Analysing IT Functionality Gaps for Maintenance Management

Several studies have been carried out for describing the functionality and use of computerised maintenance management systems. A major drawback of these studies is that they do not reveal the actual support for maintenance management. To describe the full situation, the gaps between required support and actual support have to be determined. The gaps are of two kinds: 1) Between the functionality included in the IT system and the functionality required, and 2) Between the functionality included in the IT system and the functionality actually used. To reach a better understanding of the utilisation of IT in maintenance management, the existence of these gaps must be further explored. In this paper, we will study the existence of functionality gaps in maintenance management IT applications using data from a web-based questionnaire survey conducted in Swedish industry. Results show that the IT systems in general provide good support for maintenance management, thus low degree of functionality gaps. However, most commonly unused function was failure cause and consequence analysis and the most commonly unused information was maintenance improvement suggestions. When comparing the results with respect to type of IT system used, some significant differences was revealed, indicating that ERPsystems and production systems do not include all required information for maintenance management. Next step will be to further study the reasons behind the differences in gaps by conducting additional interviews.