The mechanisms of transmission and management of knowledge are mostly created by maintenance and exploitation activities of large buildings and industrial facilities, but they are poorly studied due to the difficulty capturing themas they belong to tacit knowledge gained by the experience of the maintenance staff. These professionals are highly qualified and are accostumed to solving technical problems even under pressure. The loss of these professionals means losing also an important asset of the company. This article will tackle the importance of the factors that influence knowledge management (KM) in maintenance engineering and its barriers and facilitators. The research is carried out by qualitative investigation on maintenance staff of an industrial company.

Knowledge based on personal experience (tacit knowledge) acquired in problem solving actions and in maintenance actions is the fundamental basis for maintenance technicians in companies with great physical assets. Generally, there is no proper policy for managing strategic knowledge and its capture. In this article, through qualitative studies (grounded theory) and surveys conducted with technicians, the aim was to obtain the perception of the maintenance technicians’ part of the companies, in order to establish the characteristics of the relation between the strategic aspects and the engineering aspects of industrial maintenance, regarding knowledge management, as well as the enablers and barriers to its application. The results show how a high level of tacit knowledge is used in this activity, which requires more time for new staff. The values obtained from this survey show that the knowledge recorded by the companies (explicit) is 51.25%, compared to the personal knowledge (tacit) of maintenance technicians regarding reliability and breakdowns. In operational/exploitational actions it is 43.90%, for energy efficiency actions it is 49.61%, and in maintenance actions (preventive, predictive, and corrective) the value is 68.78%. This shows the significant gap between the perception of recorded knowledge (explicit), and the knowledge that maintenance technicians have (tacit knowledge). All this can affect the companies, as part of the strategic knowledge is lost when a maintenance technician leaves the company.