Version: 15 October 2022 Table of ContentFollow for updates Jan Stoker
From Blueprint to Reality – Implementing & Executing Maintenance Management
The chronological interplay between the industrial revolutions and Maintenance Management paradigms tells a consistent story: every technological leap forces organisations to rethink how they care for their assets. From the first steam-driven factories to today’s cyber-physical and data-rich environments, maintenance has evolved from a necessary reaction to failures into a strategic, value-creating discipline. Maintenance Management 5.0 positions itself explicitly in this continuum: it connects the human-centric, resilient and sustainable ambitions of Industry 5.0 with a rigorously standardised maintenance practice.
In Industry 1.0 and 2.0, Maintenance 1.0 and 2.0 were largely reactive and preventive in nature: “fix when broken” gradually gave way to periodic routines aimed at avoiding unexpected downtime. Industry 3.0 introduced automation and early digital controls; Maintenance 3.0 answered with predictive concepts and data-driven diagnostics. With Industry 4.0, cyber-physical systems, IoT and advanced analytics enabled Maintenance 4.0 to move towards real-time monitoring, condition-based interventions, and model-based optimisation of asset performance.
Maintenance Management 5.0 builds on these foundations but extends the focus. It does not see technology as an end in itself, but as an enabler of human-centric, resilient and sustainable operations. In a Maintenance 5.0 context, digital twins, AI, IIoT and advanced analytics are combined with “worker-in-the-loop” principles, domain expertise and organisational learning. Maintenance decisions are no longer purely technical; they explicitly balance performance, cost, risk, safety and environmental impact, and deliberately embed the human role in supervision, interpretation and governance.
This paradigm is firmly anchored in international and European standards. The ISO 55000:2024 series frames maintenance as one of the fundamental coordinated activities for realising value from assets across their life cycle. Within this asset management system perspective, the CEN/TC 319 maintenance standards provide the operational backbone: EN 13306 establishes the shared terminology; EN 17007 structures maintenance processes and indicators; EN 17485 positions maintenance within physical asset management and the Strategic Asset Management Process; EN 17666 elaborates Maintenance Engineering; EN 15628 defines competence requirements; and EN 15341 specifies maintenance key performance indicators. Together, they offer a normative reference model for what mature Maintenance Management 5.0 must organise and demonstrate.
In this deepening, Maintenance Management 5.0 is therefore not presented as a “new buzzword”, but as the logical next step in an aligned system of concepts, standards and practices. The narrative connects the evolution from Maintenance 1.0 to 4.0 with the current Industry 5.0 timeframe, and links these historical stages to contemporary frameworks such as the Asset & Maintenance Management Lemniscate, the Maintenance Landscape Model and the Digital Line of Sight. In doing so, it clarifies how maintenance professionals can use the ISO 55000:2024 series and the CEN/TC 319 standards to design, implement and continuously improve a Maintenance Management System that is technically robust, digitally enabled and genuinely human-centric.
This chapter invites the reader to explore Maintenance Management 5.0 as both an evolutionary and a normative concept: rooted in the history of industrial development, structured by international and European standards, and oriented towards a future in which maintenance becomes a decisive contributor to resilience, sustainability and long-term value creation.
Content Implementing & Executing Maintenance Management