The PLM opportunities to improve the collaborative strategies of maintenance

Maintenance of the industrial assets is a controversial theme in the enterprise management. While maintenance may be, at the level of enterprise strategy, considered as one of the most important activities keeping the competitive enterprise value, it is often relegated, during the day-by-day operations, to a secondary role if compared to other functions. Nonetheless, within a scenario where technological resources are more and more sophisticated and expensive, safety and environmental friendliness are considered as 2 unavoidable needs, maintenance is becoming a relevant function for better enterprise operations. A change in the maintenance function toward a more managerial role is required to this aim and one of the most relevant challenges for this change seems to be the improvement of its collaboration with the other enterprise functions. The present paper aims to discuss this issue. A scenario analysis, based upon some selected case studies, will be presented. The main focus is the collaborative strategies of maintenance may be actuated by catching the new opportunities offered by the emerging Product Lifecycle Management paradigm. The opportunities will be analyzed both considering an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing) perspective as well as an After Sales service provider one.