Research and Practice Agenda of Industrial e-Maintenance: Information Logistics as a Driver for Development

This paper presents an inquiry into the domain of e-maintenance, particularly of industrial entities. As a domain of research and practice, e-maintenance is understood to offer great opportunities, however it seems to be driven by the development of applications of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This ICT-driven approach is unfortunate, as ICT has no value in itself, rather its benefit comes for how it processes information, and more broadly how it forms its contextual activities. To remedy this situation, a conceptual framework is proposed, to guide both the practice and the research of e-maintenance operations. This framework combines the seminal Industrial Value Chain framework and then the Buyer-Consumer Value Chain, and articulates their intersection with a set of defined categories derived from Information Logistics. This provides one possible structure for the conception of e-maintenance, which needs to be populated with the published research and practice results. This, in turn, may uncover white spaces where research efforts deserve particular attention and are driven by value generation – whether economic or other – instead of experimental ICT application developments. The presentation of this framework is accompanied with a brief example that contrasts an event-driven versus a plan-driven approach to e-maintenance