MaintainX had a great time at the SMRP 2021 conference in St. Louis and loved seeing the energy from so many maintenance professionals. In today’s polarizing times, it was encouraging to see the community back together sharing common themes of both their struggles and triumphs over the past year and a half. While most organizations are battling staffing shortages and supply chain issues, these same organizations have taken this opportunity to improve or reimagine processes that have been in place for years. The spirit of American ingenuity and resilience was on full display.

MaintainX came away from the conference with the following takeaways: 

1. Knowledge sharing is alive and well across industry professionals. We met amazing maintenance and reliability leaders from every corner of the U.S. and were even graced with a few international attendees! It was impressive hearing about the similar challenges faced by staff across different industries whether in mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and even public utilities, to name a few.
   
2. Folks were happy to be back in person to network and those who couldn’t attend in person joined via the SMRP chat platform and contributed to productive technical webcasts, such as the Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices session that reviewed Data Quality and Governance standards. Such standards are useful across industries to facilitate data transfers and imports, which can expedite the time to value of new maintenance practices and investments.

3. Industry continues to embrace exciting new technologies in artificial intelligence, enterprise software, machine learning, and IoT sensors. Success stories were shared in the closing session, with a sense of urgency to adopt  these new tools. Organizations slow to embrace these changes are falling behind, not only from a production standpoint but with low staff retention. Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems aren’t going anywhere, but platforms like MaintainX layered on top of these systems are enabling management to track real-time data from frontline teams with unprecedented levels of timely visibility. 

Reliability engineers understand their responsibility to balance these changes with stable, consistent operations. The best engineers are able to find solutions that improve systems while keeping in mind change management. At MaintainX, we are aligned with that goal. We firmly believe that any software and tools are only useful if your team uses them.