Maintenance management models: a study of the published literature to identify empirical evidence

Purpose – Maintenance and its management has moved from being considered a “necessary evil” to being of strategic importance for most competitive organisations around the world. In terms of the identification and use of organisational-wide maintenance management models the picture is not clears from both a literature and practical perspective. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the various models and their use in real-world applications, and in doing so, explores the gap between academic research and practice. Design/methodology/approach – For this paper two comprehensive reviews of the literature were undertaken, first, to identify and categorise the various maintenance management models, and second, to determine the depth of empirical evidence for the popular models in real-world applications. Descriptive analysis of both the practical examples and empirical evidence rates (EER) for maintenance related journals is provided. Findings – Within the literature 37 maintenance management models were identified and categorised. From these, three models were found to be popular: total productive maintenance (TPM), condition based maintenance, and reliability centred maintenance. While several thousand papers discussed these three models, only 82 articles were found to provide empirical evidence. Research limitations/implications – While providing a sound foundation for future research the outcomes are based solely on academic literature. Analysis of EER outside the field of maintenance is needed to make comparisons. Practical implications – The paper offers practitioners a detailed contemporary overview of maintenance management models along with tabulated results of practical examples to present day organisations. Such practical-focused papers are very limited within academic literature. Social implications – With EER as low as 1.5 per cent for some journals this paper acts as a reminder to researchers that they have an obligation to society to spend taxpayer funded research on addressing social needs and real-world problems. Originality/value – This paper makes a concerted attempt to link academic research with management and operational practitioners. While the paper is critical of the current academic imbalance between theory and practice, a number of suggestions to improve EER are offered in the conclusions.