Empowering SMEs in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Framework for Maintenance 4.0 Adoption.

SMEs play a vital role in driving economic growth, creating jobs, and fostering innovation. However, unlike larger businesses, SMEs often struggle to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies due to limited resources. Addressing these challenges is essential to help SMEs leverage advanced technologies, enhance competitiveness, and support economic development. This paper presents a framework for SMEs to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies in maintenance operations. The framework leverages Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety, and Sustainability (RAMS²) benefits and offers optimization opportunities to enhance production efficiency, reduce costs, and improve product quality. Based on the comprehensive literature review the gaps are identified and technical components of the proposed framework are matched with RAMS² objectives. A case study illustrates its practical application, including a mathematical model to balance cost and reliability in maintenance. The proposed framework, compared to traditional systems, provides SMEs with a competitive edge by achieving operational and financial objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]