Maximo

Maintenance is often viewed as a necessary evil in the business world, a cost center that drains resources without providing immediate tangible returns. However, this perspective fails to recognize the strategic importance of maintenance and its potential to drive long-term value. Maintenance can be both an expense and an investment, depending on how it is approached and managed.

The Case for Maintenance as an Expense

At first glance, maintenance appears to be a straightforward expense. It involves ongoing costs for labor, materials, and sometimes specialized services to keep assets in good working condition. These costs can be significant, representing 2% to 5% of an organization's total Replacement Asset Value (RAV). For some industries, such as mining, this percentage can be even higher, ranging from 18% to 36% of RAV.

The expense perspective is further reinforced by the fact that maintenance costs are typically recorded as operational expenses in financial statements, directly impacting a company's bottom line. This accounting treatment can lead to a short-term focus on cost reduction, potentially encouraging deferred maintenance to improve short-term financial performance.

The Investment Perspective

However, viewing maintenance solely as an expense overlooks its strategic importance and potential for value creation. Maintenance can be a powerful investment in an organization's future when approached proactively.

Preserving Asset Value

Regular maintenance preserves the value of assets by extending their useful life and maintaining their performance. This delays the need for costly replacements and ensures that assets continue to operate efficiently, contributing to overall productivity and profitability.

Enhancing Reliability and Performance

Well-maintained equipment is more reliable and performs better. This reduces downtime, improves product quality, and increases customer satisfaction. In manufacturing environments, for example, unexpected equipment failures can lead to production losses that far exceed the cost of preventive maintenance.

Cost Avoidance

Proactive maintenance can help avoid costly emergency repairs and unplanned downtime. Research consistently demonstrates that every dollar invested in preventive or predictive maintenance saves up to five dollars on unforeseen expenses. This multiplier effect underscores the investment nature of maintenance expenditures.

Safety and Compliance

Proper maintenance is crucial for ensuring workplace safety and regulatory compliance. Organizations can avoid costly accidents, legal liabilities, and regulatory fines by investing in maintenance.

Striking the Right Balance

The key to maximizing maintenance's value lies in striking the right balance between cost control and strategic investment. This requires a shift in perspective from viewing maintenance as a necessary evil to recognizing it as a value-driving activity.

Strategic Asset Management

Organizations should develop a Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP) that aligns maintenance activities with overall business objectives. This approach ensures that maintenance resources are allocated to areas with the greatest return on investment.

Predictive and Preventive Maintenance

Implementing predictive and preventive maintenance strategies can significantly reduce maintenance costs while improving asset reliability. These approaches leverage data and technology to identify potential issues before they escalate into costly failures.

Continuous Improvement

Maintenance should be viewed as an ongoing process of continuous improvement. Organizations can refine their strategies and optimize maintenance investments by regularly analyzing maintenance data and outcomes.

IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) offers a comprehensive set of tools to enhance your maintenance processes significantly. Here are the key ways MAS can help:

Predictive Maintenance

MAS leverages AI and IoT data to enable predictive maintenance, which can:

•               Reduce unplanned downtime by up to 47%

•               Extend average asset lifespan by 17%

•               Help technicians be 26% more productive

The Maximo Predict application uses analytics-driven models to optimize maintenance planning and improve asset reliability. This allows you to address potential issues before they cause failures, significantly reducing costly repairs and production disruptions.

Asset Health Monitoring

Maximo Health provides insights into the status of critical equipment and assets using data and analytics. This enables you to:

•               Understand asset health in real-time

•               Make data-driven maintenance decisions

•               Improve asset availability and replacement planning

Work Order Management

MAS streamlines the work order process by:

•               Automating work order creation and assignment

•               Providing mobile access for technicians to view and update work orders in the field

•               Enabling standardized work order formats and templates

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)

Maximo Reliability Strategies, powered by IBM watsonx™, helps optimize equipment availability by:

•               Providing prebuilt reliability best practices for over 800 equipment types

•               Offering a dedicated FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) view with over 50,000 universal failure modes

•               Enabling faster deployment of cost-saving strategies

Visual Inspection

MAS incorporates AI-powered visual inspection capabilities, which can:

•               Boost inspection efficiency and accuracy by 34%

•               Allow remote asset monitoring using cameras and artificial intelligence

Centralized Asset Management

MAS serves as a unified platform for asset lifecycle management, offering:

•               Intuitive dashboards for real-time asset insights

•               Integration of enterprise asset management (EAM), asset performance management (APM), and reliability-centered maintenance (RCM)

•               A single solution for maintenance, inspection, and reliability tasks

By implementing the IBM Maximo Application Suite, organizations can significantly improve their maintenance processes, reduce costs, extend asset lifecycles, and make more informed decisions about their critical assets and infrastructure.

Conclusion

While maintenance involves ongoing expenses, it is a strategic investment in an organization's future. By preserving asset value, enhancing reliability, avoiding costs, and ensuring safety and compliance, well-executed maintenance programs can deliver substantial returns on investment.

The challenge for organizations is to shift their perspective from viewing maintenance as a necessary evil to recognizing it as a value-driving activity. By adopting a strategic approach to maintenance, companies can transform what was once seen as a pure expense into a powerful lever for long-term success and competitiveness.