Towards a tool for SMEs to Maintenance Management process self-assessment and improvement: literature overview and research proposal

One of the most important resources that reveal to be determinant to improve the maintenance management process is information. Information is, indeed, considered as a significant source of performance improvement, but may be difficult to identify, structure, analyses, and reuse properly. Over the years, many methodologies, tools, techniques, and strategies have been developed to systematize maintenance information flow. Among them, maintenance management information systems (MMIS) have become very popular over the years proving considerable benefits above all in large organizations. On the contrary, the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) often lack the managerial expertise to plan, organize and direct the use of information resources, and many SMEs hold insufficient in-house expertise for successful information system adoption. In literature, few studies have been undertaken to explore and understand the barriers and motivation that bring SMEs to a low success rate in the implementation of MMIS. Furthermore, no research work considers SMEs’ context and the issue of readiness of the organizations in introducing these systems. For these reasons, in this paper barriers and their implication in implementing MMIS for SMEs are discussed. The paper aims to draw a framework for a new MMIS able to provide for the small companies a general procedure/guideline to help them to identify the current state of maintenance information flow and drives actions to increase efficiency and effectiveness. The framework outlines the essential steps that should be developed to manage the information maintenance flow effectively. Moreover, the presence or not of these factors in the specific industrial context allows assessing the maturity level of the maintenance process. The assessment of maturity facilitates the identification of improvement actions that lead to better performance.