Improving asset management capabilities: a novel decision support system for maturity assessment

Asset management (AM) creates business value from physical assets, thus enabling asset-intensive industries to improve their performance with regard to sustainability. However, organisations have difficulty planning a roadmap to foster AM processes to achieve AM excellence in their production systems. This demands tools, such as maturity models, and decision-making based on data and value. When analyzing asset management maturity models (AMMMs), limited procedures and a lack of information may hinder applying them effectively. This paper proposes a novel AMMM based on the core processes in AM that affect business performance, a procedure to support self-assessment by an organisation, and a web decision support system (DSS) to assist applying the model effectively. By adopting this DSS, AM decision-makers have a decision-aid model that can improve a company’s AM capabilities by drawing up improvement plans aligned with the strengths and weaknesses identified in the assessment. The proposed models and DSS were validated in real applications in twenty Brazilian industrial enterprises with different production systems. These companies agreed with the maturity class assigned to them. Importantly, the findings confirm the usability of AMMM and a DSS as managerial decision-aid frameworks to support decisions based on value.