A Cross-Sectoral Maturity Model for Eco-Maintenance in Industrial Organizations: The MEMO Framework and the EMMI Index

Abstract

The inclusion of environmental sustainability in maintenance is becoming increasingly important, and industrial organizations are expected to demonstrate it through corporate reporting and regulatory requirements. Existing eco-maintenance assessment methods, however, rely on sector-specific or expert-weighted criteria and lack an explicit maturity index. This paper proposes the Model for Eco-Maintenance in Organizations (MEMO) and the Eco-Maintenance Maturity Index (EMMI) to assess eco-maintenance maturity across industrial sectors. Methodologically, the model was developed through a systematic literature review conducted according to the PRISMA protocol, binary indicator coding using predefined operational rules, thematic clustering into maturity dimensions, and expert focus-group review. The reproducibility of the finalized binary coding protocol was independently assessed by three coders on a 20.2% subsample of the literature corpus. An exploratory principal component analysis (PCA) was used only to characterize corpus-level indicator co-occurrence and construct an alternative sensitivity scenario, while equal weighting remained the primary EMMI aggregation rule. In the purposively selected 15-organization pilot, EMMI scores ranged from 4.17 to 5.00; ten organizations were classified at Level 5 and five at Level 4. Within this pilot sample, the automotive organizations had the highest mean EMMI score (4.74), while the manufacturing organizations showed the widest within-sample range (4.28–5.00). MEMO and EMMI provide a structured means of benchmarking documented eco-maintenance maturity, identifying improvement areas, and supporting sustainability-oriented maintenance management.