Value elements of industrial maintenance: verifying the views of the customer and service provider

Abstract

To maximise the total value in a maintenance business relationship it is important to know what the partner values. The value of industrial maintenance service can be considered to consist of value elements, and the perceived total value for the customer and service provider is the sum of these value elements. The specific objectives of this paper are to verify the most important value elements for the maintenance service customer and provider and also to recognise where the value elements differ, by using the non-parametric tests Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney U. The data has been collected by an online survey sent to 345 maintenance service professionals in Finland. In the survey, four different types of value elements were considered: the customer's high critical and low critical items and the service provider's core and support service. The most valued elements by the respondents were reliability, safety at work, environmental safety, and operator knowledge.