Managing industrial maintenance—networked model

Abstract

Industrial maintenance services are outsourced more and more as manufacturers’ own maintenance units are nowadays rare. However, instead of outsourcing the maintenance as a whole, many companies are acquiring the needed resources from several actors. Thus, maintenance practices on a site can be performed by the customer itself, an equipment provider, or an independent maintenance company. How should this be orchestrated? We begin our study with explaining the current state of industrial maintenance business. Next, we offer insights from the services networks literature. Then we move on exploring maintenance through seven case companies, which brings us to our suggestions for two optional future maintenance models: (1) capacity-based maintenance and (2) locally networked maintenance framework.