Irene Roda

Title:

Women in Industrial Asset Management and Maintenance

Description:

Women are nowadays significantly under-represented in the industry. Only around 30% is the share of women employed in industry and the percentage decreases when looking at women employed in industrial asset management and maintenance area, which is one of the first areas which comes to mind when thinking about an area dominated by men.

Nevertheless, women are one of the industry´s largest pools of untapped talent to thrive in the dual digital and green transition. Maintenance has been raised as promising ground in industry where to implement Industry 4.0-like solutions and has undergone an evolution during last years, shifting from a pure technical process to an activity contributing to the whole lifecycle management of asset to generate value for companies through a risk oriented and system-oriented approach.

These are all premises for making the potential of woman involvement unleash. The speech aims to open the discussion about opportunities and future actions to facilitate women’s participation in maintenance and asset management, which is a topic still little discussed. The opinions collected from a survey distributed to women working in different industrial sectors will be commented to identify opportunities and future actions to facilitate women’s participation in maintenance and asset management.

Biography:

Irene Roda is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and she holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering. Her main research and teaching areas are related to industrial asset lifecycle management, operations and maintenance management, and smart manufacturing. She is Director of the Observatory on Technologies and Services for Maintenance of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano. She is vice-director of the Executive Master in Industrial Asset Management and Maintenance by MIP Politecnico di Milano Graduate School of Business and by SdM – Scuola di alta formazione University of Bergamo. She is member of the IFIP TC5 WG 5.7 Advances in Production Management Systems. Whitin the IFIP WG 5.7 scientific community, she is co-leader of the Special Interest Group on “Product and Asset Lifecycle Management” and in 2020 she launched and chaired the new initiative of the Special Panel on “Women in Production Management” carried out at the APMS Conferences. She is member of the Women in Manufacturing experts group of the Back to the Future initiative promoted by the World Manufacturing Foundation. She is Book Reviews Editor of the International Journal Production Planning & Control: The Management of Operations, Taylor & Francis. She is author of several scientific publications in national and international journals. She is involved in several industrial projects, participating in defining the research scope and as main investigator.