Computerized Maintenance Management Systems in SMEs: A Survey in Italy and Some Remarks for the Implementation of Condition Based Maintenance

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is considered one of the most relevant policies for the improvement of maintenance management for the next future. The CBM consists of a maintenance program that recommends maintenance actions based on the information collected through condition monitoring (Jardine, 2006). With the rapid development of computer and advanced sensor technologies, data acquisition has become more powerful and less expensive, making condition monitoring more affordable. However, this seems not to be enough. Condition monitoring data are only the measurements related to the health condition of the physical asset. Asset life cycle management requires more than that: for example, a registry of event data for the physical asset (information on what happened, e.g., installation, breakdown, overhaul, etc., and what was done, e.g., minor repair, preventive maintenance, oil change, intervention from a third party, etc.), which is normally handled in Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), cannot be overlooked when doing CBM (Jardine, 2006). Indeed, the event data are relevant parts since they enable integration between health assessment of a physical asset with the maintenance actions subsequently decided, the used resources and costs. Therefore, before considering any evolution of CBM thanks to the advancement of techniques for diagnosis or prognosis or IT systems etc, it was deemed important to consider the availability of the CMMS as a basic cornerstone to go ahead. Reasoning by analogy, it is like saying that now, within this work, we are more interested in recognizing if “the building is good” (being based on some very basic elements such as the CMMS) rather than evaluating if “we can live better in the building due to new living solutions therein” (i.e., new technologies for CBM programs). This paper focuses on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to understand the “quality of their building”. An empirical research aims at: (i) understanding whether a CMMS is there or not, and if it is, (ii) which kind of implementation is preferred, and, last but not least, (iii) if this preference is affordable or not for developing advanced maintenance management systems such as those based on CBM programs. The focus on SMEs was selected both because SMEs’ high presence in Italy and of their probable lack of economic resources, computer science and maintenance competences, leading to poor maintenance information systems, which may eventually determine a poor “building” where to make CBM live. It should be clear to the reader, since now, that we do not intend to conclude anything about the possibilities of CBM in a SME. In opposition, we intend only to provide empirical evidences of the features of the maintenance information system of SMEs which is, for sure, a constraint for deciding when and how much a CBM strategy is implemented.