Smart Maintenance in Battery Production

Licentiate thesis, 2026

Smart Maintenance has emerged as an important concept for managing maintenance in digitalized manufacturing, yet its implementation remains insufficiently understood, particularly in newly established factories and greenfield manufacturing. Prior research has established its conceptualization and provided its facilitation, but empirical evidence into its implementation – how it is put into effect – remain limited. This is especially evident in greenfield battery production, a rapidly growing European industry characterized by significant challenges, reflected in several recently paused or failed industrialization projects. This creates a need to better understand how battery production is ramped up and the role of Smart Maintenance in enabling its success.

The aim of this thesis is therefore to examine how Smart Maintenance can be understood and developed in battery production. It addresses two research questions: (1) the main challenges associated with maintenance in battery production, and (2) how Smart Maintenance can contribute to its development. The research is based on an industrial doctoral project carried out at a large battery manufacturer in Sweden between 2022 and 2025. It follows an iterative research design aimed at exploring, analyzing, and evaluating prioritized research and development projects during production ramp-up. The thesis is based on five appended papers employing ethnographic, case study, multi-method, and design science research approaches. Together, the studies identify critical challenges, establish important development needs, and outline relevant research avenues across socio-technical components, and begin to address these in relation to the four dimensions of Smart Maintenance.

The results show that the main challenges associated with maintenance in battery production relate to performance, workforce, integration, and design. These are derived from 31 research avenues. The thesis further demonstrates how these are addressed through four prioritized research and development projects, illustrating how the four dimension of Smart Maintenance - internal integration, human capital resource, external integration, and data-driven decision-making - can be developed in battery production. More specifically, they outline a structured set of deployment requirements, worker attributes, integration enablers, and design possibilities across the dimensions of Smart Maintenance. In the end, the thesis concludes that Smart Maintenance should not be understood as a final state, but as a continuous process of development. This provides theoretical and practical contributions by demonstrating how maintenance in battery production can be developed using Smart Maintenance, while also advancing theory through its focus on implementation.