Impact of User Experience on the Quality of Manually Collected Maintenance Data

Efficient industrial maintenance operations require data of completed maintenance tasks. Usually, these data are reported in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The starting point of the research was a practical problem in the industry: the quality of manually collected maintenance data was insufficient for analysis purposes. Current approaches in the study of manual data collection have neglected to account for the role of user experience in the form of social influence and usefulness of the CMMS. This study informs our theoretical understanding of manual data collection by introducing a focus on user experience hitherto lacking and informs our empirical understanding of CMMS use. The goal of this study is to describe and analyze the manual data collection performed by maintenance technicians in industrial maintenance. The main research question of the thesis is: What factors influence manual data collection and the quality of collected data? This question is addressed with a multiple case study of three industrial maintenance providers. The study advances from explorative and descriptive case studies aiming to understand the context to specific studies investigating defined factors in detail. A total of 52 semi-structured interviews were conducted, in addition to observations of maintenance tasks and contextual inquiries of CMMS use. Research data included interview transcripts, conceptual inquiry notes and example work orders from CMMS. Finally, a survey was conducted in one maintenance organization and analyzed by partial least squares path modeling. This study describes the elements of maintenance data that provide value and the quality issues that are currently present in manually collected maintenance data. The factors affecting manual data collection are classified under technology, organization and people factors and criteria for each factor applied to CMMS context is defined. The thesis shows that sites with good quality data and sites that have more challenges with data quality differ in the effectiveness of the CMMS, management support, competence development, work descriptions, competences of data collectors, and own benefit of inputted information. Finally, the thesis shows the effect of user experience in manual data collection with a focus on social influence, managerial support and usefulness. The significance of this study is that it informs our theoretical understanding of manual data collection by introducing a focus on user experience of CMMS hitherto lacking and informs our empirical understanding of data collection as a part of maintenance technician work. Managerial implications of the study include making social influence visible in the user interface of CMMS and building motivation for manual data collection through data collection practices that make data usage visible for the data collector.