A Tripartite Business Model Canvas for Assessing Maintenance Sustainability Maturity Level: Case Study in Seawater Desalination Plants

Maintenance plays an increasingly strategic role across industrial sectors, influencing not only asset availability and operational efficiency but also environmental and social performance. However, assessing the sustainability of maintenance practices remains a cross-disciplinary challenge due to the absence of integrative, broadly applicable evaluation frameworks. This study introduces the Tripartite Business Model Canvas (T-BMC), a novel diagnostic instrument that reconceptualises maintenance as a business model structured around the Triple Bottom Line. By embedding each of the nine Business Model Canvas blocks within the economic, environmental, and social dimensions, the T-BMC yields 27 analytical elements, operationalised through a 24-item assessment instrument after three design consolidations to avoid construct redundancy. The instrument supports maturity assessment, benchmarking, and continuous improvement across diverse industrial contexts. An exploratory pilot study with 17 maintenance experts from the Chilean seawater desalination sector assessed its applicability, internal coherence, and contextual relevance. The overall perceived maturity level was 3.96 out of 5, with the Social dimension scoring highest (4.10) and the Economic dimension lowest (3.88); at the block level, Key Activities (4.27) and Value Propositions (4.10) were the strongest areas, while Channels (3.74) and Revenue Streams (3.78) revealed the main sustainability gaps. Internal consistency was strong (Cronbach’s α = 0.94 overall; 0.85, 0.82, and 0.89 for the economic, environmental, and social subscales), although, given the sample size (n = 17), these findings constitute preliminary evidence rather than confirmatory validation. A Maintenance Sustainability Dashboard further translates diagnostic outputs into actionable visual insights for decision-making and cross-plant benchmarking. These contributions offer a structured, transferable pathway for embedding sustainability within maintenance strategy and a basis for future quantitative indicator development and large-scale validation.