Layout

Talk to a maintenance lead at any enterprise and the same theme comes up: they know their team generates real value, but they struggle to make it visible in numbers the CFO trusts. The operational story the data tells is not what actually happens on site. Notifications come in half-filled, time bookings get rounded to the hour, schedules live in Excel and reconcile to SAP once a week, and downtime is not assigned to the correct entity. That gap between reality and SAP (the world's most popular EAM platform) is what makes maintenance look like a cost line in the budget even when it is carrying revenue, reliability, and labor productivity.

Resilience is easy to talk about and hard to deliver. For water and wastewater utilities, it means sustaining safe, reliable service despite aging assets, workforce transitions, regulatory pressure, and increasing operational risk. That is exactly what the Water Industry Reliability Forum set out to unpack in a practical way during the Reliability Conference, in a full-day workshop co-hosted in collaboration with MaxGrip and Reliabilityweb. This is a recap of those sessions and discussions with the audience.

Asset-intensive organizations continue to be under increasing pressure to improve reliability, reduce operating costs, extend asset life, and make better use of capital. Utilities are modernizing grids, oil and gas companies are managing large, geographically spread assets while dealing with ageing infrastructure and ongoing geopolitical tensions, manufacturers are protecting production capacity, and data centers are becoming a critical asset class requiring high availability. In response, organizations have invested over time in EAM, GIS, SCADA, historians, sensors, mobility, analytics, and digital platforms.