Your Biggest Opportunity Is Understanding Performance
Your results point to building better visibility into maintenance performance so your team can identify problems earlier, make more informed decisions and move from reactive to proactive.
Fix the foundation to break the cycle
You Can’t Improve What You Can’t See
Your results suggest that Low Visibility/Resilience is the biggest constraint on your maintenance performance. In most operations, this can show up in a few consistent ways:
- Downtime and maintenance costs aren’t being tracked consistently
- Teams lack a clear picture of where recurring problems are affecting performance
- Decisions are driven by immediate issues rather than reliable maintenance data
Without that visibility, it becomes difficult to understand where performance is breaking down, determine what deserves attention first or know whether improvement efforts are working.
Don’t panic: You don’t need sophisticated analytics to get started. The priority is establishing a reliable baseline with the information you have to make better maintenance decisions.
What the research tells us
Pro Services studied 55 manufacturing leaders to understand why recurring maintenance problems persist and what organizations that consistently improve reliability do differently.
The research found a clear connection between understanding maintenance performance and executing work more effectively:
Build a Clearer Picture of Maintenance Performance
Establish a baseline for downtime
Track when downtime occurs, how long it lasts and which assets or recurring failures are responsible for the greatest disruption.
Understand what maintenance is costing you
Build a more consistent view of maintenance costs so you can see where resources are going and which problems are having the greatest financial impact.
Use the data to guide priorities
Bring downtime, cost and recurring-failure information together to identify where your team should focus first rather than allowing the most immediate problem to dictate the agenda.
couldn’t confidently answer the question, “Are we improving?”
of higher Work Execution scores were seen among organizations with a clear understanding of maintenance performance.
of organizations that were not fully ready for technology had already invested in maintenance software systems.
Warning: Don’t start by measuring everything!
More data doesn’t automatically create better visibility. Focus first on a small set of reliable measures your team can consistently track and use to make decisions.
Get the Full Picture: Read the 2026 State of Maintenance Report
Limited visibility rarely exists in isolation. Maintenance fundamentals, workforce readiness, technology investments and organizational support can all affect your ability to understand performance and make proactive decisions.
The State of Maintenance Report examines these connections across 55 manufacturing organizations and identifies seven key decisions that influence long-term maintenance performance, including which areas organizations should address first and which improvements should come later.
Use the report to understand why these challenges persist, how your results compare to the broader research and where to focus your improvement efforts next.
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