Executive Summary

Asset-intensive organizations across a wide range of industries including energy, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and utilities continue to invest in new and innovative ways to manage their assets. The goals are to improve productivity and reliability while reducing costs in a safe and sustainable manner. At the center of their efforts are enterprise asset management (EAM) systems such as IBM Maximo. EAM has been integral to the transformation of asset management for several decades, but these systems have recently undergone their own transformation by embracing technologies such as cloud and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML). This is bringing many organizations closer than ever to truly optimizing the performance of their assets, which is the foundation for operational excellence and resilience.

IBM Maximo is an integrated application suite of asset monitoring, maintenance, and reliability applications designed to increase uptime, improve productivity, reduce maintenance costs, and enable more resilient operations across a variety of vertical markets. With expanded access to CMMS/EAM and asset performance management (APM), companies can more readily gain operational visibility of their assets and asset lifecycles while enabling faster return on investment (ROI), increasing productivity, and improving operational uptime. IDC conducted research that explored the value and benefits for organizations in using IBM Maximo to track, support, and maintain their enterprise assets.

Through a series of in-depth customer interviews and a methodology for determining business value, IDCʼs analysis found that interviewed companies realized average annual benefits of $14.6 million per organization from IBM Maximo by:

• Improving asset management, avoiding unnecessary operational costs, and increasing overall EAM efficiency

• Improving the productivity of asset management and field workforce teams using the best available technology

• Enabling the shift from legacy/manual processes to more streamlined operations via automation and other features

• Supporting business needs by minimizing unplanned downtime and avoiding disruptive events and asset failure, while improving end-user productivity and contributing to better business results

• Supporting business transformation from scheduled maintenance to condition-based maintenance, to predictive maintenance

Situation Overview

IDC has been tracking the evolution of asset management for over 20 years. What has been consistent is that organizations that have been leaders in investing in innovation and digital technology have also been leaders in various asset management performance metrics. In IDCʼs 2021 Worldwide Future of Operations Survey, we found that 70% of organizations in asset-intensive industries have continued to see improvements in productivity, reliability, and cost reduction. They are also seeing improvements in safety, energy management, and sustainability. Continuous improvement is alive and well, but the benefits are not evenly spread.

Those that report being leaders in the adoption of digital technology were almost twice as likely to report performance improvements in reliability and productivity over the past two years as their peers. Similarly, those that report better access and availability of data were also much more likely to experience performance improvements. This data should put to bed any remaining skepticism of the central role of digital technology and data in driving continuous improvement. And for asset-intensive industries, the foundation for the use of digital technology and data is their EAM system.

EAM needs to evolve, however. In recent years, IDC has focused much of its research on cloud-enabled EAM, and not all vendors have made the transition smoothly (see IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Asset-Intensive EAM Applications 2020–2021 Vendor Assessment, IDC #US46261320, November 2020). This is another area where the data from IDCʼs Worldwide Future of Operations Survey is constructive. Specifically, as it relates to the question of “reliability of equipment/operations,” those that have an enterprisewide strategy of putting more data in the cloud were 50% more likely to report positive performance improvements than those that do not allow data to be put in the cloud. This lines up with anecdotal evidence from IDCʼs clients and leaders in the area of cloud-enabled EAM.

In summary, the evidence clearly points to the need to continue to invest in digital technology and data to support continuous improvement in asset management. It also points to the need for EAM to evolve and adapt with the latest digital technology innovations, such as cloud and AI/ML. Those organizations that recognize the need to make the necessary digital technology investments and partner with a solution provider, which is itself investing in innovation, will see a substantial return on their investments. Indeed, digital technology and data allow asset-intensive organizations to see higher levels of reliability, safety, and sustainability while also reducing costs. The traditional trade-off between reliability improvements and maintenance costs is fast disappearing for leading organizations, which use cloud-enabled asset management to improve visibility, predictability, and decision making.

The Business Value of IBM Maximo

Study Demographics

IDC conducted research that explored the value and benefits of using IBM Maximo to track, support, and maintain fleets of assets. The project included nine interviews with organizations that were using IBM Maximo. Interviewed managers all had experience with and knowledge about the benefits of this solution set and were asked a variety of quantitative and qualitative questions about its impacts on their IT profiles, asset management operations, core businesses, and financials.

Table 1 presents study demographics. The organizations that IDC interviewed had an average base of 8,500 employees, which included 1,150 maintenance staff members. This workforce was supported by an IT staff of 200 engaged in managing 145 business applications. In terms of geographical distribution, seven companies were based in the United States, with the remainder in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. A variety of vertical markets were represented, namely, the utilities (3), transportation (2), education, manufacturing, government, and biotech sectors.

TABLE 1
Firmographics of Interviewed Organizations

Selection and Use of IBM Maximo 

The organizations that IDC interviewed described typical usage patterns for IBM Maximo in the context of their overall IT environments. They also discussed the rationale for choosing the platform as an optimal means of ensuring robust and efficient asset management while helping their teams improve the handling of associated tasks and operations. 

Study participants cited a variety of reasons for their choice such as the need to move beyond the legacy and manual approaches that ….