Abstract
The desire to increase reliability and productivity in petrochemical industries has driven these organisations to adopt newer technologies that promise predictable operations. These perceived opportunities have driven a rapid technology usage, including associated workflows and processes. The introduction of the 4th industrial revolution (4IR) is transforming how these industries are approaching maintenance management, and redefining the different skill sets required to execute maintenance management. Thus, there is a need to redefine how maintenance and technology adoption will look in the future.
The speed at which the 4IR is evolving and being introduced to maintainers is at such a pace that if a business fails to adopt, it will be left out of the fast-evolving technological world or forced to adopt without considering the implications and benefits of these new systems. The understanding of external and internal factors affecting the adoption of 4IR-enabled maintenance management technologies expedites and breaks barriers to technology adoption. The aforementioned factors influence the perception of whether technology is easy to use and is useful to apply for the intended need within the petrochemical industries, thus affecting the perceived actual utilisation or outsourcing of these 4IR-enabled maintenance management technologies.
Technologies that are to be adopted by petrochemical industries need to be technologies that are viewed as useful and should enable employees to accomplish their tasks quicker and easy, enhance effectiveness and improve job performance. These technologies must improve the quality of innovation in the petrochemical industries and should be useful in the execution of tasks, in as far as maintenance management is concern. These technologies must be able to provide advantages that far outweigh the current labour-intensive systems and most importantly it must make fault finding easier and convenient.
This research aims to explore the successful acceptance and adoption of these technologies with the usage of the Technology Adoption Model (TAM). The outcome of this research was utilised to develop a framework that can be employed to develop a sustainable technology adoption approach that will consider both internal and external aspects affecting technology adoption, perceived ease of use, perceived usability, attitude towards use, behavioural intention to use and actual technology utilisation focused on petrochemical industries.
The research concluded that external factors affecting the perceived ease of use are the drivers of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use for these 4IR-enabled maintenance management technologies. The correct alignment of perceptions of users is responsible for
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the attitude towards use leading to the actual utilisation of these 4IR-enabled maintenance management technologies once the behavioural attitude towards use is enabled.
The proposed framework should be adopted to ensure that there is a clear understanding of these factors that can lead to an effective technology adoption process. The impact of the 4IR-enabled maintenance management technologies in the petrochemical industry remains an aspect that will need to be continuously and closely monitored.
Even though the scope of this research is limited to one major petrochemical company in South Africa, it is recommended that other petrochemical industries still evaluate this research closely to understand if there are no factors that are applicable and relevant to the respective areas. Therefore, the proposed framework presented as part of this research should be studied very closely and thoroughly by organisations, where feasible, be implemented to counter the impact and implication of accidental adoption of technology.