How does maintenance influence/or is influenced by ERP adoption in enteprises?

This paper aims to understand how Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) adoption in enterprises is influencing Maintenance to deliver on sustainable business operations. In 2024, McKinsey & Company published an article termed “What Matters Most? Eight CEO Priorities for 2024” which highlighted complexity as one of the biggest challenges facing leaders today. This is due to fast changing business environment which necessitate a response from Operations. Slack et al. (2017) lists some of these business pressures which include increased cost-based competition, environmental impact, high-quality expectations and better services amongst others. Maintenance plays a crucial role in responding to some of these pressures through predictive maintenance which reduces costs and energy consumption (Achouch et al., 2022) by use of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors which collect equipment data from various equipment or sections of the business operations. High quality standards are maintained for a prolonged period and variability is reduced as a result. This promising trend in maintenance which is harnessing 4IR Technologies giving birth to Maintenance 4.0 (Achouch et al., 2022), is however isolated from other ten (10) strategic decision areas of business operations (Kettering University, 2016). This siloed design which does not link maintenance systems, smart inventory systems and supply chain systems with wider enterprise processes and human resources robs the enterprise of a single source of data, its visibility, informed decisions, improved supply chain and consumer trust (Santosh, 2024), all of which become a reality by adopting ERP. The implications of this lack of coordination are unmet customer demand, high human resource costs, inefficiencies and tainted supplier relationships. Globalization of trade (Heizer et al., 2024), which ultimately lead to increased customer demand from across the globe, highlight the need for a sound integrated maintenance which will enable the enterprise to meet the growingly varying customer needs. The global network of suppliers that serve these diversified customers ought to produce the same level of quality consistently to survive the growing competitive pressures. Heightened scrutiny on design and production of environmentally friendly, high quality green products have made boardrooms around the world to rethink maintenance from a systems perspective. That is: “How does integration of maintenance data with other strategic decision areas contribute to the running of sustainable business operations? How do we innovate to support sustainability goals while ensuring the reliability and performance of products? How do we make better and instant decisions accurately, to respond to the complexities of the environment?”