Last Updated on February 23, 2025 by maximosecrets

Introduction

Good morning, I’m Andrew Jeffery and I’m pleased to be introducing “The 12 Steps to Asset Management Maturity”.

We’ll start with an introduction and then we will review what steps we can take in improving asset management maturity from a Maximo context.

We’ll then extend our thoughts into what additional steps we can take when we are using Maximo APM – Asset Health Insights and other Maximo APM products. 

So, let’s get started.

Many asset intensive industries have thousands of assets, sometimes in excess of a million. Identifying and capturing this data takes a long time and it is no surprise to find that companies identify what they need in order to perform work and the asset details then remain unchanged, except perhaps recording new assets and retiring old ones.

There is a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) and those of you who monitor the Maximo roadmap will find several products being added to the Maximo family, some of those branded as part of Maximo APM – Asset Performance Management. To reach those heights in asset management maturity requires you to have got some of the basic steps implemented with everyone working together so that these basic processes operate as “business as usual”, and that data is captured to a high degree of quality and consistency. 

This presentation will describe a 12-step method towards asset management maturity, it is written from a Maximo perspective, and will be useful to any customer that has or is thinking of acquiring one the Maximo APM products.

Asset Management varies from industry to industry, so writing something generic is difficult, you will see omissions, for example I do not mention linear or calibration. The focus is very much on what you can achieve with the core Maximo product before leaping into the world of APM. I will not discuss Health Safety and Environment (HSE) because that is a big enough subject area to have its own maturity model. 

Identify

Asset identification is the process of identifying your assets, defining their useful attributes, how one asset relates to another and how similar assets can be grouped so that you can make decisions based on all the data that you will inevitably collect.

Level 1

Start by identifying the asset systems in your business, and the criticality of one system over another. Determine how you will derive criticality, whether you will use a matrix based on consequence and likelihood, or an integer value. Think also of the asset types that you operate and which you wish to track and maintain. Determine the lifecycle of the assets and a set of statuses appropriate to each asset type, and also for the operating locationsA location with a location type of OPERATING. More where they reside.

Maximo requires a primary location hierarchy for each site. This provides a drilldown for users to navigate through locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More to find the assets at those locations, it will intersect with the asset systems. In Maximo an operating location can belong to multiple asset systems, so the primary hierarchy need not include every operating location where there is an asset. You can gather costs by asset system using the Maintenance Cost By System report, so the primary hierarchy need not reflect how you want to manage maintenance budgets.

The primary hierarchy is often used as the address system for service addresses which provide a latitude and longitude which will position the locations and assets below it on a map. If you have a GPS connection, you can find nearby locations and assets. Often the primary location hierarchy will be considered from this geographic perspective.

Determine the important attributes you want to collect for locations, priority at least. If you are data loading, then you may want to include other attributes like failure class, calendar and shift, and GL account. Work can be performed against a location, so once you have your locations defined you can start to create work orders.

Level 2

The second step is to determine how you will classify and code your assets when you add them to the Maximo system. There are several code fields used with assets.

• Failure ClassA Failure Class is the top-level Failure Code of a Failure Hierarchy. More is a set of codes at the top level of a failure hierarchy
• Classification is a hierarchy of codes that have a similar set of attributes to describe the asset. The asset classifications are often the same as the classifications used with items that are purchased. 
• Asset TypeThe Asset Type is used for grouping assets and is used in the Health application of the Maximo Application Suite. More is a category of assets that have similar characteristics against which you would manage asset health, let your reliability engineers decide this.

As you can see there is a certain amount of overlap between all three and you might start out by aligning them. If you are a Maximo O&G client, then you are provided with the ISO14224 standards for Failure Classes and Classifications. There are other standards out there for other industries, and UNSPSC as an item classification hierarchy for products and services.

You could now move to level 3 and start adding assets, but I will introduce two other concepts that you might consider now:

• Rotating Items are storeroom items that are tracked by their own asset number, they are typically repaired or refurbished. Rotating items can also have an item assembly structure which can create an asset hierarchy below your assets.
• Asset Templates is a template for one or more assets that share the same manufacturer and model. You define the classification and attributes, meters, spare parts and master PMs for the asset template then copy this data over to the assets that belong to the asset template. It will save a lot of time and make your data consistent.

Level 3

The third step is creating assets and associating them with the operating location or storeroom where they reside. Before you start, consider the order in which you will undertake this exercise, as it is likely to take some time. Decide on the important attributes to collect; serial number, priority, asset type, failure class, installation date, expected life, calendar and shift, and GL account. Unhide the Asset Tag field and use this for any barcode label reference.

It is a good idea to have a data import and data export function for assets. The export function can be used later to fill-in some of the other attributes that you do not collect initially, with the asset records being re-imported with the new data values.

Start by loading the data from your existing spreadsheets, the aim will be to eliminate these otherwise you will have two sources of master data. I recommend using an autokey for the Maximo asset number, one without a prefix. You may want to load the old reference to a spare field so that it is not lost.

At some point you should consider labelling your assets with barcode, QR code or an NFC label (Near Field Communication), I favour NFC labels. If your technician is out collecting asset data, make sure you get a photo of any identification labels, and a nice picture of the asset itself, and make sure they get attached to the right record in Maximo. 

What we now have is an asset register, which can be further enhanced to form an asset database. You should consider who will own the function of asset manager, responsible for the asset database, it may be several people. The difference between as asset register and the asset database include:

• The attributes of the asset classifications and the attribute values, the assets’ specification
• The meters and measurement points
• The spare parts for the assets
• The routine maintenance plans, PMs and inspections
• The asset hierarchies
• The web links and associated documents and drawings. The linked documents should be stored in a repository where the address does not change over time and linked to the appropriate record in Maximo, which may be the item, and not the asset.  

These steps are made easier when you have defined the asset templates, associated the assets with rotating items, and defined the item assemblies, because much of the data can be generated rather than adding it for each asset individually.

Report

Now we have identified our locations and assets we should be recording the work orders we perform and no doubt you have implemented some time-based preventive maintenance routines, but how do we make further progress in asset management? We need to monitor our assets, report when things go wrong and measure our progress.

Level 1

We should have defined our failure classes and assigned them to operating locations and assets. Now we need to build out our failure hierarchy by adding problem, cause and remedy codes. If you don’t have access to the ISO14224 failure codes, then at least build out the problem codes for each failure class. By having your technicians report the cause and remedy in long text as part of a failure report, it will be easier later to define the cause and remedy codes. You should define the work types where a failure report is mandatory and set this. It is preferable to allow your technicians to set the actual failure date. The Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) can now be calculated. 

When an asset goes down, we should record it as such, similarly when an asset is returned to service it should be marked as up. In Maximo, an asset has an up/down status that is tied into the downtime reporting function. Use a calendar and shift against an asset to define when operationally it is expected to be in service. When an asset is up during all operational hours it will have 100% availability, the downtime during operational hours affects asset availability and this is a key metric to measure. 

Now we are reporting failures and downtime add a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and/or result sets to your Start Center to ensure that the data is being captured consistently and accurately.

If you are a manufacturing plant producing goods and are now calculating equipment availability, then you will probably be interested in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). There are two Maximo reports OEE by SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More and OEE by Location which use a table called KPIOEE which you will need to populate with data for actual and scheduled units produced and number of units defective. A simple custom application over this table with an application import action is all you need.

Level 2

There are three types of meters in Maximo, Continuous (runtime), Gauge (measurements) and Characteristic (observations). The first step at this level is adding the meters to operating locations and assets and creating a time-based PM with a Route to periodically record the meter values. 

You should now be looking to convert some of your time-based PMs to time and/or meter-based PMs. Meter-based PMs use continuous meters, the reading can be an actual value or delta value. The meter value can be rolled across from a location to an asset, and down an asset hierarchy. The Reset/Replace Meters action can be used to reset to zero the values since last repaired, last overhauled, last inspection or from installation. If you are going to use this you need to put in place the process to reset this when you do an inspection, repair or overhaul of the location or asset.

Condition based maintenance can be set up using the Condition Monitoring application, creating a measurement point for a gauge meter and a location or asset and setting the upper/lower action/warning limits and the job plan to be performed when the action limits are breached. A Cron Task can be used to automate the creation of a work order when a measurement exceeds the action limits.

On Job Plans you should be indicating whether the location or asset requires downtime in order to perform the work and whether it requires a dedicated maintenance schedule. 

Some location and assets are still under warranty and you should be thinking about creating Warranty Contracts, so that when there is an active warranty and the location or asset is referenced on a work order then you are alerted to this.

Level 3

Condition Assessments should be carried out periodically on all locations and assets. The Manage Inspection Forms work center can be used to capture all the questions to be answered and at the end of the inspection you may think about recording an overall score for the asset by using a characteristic meter set-up in Condition Monitoring application. The relevant inspection form will be linked to a route stop for the location or asset and the route is associated with a PM.

Inspection Forms should be associated with the location and asset so that a condition assessment can be carried out at any time.

When a condition assessment identifies a defect then you may want to initiate the capture of either a service request or work order. My preference is for a service request because defects may not be addressed immediately, not until they show signs of deterioration to a point where they need to be acted upon, at that point I would create the work order.

At this level of asset management maturity, you should have at least identified the hazards and hazardous materials of your locations and assets and the precautions to be taken to mitigate the hazards. You might also look towards implementing Safety Plans or some of the safety related applications if you have Maximo Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) or Maximo for O&G.

Level 4

The fourth step is to monitor asset costs. With maintenance work orders now being reported against assets the Maintenance Cost Rollup Report is used to periodically roll asset costs up the asset hierarchy. At the beginning of the year you should be setting a process to use the action Zero Asset Costs to set to zero the year to date values. 

In the Locations application you should be looking to implement the Cost By Location report and if you have the supporting data the Maintenance Cost by System report. 

The Budget Monitoring application has a focal point for Locations and Assets, and this can be used to summariseestimates, commitments and actual costs. You can use last year’s work orders to help set a budget against locations and assets, you may still do this even if you formerly budget against General Ledger codes.

Asset Depreciation can be used in decisions on whether to repair or replace an asset. Depreciation Schedules can be defined on either a rotating item or an asset template and copied over to the asset. For each asset you have a starting cost and a salvageable amount, and you depreciate between these values over the expected useful life, which may be determined from a meter. An estimated end of life, and a reassessment of the replacement cost should also be recorded.

Advise

We have now collected a lot of data and are using the tools available to us in core Maximo. Now is the time to start exploring the tools available to us as part of Maximo Asset Performance Management (APM).

Level 1

The first APM product to invest time in will be Maximo APM Asset Health Insights – Maximo Health. Level 1 is setting up health scores for assets and locations. This requires the creation of a scoring method, which has a set of drivers with a weighting set for each driver, for example age, cost, performance. Each driver has a formula which can combine different factors, for example, year to date maintenance costs versus budget, or year to date costs versus replacement cost. Weightings are applied to each factor that is part of the same driver. Each factor has its own formula which derives a value from data anywhere in Maximo, this uses Maximo formulas. A range of percentages is used to create a colour coded baseline, for example 0-50 (poor) – red, 50-85 (fair) – yellow, 85-100 (good) – green.

You perform asset health scoring for sets of assets that you define with a query. Each asset in a set is evaluated against its scoring method to derive a health percentage which is tracked over time. The average and lowest health scores of the assets at the same location are calculated and these values are similarly set at higher levels in the location hierarchy. For example, in a water utility you may be looking at the health score of pumps, at a high level you can see that there is an issue and then drilldown to find it. If maps are set-up you can also visualize this from a map. You can take actions when you find an asset that requires attention.

Level 2

Level 2 also uses Maximo Health, and this is helping to make repair or replacement decisions. You identify assets that are near end of life and make plans for whether they will be refurbished, replaced or decommissioned and include these decisions as part of long-term budget planning.

It is key to have expected end of life dates and to perform condition assessments. You then make a query for those assets which are within the end of life date in the time horizon for which you perform long term planning.

For each asset in the time horizon you review the condition and expected end of life and add a plan and pick the plan type, for example refurbish. Based on this you assess by how much the end of life will be extended and a target date for the refurbishment. You add other details like the job plan to use, labor hours and downtime hours. 

When you have made plans for multiple assets, which may need to be adjusted based on available budget, you can then implement the plan by creating work orders.

Level 3

Level 3 uses Maximo Predict or Maximo APM Predictive Maintenance Insights to give it its full title. This is a cloud-based solution with five predictive models. The model scores are integrated with Maximo Health.

Assets are generally maintained on a pre-determined schedule that doesn’t consider how they are being used which can lead to a lot of maintenance efforts as being ineffective. Preventive Maintenance is often performed too frequently, and it doesn’t necessarily achieve increased uptime of those assets.

Predictive maintenance is founded on a condition-based model, ideally the condition would be monitored with IoT sensors, historical maintenance data, operational logs and sometimes historical or current weather conditions. The predictive models use this data and suggests which assets need maintenance and when. Specifically, the five model templates are:

• Days to failure
• Predicted failure probability
• Factors that contribute to a predicted failure
• Anomaly Detection
• Failure Probability Curve

Asset groups are sets of similar assets that can be scored and analysed using the same approach. An asset event data file for the assets in the asset group is compiled containing failure events, maintenance events and operating data. This is analysed, and the models determine whether the asset is being under maintained, over maintained or is well maintained and makes a prediction of the next failure date. You then adjust accordingly.

Level 4

Up to now our focus has been on data that you may or should already have in Maximo. None of it is real-time, it is all historical although some of it may be events occurring in the last 24 hours. Level 4 moves towards the real-time element and captures other data for which Maximo is not the source, data from SCADA, historians and IoT sensors, and weather, all data captured through sensors.

There is a good reason why this data is not in Maximo, sensor data captures a lot of data and it needs analytics to make sense of it. Maximo Monitor is the most recent of the Maximo APM products and should be used as a filter for Maximo Health. The health scores, repair/replace decisions and predictive elements that we have discussed in levels 1 to 3 will all benefit from being enriched by sensor and weather data.

Maximo Monitor has four distinct elements:

• Connect uses data from sensors, SCADA and historians and maps it through to asset data in Maximo

• Prepare uses advanced analytics and anomaly detection algorithms to set meaningful alerts

• Visualise – build custom dashboards with pre-built widgets to show the output from the prepare element. The widgets are used to monitor key drivers, OEE, availability, uptime, etc. 

• Investigate – Allows you to respond to the alerts to find root cause and take automated actions by drilling down from a plant, to a system, component, asset or sensor.

Maximo Monitor uses the IBM Watson IoT Platform with its integration into Watson tools, applications, and APIs that provide an array of cognitive services and analytics. 

Level 5

This uses Maximo Assist, it has two elements:

• Assist AI ingests data from Maximo and other systems and unstructured data from documents, photos, videos, etc., to provide a virtual assistant to a technician. Natural language is used to ask questions, and recommendations are returned to the technician. This has been integrated into the Work Execution work center and so you will probably want to rollout the use of work centers first or at least in parallel. 

• Assist AR is an augmented reality assistant that connects experts/peers to the field technician. It uses the video camera on a smartphone or tablet so that the expert/peer can see what is going on, they then use AR-tags to annotate the video and interact with the technician. The whole becomes an instruction of how to fix an issue with an asset, this may subsequently be found by the Assist AI element at a later point.

Both the Assist AI and Assist AR help to address the issue of a loss of knowledge with an aging maintenance and engineering workforce. 

Maximo APM

There are five products in the Maximo Asset Performance Management (APM) portfolio, we have already discussed most of this, but here is a summary.

Maximo Health – Asset Health Insights, or MAHI as it was known is probably the first of the products to implement as it is the one that will make most use of your existing Maximo data. It uses this data to create asset health scores and help you make repair or replacement decisions.

Maximo Predict – Predictive Maintenance Insights is a cloud-based solution than will take event data for assets of a similar type and then through mathematical models determine whether you are over/under maintaining those assets and help to predict a next failure date. 

Maximo Assist AI – Equipment Maintenance Advisor (EMA) – ingests data from Maximo, other systems, documentation, photos, videos and other unstructured data to provide assistance to technicians who can use natural language to ask questions and to receive back recommendations. As you gather more data and determine the effectiveness of the recommendations you then refine and train the models to provide better recommendations. It can be used to help address the issue of a loss of knowledge from an aging workforce.

Maximo Assist AR – Augmented Reality for field technicians. From the Maximo Work Execution work center, you can seek advice and ask a remote expert or peer for instructions on how to resolve a problem on an asset. Using the phones camera and creating a live video session the technician and expert interact using a set of AR-tags that annotate what is being displayed. The session can then be saved for future reference, as part of Maximo Assist AI.

Maximo Monitor – Uses data from sensors, SCADA, and historians with machine learning algorithms to spot anomalies in the data. It aggregates operating state data and process parameters to provide an enterprise wide view of performance. The solution scales easily and uses the anomaly detection and advanced analytics to identify the right alerts while helping you understand the complex relationships between factors causing failures. Drilldown from a plant, to a system, component, asset and sensor view to help your resolution teams diagnose root cause. Maximo Monitor has configurable dashboards using widgets that can be assembled to monitor your operations and KPI’s, including OEE, Availability, Uptime, etc.