Measuring maintenance impacts on sustainability of manufacturing industries: from a systematic literature review to a framework proposal

The current societal, industrial and governmental environment makes sustainability requirements ubiquitous, pushing manufacturing organisations to reach new sustainability targets. Hence, sustainable manufacturing attracted much attention over the last decade as an emerging manufacturing approach, aiming to empower enterprises to meet sustainability challenges. In such a goal, maintenance is major lever for sustainable manufacturing because it provides the company with the ability to keep its production system efficient and its product at the required quality. Maintenance affects production volume and costs, asset performance, equipment availability, final product quality, workers and end-users health and safety, surrounding natural environment and social welfare. The goal of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, a systematic literature review was performed to analyse the relationship between maintenance and sustainability issues, the maintenance impacts on sustainability of manufacturing industries and, finally, to identify the indicators used for assessing such impacts. The conducted literature review indicated that maintenance impacts on sustainability should be better investigated, and the relationships between maintenance processes and sustainability indicators should be defined and formalised. Thanks to this research challenge, the second goal of this study was to provide an original conceptual framework for measuring maintenance impacts on sustainability. Therefore, maintenance impacts on sustainability and the relationships between sustainability indicators and maintenance processes, were identified. The developed framework can guide and help several stakeholders to define direct and indirect impacts of maintenance on sustainability aspects, to select the indicators of interest for measuring such impacts, and to be more aware about maintenance and sustainability relationship.