Maintenance Is Moving from ‘Fix It’ to ‘Win with It’

For many companies in many different industries, maintenance is shifting from a back‑office cost to a strategic lever for productivity, safety, and ESG performance. For facility leaders, the real challenge is moving from firefighting to data‑driven operations without turning digitization into just another IT project.

From Firefighting to a Maintenance Roadmap

According to Timly’s Maintenance Report 2026, there are four maturity stages that facility teams can easily adapt:

1. Reactive: Work starts when something fails; documentation is patchy, downtimes are long, and costs are unpredictable.
2. Preventive: Fixed‑interval maintenance based on OEM schedules improves reliability but can still be inefficient.
3. Condition‑based: Interventions are triggered by asset condition data—inspections or sensors—with maintenance logs and inventories digitized.
4. Predictive: Data analytics, AI, and IoT support forecasting, planning, and resource optimization; maintenance is managed as a strategic function.

Most organizations sit between reactive and condition‑based, with predictive approaches still concentrated in larger, digitally mature companies.

Structural Challenges Facilities Must Tackle

The report also highlights five persistent issues that will resonate with facilities managers:

1. Aging assets: Equipment and building systems run beyond design life, often with limited condition data, driving unplanned downtime; for the world’s 500 largest companies, such downtime is estimated to cut revenue by around 11%.
2. Skills and knowledge gaps: 63% of surveyed SMEs report a shortage of qualified staff, and critical know‑how often exists only in employees’ heads.
3. Low digitization: Many small and midsize organizations still rely on paper, e‑mail, and Excel; in 2024, 42% of small and 20% of midsize firms in the sample had not reached basic “digital intensity.”
4. Budget pressure: Maintenance is treated as a cost center, so investments are delayed even though indirect costs (stoppages, overtime, defects) can be 2–10 times higher than direct maintenance spend.
5. Fragmented systems: Asset, maintenance, and responsibility data are scattered, which weakens accountability and makes automation and compliance harder.

Digital Maintenance, Compliance, and ESG

In Europe, regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the EU Taxonomy, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are pushing organizations to document environmental and social impacts—maintenance included. Standards such as ISO 55000 and ISO 9001 further shape expectations around documentation, risk, and continuous improvement.

The report positions maintenance as a key ESG lever: extending asset lifecycles, cutting waste, and improving energy efficiency while providing audit‑ready histories. Digital maintenance platforms matter mainly because they centralize asset data, standardize inspections, and make compliance reporting more straightforward—not because of any single “killer feature.”

Actionable Steps for Facility Leaders

Several recommendations translate directly into facility practice:

1. Assess where you are. Map which assets are recorded, how work is triggered and tracked, and where shadow systems (spreadsheets, ad‑hoc e‑mails) exist; this often reveals quick wins before any new tool is purchased.
2. Make digitization a business initiative. Treat digital maintenance as part of corporate strategy, with shared ownership across technical teams, procurement, finance, safety, and FM—not as an isolated IT rollout.
3. Clarify roles and KPIs. Define who owns master data, who monitors KPIs, and who decides on corrective actions; focus on a few indicators such as planned vs. unplanned work, downtime per critical asset, response time, and maintenance cost per asset.
4. Start with pilots. Begin with one building, system, or asset class, then use feedback to refine processes before scaling; case examples in the report show how simple steps like QR‑based asset labeling can quickly improve transparency.
5. Integrate, don’t rip and replace. Favor solutions that connect to existing ERPs and discovery tools via APIs to avoid double entry and preserve prior investments.
6. Invest in change management. Involve frontline staff early, co‑design workflows, and keep training and certifications current; this builds acceptance and keeps digital systems aligned with reality.

A More Strategic Future for Maintenance

The report ultimately argues that maintenance is becoming a core pillar of corporate strategy, built on real‑time data, better forecasts, and targeted investments. Maintenance teams are expected to move from reactive troubleshooting to scenario‑based planning, supported by digital twins and AI‑driven insights, with information available at the point of work via mobile tools.

For facilities leaders, the key message is simple: Staying in firefighting mode is increasingly costly—in downtime, risk, and missed ESG opportunities—while a stepwise move toward condition‑based and predictive practices can turn maintenance into a visible, measurable driver of organizational resilience and long‑term value.

Jennifer Ritz works for Timly Software AG as deputy team lead of content marketing and PR and is responsible for German and English marketing communications.