA, 2017-05-01 -- 2019-10-31.

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Areas of Advance

Production

DOI

10.1016/j.ijpe.2019.107547

More information

Latest update

5/20/2020