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A common understanding of what events to regard as production disturbances (PD) are essential for effective handling of PDs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to answer the two questions: how are individuals with production or maintenance management positions in industry classifying different PD factors? Which factors are being measured and registered as PDs in the companies monitoring systems?

A longitudinal approach using a repeated cross-sectional survey design was adopted. Empirical data were collected from 80 companies in 2001 using a paper-based questionnaire, and from 71 companies in 2014 using a web-based questionnaire.

A diverging view of 21 proposed PD factors is found between respondents in manufacturing industry, and there is also a lack of correspondence with existing literature. In particular, planned events are not classified and registered to the same extent as downtime losses. Moreover, the respondents are often prone to classify factors as PDs compared to what is actually registered. This diverging view has been consistent for over a decade, and hinders companies to develop systematic and effective strategies for handling of PDs.

There has been no in-depth investigation, especially not from a longitudinal perspective, of the personal interpretation of PDs from people who play a central role in achieving high reliability of production systems.

Inadequate strategic planning and maintenance budget may undermine the maintenance of the Higher Education Institution Building (HEIB). Studies have shown that a customised maintenance concept such as Soft System Methodology (SSM) can improve public building maintenance operations. There is a paucity of studies regarding public HEIB maintenance in Nigeria via an SSM approach. Therefore, the research investigated the state of public HEIB and developed a framework to improve public HEIB maintenance practices in Nigeria.

The research adopted SSM to understand Nigeria’s public HEIB maintenance practices. The SSM permitted a substitute approach to improve public HEIB maintenance practices via a developed framework. Data were collated via virtual interviews with experts, and findings were presented in line with the SSM seven steps.

Findings show that besides the shoddy state of public HEIB maintenance, there is no public digitalised HEIB framework to improve maintenance practices across Nigeria’s higher education institutions. The study developed a digitalised framework with the support of Computerised Maintenance Management System from the findings. It would reposition the public HEIB and stir up various agencies/departments/units managing maintenance for better service delivery via integrated delivery, practical, methodological and managerial aspects.

The research investigated Nigeria’s public HEIB maintenance practices via SSM to identify the required document and propose a feasible framework to improve Nigeria’s HEIB maintenance practices. Besides the developed conceptual framework, Nigeria’s HEIB maintenance practitioners and higher institution chief executives can use the recommended framework as guidelines to improve HEIB maintenance practices.

For many decades, it has been recognized that maintenance activities should be adapted to the specific usage of a system. For that reason, many advanced policies have been developed, such as condition-based and load-based maintenance policies. However, these policies require advanced monitoring techniques and rather detailed understanding of the failure behavior, which requires the support of an OEM or expert, prohibiting application by an operator in many cases. The present work proposes a maintenance policy that relieves the high (technical) demands set by these existing policies and provides a more accurate specification of the required (dynamic) maintenance interval than traditional usage-based maintenance.

The methodology followed starts with a review and critical assessment of existing maintenance policies, which are classified according to six different aspects. Based on the need for a technically less demanding policy that appears from this comparison, a new policy is developed. The consecutive steps required for this functional usage profiles based maintenance policy are then critically discussed: usage profile definition, monitoring, profile severity quantification and the possible extension to the fleet level. After the description of the proposed policy, it is demonstrated in three case studies on real systems.

A maintenance policy based on a simple usage registration procedure appears to be feasible, which enables a significantly more efficient maintenance process than the traditional usage-based policies. This is demonstrated by the policy proposed here.

The proposed maintenance policy based on functional usage profiles offers the operators of fleets of systems the opportunity to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their maintenance process, without the need for a high investment in advanced monitoring systems and in experts interpreting the results.

The original contribution of this work is the explicit definition of a new maintenance policy, which combines the benefits of considering the effects of usage or environment severity with a limited investment in monitoring technology.

This paper aims to present a dual-perspective framework for maintenance service delivery that should be used by manufacturing companies to structure and manage their maintenance service delivery process, using aggregated historical and real-time data to improve operational decision-making. The framework, built for continuous improvement, allows the exploitation of maintenance data to improve the knowledge of service processes and machines.

The Dual-perspective, data-based decision-making process for maintenance delivery (D3M) framework development and test followed a qualitative approach based on literature reviews and semi-structured interviews. The pool of companies interviewed was expanded from the development to the test stage to increase its applicability and present additional perspectives.

The interviews confirmed that manufacturing companies are interested in exploiting the data generated in the use phase to improve operational decision-making in maintenance service delivery. Feedback to improve the framework methods and tools was collected, as well as suggestions for the introduction of new ones according to the companies' necessities.

The paper presents a novel framework addressing the data-based decision-making process for maintenance service delivery. The D3M framework can be used by manufacturing companies to structure their maintenance service delivery process and improve their knowledge of machines and service processes.

This paper aims to exemplify the use of project management tools in the scheduling of aircraft maintenance activities. This process is known as maintenance, repair and overhaul and it has gained importance within the aeronautical sector due to its expected growth in the coming years; however, it also faces increasing competitiveness in its market. This fact gives rise to the need of acting in maintenance management and seeking lower costs while maintaining the quality of the service provided. The purpose of this paper is to propose the structuring of a procedure that aims to reduce the total maintenance time (downtime) and guarantee the delivery of the aircraft on time.

The paper, through a case study at a Brazilian aircraft maintenance center, used critical path method and critical chain project management, the latter being derived from the theory of constraints, with the purpose of analyzing resources systematically and synchronizing the activities in the precedence network.

As a result, it is shown that downtime can be reduced from 11 to 5 days and improvements are proposed to achieve greater market competitiveness.

This paper demonstrates the competitive advantage that resulted from the application of project management tools in the aircraft maintenance planning and execution.

The purpose is to describe new business opportunities within the Swedish railway industry and to support the development of business models that corresponds with the needs and requirements of Industry 4.0, here denoted as Service Management 4.0.

The study is an in-depth and descriptive case study of the Swedish railway system with specific focus on a railway vehicle maintainer. Public reports, statistics, internal documents, interviews and dialogues forms the basis for the empirical findings.

The article describes the complex business environment of the deregulated Swedish railway industry. Main findings are in the form of identified business opportunities and new business model propositions for one of the key actors, a vehicle maintainer.

The article provides valuable understanding of business strategy development within complex business environments and how maintenance related business models could be developed for reaching Service Management 4.0.

The purpose of this study is to ensure productive, robust and sustainable production systems and realise digitalised manufacturing trough implementation of Smart Maintenance – “an organizational design for managing maintenance of manufacturing plants in environments with pervasive digital technologies”. This paper aims to support industry practitioners in selecting performance indicators (PIs) to measure the effects of Smart Maintenance, and thus facilitate its implementation.

Intercoder reliability and negotiated agreement were used to analyse 170 maintenance PIs. The PIs were structurally categorised according to the anticipated effects of Smart Maintenance.

Companies need to revise their set of PIs when changing manufacturing and/or maintenance strategy (e.g. reshape the maintenance organisation towards Smart Maintenance). This paper suggests 13 categories of PIs to facilitate the selection of PIs for Smart Maintenance. The categories are based on 170 PIs, which were analysed according to the anticipated effects of Smart Maintenance.

The 13 suggested categories bring clarity to the measuring potential of the PIs and their relation to the Smart Maintenance concept. Thereby, this paper serves as a guide for industry practitioners to select PIs for measuring the effects of Smart Maintenance.

This is the first study evaluating how maintenance PIs measure the anticipated effects of maintenance in digitalised manufacturing. The methods intercoder reliability and negotiated agreement were used to ensure the trustworthiness of the categorisation of PIs. Such methods are rare in maintenance research.

The key objectives of this study were to investigate the interactions among the lean, green management practices and organizational sustainable performance measures and explore the possibility of simultaneous implementation of these concepts for improving the organizational sustainable performance.

Using the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique, the interactions among the lean, green practices and organizational sustainable performance measures were established. A focus group which consisted of purposively selected 15 experts was utilized in the primary data collection.

In Sri Lankan context, water and material consumption reduction, energy efficiency, water pollution and greenhouse gas reduction were identified as the dominant green practices, while pull production, lot size reduction, continuous improvement, preventive maintenance, employee involvement and cycle time reduction were the dominant lean practices. Inventory level, profitability, quality, cost, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, lead time, resources consumption (material, water, energy) and waste generation were determined as the dominant sustainable performance measures. The resulting ISM-based structural model which consisted of eight levels concluded that firstly lean practices influence the green practices and afterward green practices affect the sustainable performance measures.

The aim of this study was to develop a hypothetical structural model to explain the interactions among the lean, green management practices and organizational sustainable performance measures. But this hypothetical model was not empirically tested in the current study. So further study is required to empirically test the proposed model.

Currently organizations who practice for sustainable performance engages, lean and green practices separately without understanding on which practices are stared when and how. So, through the findings of this study, organization who desire to improve the sustainable performance are recommended to begin the journey with lean practices and subsequently move in to green and handle both lean and green initiatives through one functional unit.

The existing literature does not possess a model for explaining the lean–green synergy and organizational sustainable performance and this study successfully fills this gap. Also the study proposes for the practitioners, when and how the lean and green practices should be initiated and implemented for rising the sustainable performance of an organization.

Although facilities management (FM) has been advocated in the construction industry to address the issues of facilities in buildings, their adoption is still plagued with barriers. The factors affecting FM practices need detailed investigation. However, few studies have been conducted on the factors affecting FM practices in developing countries such as South Africa. This study aims to investigate the factors affecting effective FM practices in public buildings in South Africa.

To achieve this aim, a quantitative survey was carried out using questionnaire to gather relevant data in the study area. The collected data were analysed using descriptive statistics and principal component (factor) analysis. The study was conducted on 39 facilities managers in the Department of Public Works in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa.

The descriptive analysis revealed that availability of funds, occupants’ knowledge of FM, absence of policy guiding FM practice, state of deterioration of facilities and design concepts and scope were significant challenges affecting effective FM practices in public buildings in South Africa. The result of the principal component analysis of the factors affecting FM practices were grouped into organisational factors, structural/design errors and end users’ elements.

As it is widely understood that “money” plays a significant role in the performance of any activity or function, administrators/governments of public facilities should strive to plan and make appropriate finances accessible to facilities managers. Participation of facilities managers in the planning stage can also help reduce design flaws and their maintenance implications. In addition, adequate training for professionals can improve FM awareness and productivity.

The paper reveals the structural framework of the factors that can influence the effective facilities management practices in public buildings.