Nowadays, the digitalization and its developments such as the Internet of Things are more than just keywords or possible, future trends. Various applications of the IoT are an inherent part of the everyday life, and companies use the IoT and its applications for improving their products, services, and internal processes. This master thesis investigates the use of the IoT in maintenance, so-called smart maintenance, and its consequences for organizations and their environment. Although smart maintenance has enormous potential, many companies avoid this innovative maintenance approach and still use a traditional maintenance strategy. The master thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon of smart maintenance in a B2B context, therefore, how companies implement the innovative maintenance approach between them and their corporate customers. To understand the phenomenon of smart maintenance, the author conducts different expert interviews to receive valuable insights into the research topic. The interviews intend to collect information from the interview partners and their experience with smart maintenance to develop reliable assumptions about the phenomenon of smart maintenance. The findings of the scientific literature and empirical investigation revealed six dimensions of smart maintenance, the organizational design, implementation, practices, motives, challenges, and sustainable effects. When implementing smart maintenance between an organization and its corporate customers, the organization has various possibilities of how to design the innovative maintenance approach. A possible explanation for the small number of companies which have implemented a smart maintenance approach is the high organizational and financial effort to develop a profitable smart maintenance strategy.
