In the evolving landscape of Industry 5.0, Maintenance plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, availability, and operational efficiency of physical assets. As industries integrate advanced technologies and human-centric approaches, the importance of a structured maintenance framework becomes even more pronounced. The European standard EN 17007 offers a comprehensive guideline for organizing Maintenance processes, breaking them down into distinct families and levels to streamline the execution of tasks and optimize asset performance.
Based on the Asset Management Bow-Tie and the Asset Management Lemniscate we delve into the intricacies of the Maintenance process framework, emphasizing the categorization of Maintenance activities into three primary types: Management, Realization, and Mupport processes. These categories are foundational for professionals engaged in Maintenance, providing the essential knowledge and skills required to ensure smooth and efficient operations. Additionally, the article explores the broader maintenance landscape, highlighting its critical intersections with Asset Management, risk management, and sustainable development, particularly within the context of Industry 5.0.
Read further to explore how these maintenance processes are structured and applied to real-world operations, and how the integration of Industry 5.0 technologies is reshaping the future of Maintenance Management.
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Author: Ing. Jan Stoker MSc. MEng. Follow Jan Stoker
Introduction
A structured framework, based on the principles of asset management, is essential to ensure the reliability, availability, and longevity of physical assets, all while aligning with broader corporate objectives.
The European standard EN 17007 offers a comprehensive framework to categorize maintenance processes into three distinct families: Management, Realization, and Support processes. These categories define the scope, structure, and sequence of actions required to maintain assets effectively. This article will explore these maintenance processes in depth and integrate the Asset Management Lemniscate and Asset Management Bow Tie models, which provide additional layers of understanding in asset lifecycle management and risk mitigation.
1. The Maintenance Process Framework (Level 1)
At the core of the maintenance framework lies a systematic approach to actions that align with the overall asset management strategy. Maintenance, as defined by EN 17007, involves not just the technical execution of repairs and servicing but also the strategic planning, support mechanisms, and continuous improvement efforts needed to sustain asset performance. The three primary process families—Management, Realization, and Support—are interdependent, and their integration within the asset management system is crucial for optimizing outcomes.
1.1 Management Processes
The management process serves as the strategic backbone of the maintenance framework. It encompasses activities that align maintenance actions with organizational goals, ensuring coherence and direction across all levels of operation. Key functions within the management process include:
- Strategy Formulation: Setting long-term goals for asset performance and aligning them with corporate objectives.
- Policy Development: Defining maintenance policies that dictate resource allocation, compliance, and operational procedures.
- Organizational Design: Structuring roles, responsibilities, and hierarchies to manage maintenance effectively.
- Continuous Improvement: Driving initiatives that focus on enhancing processes and outcomes through regular feedback and performance analysis.
Incorporating the Asset Management Lemniscate, the management process can be seen as the decision-making loop that continuously evaluates and redefines asset strategies based on lifecycle data. The Lemniscate model illustrates the dynamic interaction between strategic asset management and operational activities, ensuring that maintenance decisions remain relevant as assets evolve.
1.2 Realization Processes
The realization process is where strategic intentions are translated into tangible actions. It focuses on the execution of maintenance tasks, both preventive and corrective, that directly affect asset performance. These tasks ensure that assets maintain their functionality and reliability over time. Key components of realization processes include:
- Preventive Maintenance (PRV): Actions taken to avoid potential failures by anticipating wear, fatigue, or other degradation mechanisms.
- Corrective Maintenance (COR): Restorative actions aimed at repairing or restoring the functionality of assets after a failure has occurred.
- Improvement Actions (IMP): Continuous efforts to enhance the intrinsic reliability and maintainability of assets.
- Preventive and/or Corrective Actions (ACT): Implement preventive and/or corrective actions on the item.
The Asset Management Bow Tie model becomes especially relevant in realization processes as it highlights the dual roles of prevention and mitigation in managing risks. Preventive maintenance acts as the defensive line, aiming to avoid failures altogether, while corrective maintenance serves as the mitigative action to reduce the impact of failures that do occur. This bifurcation helps organizations clearly define and manage the risks associated with asset failures.
1.3 Support Processes
Support processes are essential for providing the resources, infrastructure, and information required to execute both management and realization processes. They ensure that all operational and strategic goals can be met efficiently by addressing the logistical and administrative needs of maintenance operations. These processes include:
- DOC: Deliver the operational documentation.
- IST: Provide the needed infrastructures.
- MRQ: Deliver maintenance requirements during items design and modification.
- SER: Provide external maintenance services.
- SPP: Deliver spare parts.
- TOL: Deliver the tools, support equipment, and information system.
- RES: Ensuring the availability of internal and external human resources, spare parts, tools, and equipment.
- HSE: Managing the health, safety, and environmental risks associated with maintenance tasks.
- BUD: Allocating and managing financial resources for maintenance activities, ensuring that the necessary funds are available for both routine and emergency tasks.
- DTA: Recording and analyzing maintenance histories to inform future decisions and optimize processes.
- OPT: Continuously refining maintenance workflows and activities to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Support processes align with the Asset Management Lemniscate by providing the necessary resources and data that feed back into the strategic decision-making cycle. Additionally, the support processes contribute to risk mitigation efforts, as described in the Asset Management Bow Tie, by ensuring that resources are in place to handle potential failures efficiently and safely.
2. Integration of Maintenance with Asset management Models
2.1 The Asset Management Lemniscate
The Asset Management Lemniscate model provides a visual representation of the continuous vertical and horizontal loop, better known as the vertical and horizontal Line of Sight, between asset strategy and operational execution. Maintenance processes, especially the management and realization processes, are deeply integrated into this loop. As assets progress through their lifecycle, data gathered from maintenance actions feeds back into the strategic decision-making process, influencing future policies, resource allocations, and improvement initiatives.
The Lemniscate emphasizes the importance of a dynamic, iterative approach to asset management. Maintenance, therefore, is not a static or isolated activity but a key contributor to the ongoing evaluation and adjustment of asset strategies. This ensures that assets remain aligned with organizational goals throughout their lifecycle, from design and acquisition to operation, modernization, and eventual decommissioning.
2.2 The Asset Management Bow-Tie
The Asset Management Bow Tie model complements the Lemniscate by providing a framework for risk management in maintenance activities. It visualizes the pathways through which risks are managed, highlighting the dual roles of preventive (defensive) and corrective (mitigative) actions in maintaining asset integrity.
The realization process, with its emphasis on preventive and corrective maintenance, forms the core of this risk management framework. Preventive maintenance reduces the likelihood of failure by addressing known failure modes before they occur, while corrective maintenance minimizes the consequences of failures that do happen.
The support processes, particularly in the context of risk management, resource provisioning, and safety measures, ensure that all preventive and mitigative actions are adequately supported.
3. The Industry 5.0 context: Human-Centric, Sustainable and resilient
Maintenance
Industry 5.0 is characterized by a shift toward a more integrated and forward-thinking approach to industrial operations, with a focus on three core pillars: human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. In this context, maintenance processes must adapt to support these goals, ensuring that assets not only operate efficiently but also contribute to the long-term viability and adaptability of the organization.
3.1 Human-Centric Maintenance
The human-centric pillar of Industry 5.0 emphasizes the collaboration between humans and technology, leveraging the strengths of both to create more intelligent and adaptive systems. Maintenance, traditionally viewed as a largely technical domain, must evolve to prioritize human input and engagement alongside automation and digitalization.
- Skilled Workforce: In Industry 5.0, the role of maintenance professionals becomes more strategic, requiring advanced skills to interact with intelligent systems, such as AI-driven predictive maintenance tools. The management process must focus on developing and nurturing these skills, ensuring that the workforce can effectively manage both physical and digital assets.
- Health and Safety: A key aspect of human-centric maintenance is the prioritization of worker safety and well-being. The support processes, particularly those related to risk management (HSE), must be enhanced to mitigate hazards in increasingly complex environments. AI-driven monitoring systems and collaborative robots (cobots) will play a critical role in reducing risks while allowing workers to focus on higher-level tasks.
Industry 5.0 sees human workers not as replaceable entities but as essential contributors to the maintenance process, offering creativity, adaptability, and problem-solving abilities that complement automated systems.
3.2 Sustainable Maintenance
Sustainability is a central theme in Industry 5.0, with an increasing focus on minimizing environmental impact while maintaining operational efficiency. In the realm of maintenance, this translates to the development of processes that extend asset life, reduce resource consumption, and mitigate waste.
- Extended Asset Life: Preventive and predictive maintenance, core aspects of the realization process, contribute directly to sustainability by ensuring that assets function optimally for longer periods. By avoiding unplanned downtime and extending the life of machinery and equipment, organizations can reduce the need for new materials and energy-intensive repairs or replacements.
- Energy and Resource Efficiency: Support processes like resource management (SPP and RES) must prioritize energy efficiency and the responsible use of materials. By optimizing resource consumption, maintenance can align with the broader goals of reducing carbon footprints and supporting circular economies.
Sustainable maintenance practices are integral to the longevity of both assets and the organization, ensuring that maintenance actions support environmental objectives and promote responsible stewardship of physical resources.
3.3 Resilient Maintenance
Resilience is the third foundational element of Industry 5.0, emphasizing the ability of organizations to anticipate, absorb, and recover from disruptions. In an increasingly unpredictable global environment, resilient maintenance processes are essential for safeguarding asset performance in the face of external shocks, whether they be technological, economic, or environmental.
- Anticipation of Disruptions: Resilient maintenance involves not just reactive responses but also proactive strategies to anticipate potential disruptions. This includes the integration of predictive analytics into the management process, where data-driven insights are used to foresee failures and adjust maintenance strategies accordingly. For example, the use of IoT sensors and AI can provide early warnings of potential breakdowns, allowing organizations to address issues before they escalate.
- Rapid Recovery and Adaptability: Resilience in the realization process focuses on minimizing downtime and restoring functionality swiftly after a disruption. By employing modular systems, spare part availability, and flexible resource deployment, maintenance teams can quickly recover from unexpected failures, maintaining operational continuity.
- Building Redundancy and Flexibility: Support processes like infrastructure management (IST) and spare parts provisioning (SPP) play a critical role in resilience by ensuring that organizations have the necessary backup systems and parts in place to handle emergencies. Moreover, resilience requires the continual improvement of processes (OPT), where lessons learned from past disruptions are incorporated into future maintenance plans.
In the context of Industry 5.0, resilience extends beyond traditional risk management. It requires a robust and adaptable maintenance framework that not only handles current challenges but also evolves to meet future uncertainties. By building resilience into maintenance practices, organizations can protect their assets and ensure long-term operational stability even in volatile environments.
4. Maintenance Engineering Lifestages Amidst Industry 5.0
Introduction: Maintenance Engineering in the Era of Industry 5.0
Maintenance engineering plays a pivotal role in this context, ensuring that physical assets perform their required functions in a safe, sustainable, and cost-effective manner throughout their life cycle. Critical to this process are the principles of maintainability—the capability of an asset to be efficiently maintained—and circularity, which focuses on reducing waste by enabling reuse, refurbishment, and recycling. These principles align closely with standards such as EN 17666, ISO 550XX:2024, and frameworks like the Asset Management Lemniscate and the Maintenance Framework.
By integrating maintainability and circularity across all life cycle stages, maintenance engineers ensure that assets contribute to the circular economy and achieve long-term value creation. Additionally, the evolution toward Maintenance 5.0—which prioritizes collaboration between humans and intelligent systems—further strengthens the role of maintenance engineering in achieving Industry 5.0 objectives.
4.1 Concept Stage: Embedding Maintainability and Circularity in Design
The concept stage represents the initiation of an asset’s lifecycle, where the foundational vision for the asset is developed. In this stage, maintenance engineering focuses on incorporating maintainability and circularity into the design philosophy, ensuring that early decisions enable efficient maintenance and sustainable resource use.
4.1.1 Maintainability in the Concept Stage
This ensures that assets are designed to minimize maintenance effort and downtime, supporting the long-term operational goals outlined in the Maintenance Framework.
Maintenance Fundamentals SAM, First Edition
4.1.2 Circularity in the Concept Stage
Circularity principles are embedded at the conceptual level by emphasizing material selection, modularity, and design-for-disassembly approaches. Maintenance engineers evaluate the potential for reuse, refurbishment, and recycling of components, ensuring that designs align with circular economy objectives. By integrating these principles early, organizations can reduce environmental impact and lifecycle costs. The Maintenance 5.0 philosophy further supports this integration by fostering collaboration between engineers, designers, and sustainability experts.
4.2 Development Stage: Designing for Optimal Maintainability and Circularity
In the development stage, the initial concept is refined into detailed designs and actionable maintenance plans. This stage is iterative, involving collaboration between multiple disciplines to ensure that maintainability and circularity objectives are realized.
4.2.1 Preliminary Design
Using the Asset Management Lemniscate, engineers evaluate design alternatives, balancing technical feasibility with environmental and economic considerations.
Digital tools such as AI-driven analytics and simulation models play a critical role in identifying potential risks and optimizing design solutions.These tools enable engineers to predict the long-term maintenance implications of design choices, ensuring alignment with sustainability and operational objectives.
4.2.2 Detailed Design
4.3 Realization Stage: Implementing Maintenance and Circularity Strategies
The realization stage focuses on translating design concepts into operational systems, ensuring that maintainability and circularity principles are embedded in the physical construction and commissioning processes.
4.3.1 Build Phase
In the build phase, maintenance engineers ensure that the construction process adheres to maintainability objectives. This involves verifying that components are installed with sufficient accessibility for maintenance tasks and that the as-built system aligns with design specifications. The Maintenance Framework emphasizes the importance of traceability and compliance during this stage, ensuring that as-built conditions reflect planned maintenance strategies.
4.3.2 Commissioning
During commissioning, maintenance engineers validate maintenance procedures and ensure that systems are ready for operation. Circularity is integrated by identifying opportunities to reduce waste and repurpose materials used during construction. Advanced tools such as augmented reality (AR) support training and validation processes, enabling personnel to familiarize themselves with maintenance tasks. The Asset Management Lemniscate helps engineers evaluate commissioning outcomes, ensuring that systems are optimized for operational efficiency and sustainability.
4.4 Utilization Stage: Sustainably Achieving Operational Excellence
The utilization stage encompasses the operational lifespan of the asset, where maintenance plans are executed, and performance is continuously optimized. This stage is critical for realizing the maintainability and circularity objectives established earlier.
4.4.1 Maintenance Execution
The Maintenance Framework provides a structured approach for revising schedules, improving task efficiency, and addressing emerging challenges.
4.4.2 Circularity in Operation
Circularity during utilization is achieved by extending asset life, reducing waste, and optimizing resource use. Maintenance engineers identify components suitable for refurbishment or remanufacturing, ensuring minimal environmental impact. Collaboration with operators and the use of AI-driven insights support sustainable decision-making, aligning operations with organizational goals and regulatory requirements outlined in ISO 550XX:2024.
4.5 Disposal/Transition Stage: Facilitating Circular Economy Practices
The disposal or transition stage focuses on decommissioning assets responsibly, ensuring alignment with circular economy principles. Maintenance engineers play a key role in facilitating reuse, recycling, and refurbishment processes.
4.5.1 End-of-Life Assessments
Maintenance engineers assess the remaining life of components and identify those suitable for reuse, refurbishment, or recycling. Using the Asset Management Lemniscate, they evaluate disposal strategies, balancing economic and environmental considerations. AI-powered tools support decision-making by analyzing asset conditions and identifying optimal end-of-life solutions.
4.5.2 Circularity in Transition
Circularity is achieved by prioritizing the reuse of materials and components, ensuring minimal waste. Maintenance engineers document lessons learned and transfer knowledge to future projects, reinforcing the principles of Maintenance 5.0. Compliance with standards such as EN-IEC 60760-2 ensures that disposal practices align with organizational and environmental goals, contributing to the circular economy and reducing overall lifecycle costs.
5. Wrap Up
As Industry 5.0 redefines industrial operations with its focus on human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience, maintenance engineering must evolve into a strategic enabler of these principles. This transformation integrates maintainability, circularity, and advanced technologies across all life cycle stages, ensuring organizations can adapt to a complex, interconnected world while maintaining operational efficiency.
Frameworks like EN 17007, the Asset Management Lemniscate, and the Asset Management Bow Tie provide structured guidance for aligning maintenance strategies with Industry 5.0 objectives. These frameworks emphasize the continuous interaction between asset management strategy, operational execution, and sustainability objectives, transforming maintenance into a dynamic, risk-managed, and value-driven function.
By adopting the holistic approach of Maintenance 5.0, which blends human ingenuity with technological innovation, organizations can extend asset life, minimize environmental impact, and build resilience against future challenges. Maintenance thus becomes more than a technical discipline—it is a cornerstone for driving long-term adaptability, sustainability, and growth in the Industry 5.0 landscape.
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