Maturity level of predictive maintenance application in small and medium-sized industries: Case of Morocco

Abstract

In order to remain competitive in the long term and to push the company's efficiency to its limits, entrepreneurs are more and more open to the idea of integrating into Industry 4.0 aiming mainly at filling the important downtimes and the associated productivity losses by implementing predictive maintenance. This concept, common in developed countries, is much less widespread in Morocco and even less in small and medium-sized Moroccan companies. The objective of this article is to study the maturity level of predictive maintenance in Moroccan small and medium-sized enterprises, through a questionnaire validated by experts and made available to several companies. Valid data from 115 companies throughout the kingdom operating in different sectors were collected and processed by descriptive and factorial analysis under SPSS software. The results obtained show that only 33% of our sample were able to implement predictive maintenance, and that the expected benefits of this approach are the minimization of downtime at 96.5% and the increase in productivity at 94.8%, The main challenges observed are the lack of team motivation and a corporate culture unsuited to digitalization, which represents 42.277% of the total variance, lack of financial resources at 12.916% of the total variance and lack of data protection at 11.644% of the total variance. This analysis indicates that the level of maturity regarding the application of predictive maintenance in Moroccan small and medium-sized companies is low, these rates can be used to improve the root causes.