Maintenance is a complex technical activity and a sophisticated discipline; it is indispensable for the development of the world and for the management of all the equipment and infrastructures we use, with quality and safety.

At the same time, the techniques of Facility Management continue to spread, thanks to the tendency to resort to innovative contractual formulas of the "results" type, albeit in a form that is still not entirely homogeneous with respect to several difficulties from the entrepreneurial and organisational point of view.

Nevertheless, the failure to take a single economic division into consideration for Maintenance still persists on the official level, which inevitably provokes delays in its development, for example, in contractual and commercial terms and relative to employment, from the point of view of legislation and university training.

Additionally, on the technical and design level, delays are often lamented in the spread of methods of design, which makes it difficult to implement maintenance processes exhaustively and in a fully satisfactory manner.

In the face of these weaknesses, it must in any case be noted that the balance of the last three years in these sectors of activity and disciplines is substantially positive, both on the economic and occupational level, even in virtue of the initiatives that promote a new and more productive structure of maintenance.

Among these is the International MM Conference, which has turned out to be an important appointment and an effective instrument of awareness to spread the culture of maintenance and the correlated technical processes.