A Maintenance Maturity and Sustainability Assessment Model for Manufacturing Systems

Maintenance is a key manufacturing function that contributes to a company’s productivity, profitability and sustainability. Unfortunately, many aspects of the contribution of maintenance to sustainability in manufacturing remain unexplored, and many enterprises are not yet ready to assess the maintenance impacts on their sustainability. Maturity models are useful tools for assessing maintenance practices; however, no maintenance maturity model that allows the evaluation of the contribution of maintenance to sustainable performance was found in literature. This paper proposes a model for assessing the maturity and sustainability of maintenance processes. The model outputs are: a measure of the maintenance and sustainability maturity level; recommendations for improvement to undertake to enhance maintenance maturity and, thus, meet sustainability standards. The model was applied in three manufacturing enterprises: the calculation of their maintenance maturity and sustainability indices made the maintenance stakeholders more aware of the need to implement effective strategies for more sustainable maintenance performance.