Improving efficiency and quality of operational industrial production assets information management in customer–vendor interaction

Industrial assets management has a key role in ensuring continuity of industrial production via purchasing, warehousing and maintenance of devices and spare parts used in manufacturing, but it suffers from data and information accessibility, completeness, consistency, interoperability, and timeliness challenges in the customer - equipment vendors interaction and information sharing. Current practices in devices and spare parts purchasing, warehousing and maintenance include a lot of manual information search, validation and update work done at the manufacturing companies to maintain high quality master data records for the production assets management. This article addresses the challenge of improving efficiency and quality of operational production assets information management in industry customer company interaction with their production equipment vendors, with a design science research approach. The research was executed in collaboration between research organizations, forest industry companies, industrial production equipment vendors and information technology (IT) companies on two parallel and complementary research tracks, which are described with their key research results. The contributions are an ex-ante evaluated digital marketplace concept with preliminary requirements, and an ex-post evaluated semi-automated master data harmonization tool, as artefacts for improving efficiency and quality of production assets information management in industrial customer–vendors interaction. As theoretical contribution, the article provides a synthesis of the research results in the framework of information systems (IS) design theory as a nascent and novel design theory on designing IS artifacts for improving efficiency and quality of production assets information management, both in single industrial customer company and ecosystem settings. The contributions provide a starting point for further research and development of a digital marketplace for improving production assets information management in industrial customers – vendors interaction, potentially also applicable for similar ecosystems in other continuous production process -based manufacturing industries.