Lean integration in maintenance logistics management: A new sustainable framework

Abstract

The current industrial constraints on production systems, especially availability problems are complicating maintenance managers' mission and making longer and further performance improvement process. Dealing with these problems in a wiser managerial vision respecting sustainability dimensions would be more efficient to optimize all resources. In this paper, and after addressing the lean/sustainability challenge in a the literature to define main research orientations and critical points in manufacturing and then maintenance specific context, two case studies have been conducted in two production systems in Morocco and Canada, within the objective to set a clearer scene of the lean philosophy implementation in maintenance and within the sustainability scope from an empirical perspective. To activate the social dimension being often non-integrated in the lean/sustainability initiatives, the article authors reveal an original research direction assigning maintenance logistics as the leading part of our approach to cover all sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, its management is discussed for the first time in a sustainable framework, where the authors propose a new model considering the lean/sustainable perspective and inspired by the rich Human-Machine interaction memory to solve daily maintenance problems exploiting the operators' experience feedback.