Think about the number of physical assets you may touch in your daily work: Perhaps you need to replace a printer cartridge, drive a company car, repair a laptop, or troubleshoot a generator. Regardless of whether you work in an office or on a factory floor, keeping these assets in good condition and up and running is a huge part of business.
To the layperson, this all counts as maintenance. But companies are increasingly adopting a sophisticated and data-driven approach (sometimes called asset lifecycle management) that includes planning, acquisition, utilization maintenance and disposal — collectively focused on keeping each and every asset running smoothly for as long as it can. Like your plumbing at home, this end-to-end maintenance is unexciting but absolutely critical — and chief sustainability officers should consider it key to operationalizing sustainability.
Modern maintenance is about optimizing the performance of assets across their entire lifecycle, ensuring they operate at peak efficiency and last as long as possible. That’s good for business, but it’s also a key entry point for CSOs to drive tangible and tactical progress in their organizations.
How asset maintenance can boost sustainability
Imagine asset maintenance as a high-tech dashboard in a car. It may show the air pressure of each tire, the miles driven since the last oil change, whether the doors and trunk are properly closed and more. Even in this example, that sort of data-driven monitoring and maintenance helps ensure your car lasts as long as possible — with minimal time spent frustrated on the side of a road. Now apply that system to a major company, and you can quickly imagine how the cost-savings and environmental benefits can scale.
With an effective maintenance strategy, a business can significantly lower costs, minimize downtime and boost operational performance, while advancing their sustainability objectives. Owners who implement an end-to-end maintenance strategy can reduce the total cost of asset ownership by as much as 40 percent, according to an analysis of multiple reports. In short, asset maintenance offers businesses a direct path to improving both the bottom line and environmental impact.
While the precise role of asset maintenance depends on what a company does and its assets, but there are several general ways it can help advance sustainability goals.
First, maintenance can extend the lifespan of assets. One of the coolest examples we’ve worked on at IBM is the Great Belt project in Denmark, which includes one of the longest suspension bridges in the world with a central span of over 5,000 feet. For this project, maintenance includes a combination of drone photography, AI analysis and 3D modeling that has collectively reduced operational expenses 2 percent year over year. In terms of specific sustainability outcomes, the improved monitoring and maintenance is projected to double the lifespan of the bridge — while also avoiding 750,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
Second, maintenance systems can help with efficiency. In its own efforts, IBM’s real estate organization tapped a new AI-powered module to analyze the description of a maintenance work order and automatically generate a service code. That sounds simple, but it reduced work orders labeled “Other” — the least helpful category — by 84 percent, allowing problems to be more quickly understood, parts to be ordered and useful maintenance trips to be made. The result is an estimated savings of 10,000 people hours. That’s time that was spent on working through unnecessary confusion — time that we can bid “good riddance.” Now, it can be instead spent on proactively ordering replacement parts, checking up on equipment and systems most in need, and other useful things.
Finally, asset maintenance can help maximize uptime. This is just the other side of the efficiency coin, but it’s worth reiterating on its own. Every company relies on numerous systems or machines to get its work done. At a renewable power plant, key assets might be turbines, solar panels or grid infrastructure. Every second they’re offline means less renewable energy in the grid. That might mean a factory lies dormant somewhere, food is spoiling in a powerless refrigerator or that a more expensive and dirtier back-up option is used instead. All that waste, cost and emissions can be potentially avoided with more predictive and proactive maintenance.
Expanding what corporate sustainability looks like
For CSOs looking to drive progress on sustainability, maintenance is not a bad place to start. Imagining a technician typing on an iPad or wielding a socket wrench may not connote the same idea of sustainability as someone choosing between trash and recycling, but it should. Moreover, these examples show that smart maintenance can avoid waste, lower costs and reduce emissions.
Maintenance is yet another area where sustainability leaders can leverage data, to figure out where “hot spots” are and then operationalize a roadmap of action. The heavy industry sector already knows this, but it applies to every sector. At IBM, we do this with data from our facilities management platform, which is integrated into our reporting tool to create a single, auditable system of record that allows for site-specific inquiries and informed decision-making.
There are already strong technological tailwinds behind asset maintenance as low-cost sensors proliferate, data becomes more available, and AI is increasingly used to drive insights and action. But it’s time for the full C-suite to recognize the broad range of benefits it brings — and CSOs can play a mission critical role for driving that recognition.
