Preventative Maintenance or Planned Statutory Maintenance?

After the recent UK & I Maximo User Group, a common "eureka" moment occurred when I posed to attendees "Are you maintaining your assets for compliance, or are we maintaining them for reliability?"

For most maintenance planners, the answer is uncomfortable. We've built our entire maintenance frameworks around statutory requirements-the mandatory tasks, the regulated intervals, the checkbox maintenance that keeps auditors satisfied. But what if I told you that compliance-driven maintenance planning is leaving significant value on the table?

Most maintenance planning starts and ends with statutory obligations. We identify what regulations demand. We build tasks around those demands. We execute. We report. Repeat.

The problem? Statutory maintenance is a floor, not a ceiling.

Regulations are designed to establish minimum acceptable standards-they're there to prevent catastrophic failures and ensure basic safety. But minimum standards don't drive optimal performance. They don't prevent hidden failures that don't violate regulations but impact operational efficiency. They don't anticipate cascading failure modes that haven't been legislated yet.

This is particularly true for complex assets where failure modes extend far beyond regulatory scope. A regulation might mandate bearing replacement at specified intervals, but it won't tell you how a bearing failure propagates through your entire production line, or what secondary failures it triggers in dependent systems.

The FMEA Perspective: An Evidenced based approach to Preventative Maintenance

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis forces us to think differently about maintenance planning. Instead of asking "What does the regulation require?", FMEA demands we ask:

• What could fail? (Failure Modes)

• Why would it fail? (Root Causes)

• What would happen if it failed? (Effects)

• How severe would those consequences be? (Severity)

• How likely is this failure mode? (Occurrence)

• How well can we detect it in advance? (Detection)

These questions naturally push maintenance planning into territory that compliance frameworks don't cover. A failure mode might have low regulatory risk but enormous operational impact. Another might be nearly undetectable through conventional monitoring but catastrophic in its effects. These insights don't come from compliance checklists-they come from systematic analysis.

I am not advocating to replace statutory maintenance with reliability practices but to use them hand-in-hand as means of ensuring regulatory compliance whilst having some impact (a lever the maintenance team can pull) on operational performance. 

Reliability Strategies: A tool to get started and sustainable grow into reliability centerd maintenance

IBM's Reliability Strategies solution takes FMEA analysis one step further by operationalizing these insights within the broader asset management context. Traditional maintenance planning tools organize tasks by asset, equipment type, or regulatory requirement. Reliability Strategies reframes the question entirely: What maintenance strategy best protects against each failure mode?

This distinction matters enormously. Rather than asking "When should we service this equipment?", you're asking "What combination of preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, predictive interventions, and perhaps even redesign can most effectively manage this specific failure mode?"

For a given asset, this might mean:

• Preventive maintenance for certain failure modes where degradation follows predictable patterns

• Condition-based monitoring for modes where early warning signs can be detected

• Predictive interventions for modes where data analytics can trigger maintenance before failure

• Run-to-failure strategies for modes where failure has minimal impact and costs more to prevent than to repair

• Redundancy or redesign for critical failure modes that no maintenance strategy can reliably prevent

Notice what's missing from this list? Compliance. Compliance becomes an input to the analysis, not the driver of it.

Low Adoption: Evidence from the field

During our session we did an informal survey, one of the questions was "who conducts an FMEA outside or in Maximo?". Of the +-40 organisations (not people) who attended only 15% have adopted this approach... none of whom use it in Maximo.

My big question is why?

What are some of the challenges you and your organisation have faced or anticipate facing in moving from compliance to reliability - is this even a route you wish to take? I would love to hear your feedback and if there are any specific questions please let me know!