Six reasons why you haven't earned Maintenance 4.0 yet

Don't chase the shiny objects. While this will likely not gain me new friends with the marketing hype of Maintenance 4.0, realize that sensors and algorithms alone will not give you a robust reliability program. 

Here's what I keep seeing on the plant floor. Organizations can't tell me the basis for their maintenance strategies, i.e., how they identify the likely failure modes. The MRO storeroom is in disarray. True planning and scheduling are limited at best. And the list goes on. 

Let me be blunt. Most organizations can't fully take advantage of Maintenance 4.0 concepts, not because the technology is not real, but because they lack a foundation to support it. In my years as a practitioner and consultant, many plants achieved world-class maintenance and reliability practices, but none came from an AI initiative. It came from getting six fundamentals right with consistent execution. 

If you're working to harmonize all the plants, or within a plant, trying to execute, here are the six areas that will move the needle.

1. Improve your maintenance strategies

I encourage every professional to take an introductory course in RCM2. Not to do RCM analysis, but to help you understand how equipment fails and how to determine the appropriate failure management strategy. The RCM2 framework is the gold standard. Even with PMO, you apply RCM2 concepts to identify your likely failure modes and determine the appropriate precision maintenance tasks. 

Using failure data, minimize unnecessary maintenance. Optimize the frequency and type of precision tasks, such as on-condition tasks, scheduled restoration or discard tasks, or failure-finding tasks. Balance cost and resources while improving reliability. For new assets, you should consider RCM or FMEA, rather than just accepting the OEM manual. Shift from shutdown PMs to running PMs, to help provide technicians with work when the equipment is running.

2. Get your CMMS right

Everything in a CMMS revolves around the equipment hierarchy. If your parent-child asset structures are wrong, everything downstream suffers. If you're missing assets, how do you assign PMs to them? Stop your equipment numbering where you stop your maintenance strategy. For example, a gearbox PM should be written to the gearbox child asset, not to the cartoner it is on. This enables you to route lubrication or predictive maintenance activities more effectively. 

Beyond hierarchy, use failure, cause, and remedy codes. Data governance matters. If you don't enforce standards for how data gets entered, you'll get garbage out. When was the last time you audited your CMMS data? 

3. Make planning and scheduling the hub

Planning and scheduling are the hub of maintenance work execution, yet most organizations do it poorly. The planners rarely receive training; they rely on tribal knowledge. Planning includes the what and the how: crafts, estimated hours, materials, precision task steps, job duration estimates, and more. Planners create reusable job plans and libraries over time, so the organization isn't reinventing the wheel on every shutdown. Require two to three detailed corrective job plans to be created weekly.

From a scheduling perspective, many plants still operate with a down-day listing. No estimated hours, no precision tasks, no staged materials. The goal is a weekly schedule that covers 100% of the technician workforce's available hours. Many organizations lack a feedback loop from technicians to the planner to improve job plans.