Unpacking the State of Industrial Maintenance

When it comes to tackling maintenance challenges, how do your strategies compare with other leaders?

We surveyed more than 1,300 maintenance professionals for our 2025 State of Industrial Maintenance report to gain a deeper understanding of how teams are adapting to new trends and pressures. Frontline reliability leader Daniel Marchant, service manager at Xylem, recently joined MaintainX co-founder Nick Haase to unpack the key findings. 

Read on for takeaways from the conversation and to learn how top maintenance teams are:

• Closing the gap between preventive maintenance strategy and execution
• Dealing with rising costs and uncertainty 
• Adopting AI in their operations
• Tackling the talent shortage

Closing the preventive maintenance execution gap

The findings

These days, maintenance leaders know preventive maintenance programs are critical. But according to our survey, getting preventive programs up and running has been a struggle. The data indicates that 71% of facilities have an active preventive strategy in place. Despite this, 58% of teams dedicate less than half of their maintenance time to preventive work.

Daniel’s take

So what’s contributing to the disconnect between preventive strategy and execution? According to Daniel, leadership often misses opportunities to set the tone with their frontline teams. “They’re not selling the strategy to the right people,” he explains.

Providing practical training on how to execute preventive work—and the right tools to schedule and track this work efficiently—is essential to success. 

“We spend a lot of time in the strategy world, but we don't train and engage the people that are actually going to be driving the strategy,” Daniel says. “You need to be a proactive engager. If you’re not, then your strategy is going to fail.” 

Dealing with rising costs and uncertainty

The findings

For most facilities, downtime costs have risen or remained static over the past year. Machine wear and tear, plus the rising cost of parts and shipping, were cited as primary contributors to downtime cost increases. Meanwhile, uncertainty around macroeconomic factors like tariffs are also starting to impact the way businesses operate.

Daniel’s take

Safeguarding your success as costs rise involves planning for uncertainty, especially when it comes to inventory. “It’s reminiscent of what we dealt with during COVID,” Daniel says. “You should make sourcing a part of your strategy, especially for critical components and pieces of equipment."

For many maintenance professionals, winning in uncertain times may require expanding the scope of their role. “It typically hasn't been the responsibility of the maintenance and reliability side of the house to think about parts and inventory management to the same extent as the supply chain side of the house,” Daniel explains. “But as we talk about how to reduce the cost of downtime, improving your parts and inventory management is going to become a more important part of being successful in these roles.”

Adopting AI in maintenance

The findings

According to the data, AI usage is on the rise for many maintenance teams: 44% percent of respondents to our survey have already implemented AI in their operations in some capacity.

Daniel’s take

While AI adoption is on the rise, the technology’s success depends on being thoughtful about implementation and finding the right use case for it in your organization. AI implementation isn’t about replacing technicians, as Daniel points out: “The underlying perception in maintenance is that AI isn’t going to go out there and turn a wrench.” 

Instead, companies seeing the most success with AI are finding practical ways it can help frontline workers do their jobs more efficiently. 

Daniel points to the power of keeping it simple when it comes to bringing AI into your workflows. “As we evolve, adopting AI is a necessity to an extent. But we need to be extremely tactical when we adopt it. We need to pick a process, a piece of equipment, or a singular problem and come up with a singular solution,” Daniel says. "Trying to implement a grand, everything-automated, Star Trek interface and maintenance plan is not going to happen unless you have infinite resources."

Tackling labor costs and the talent shortage 

The findings

Of the many challenges facing maintenance teams today, the growing skills gap and the rising cost of labor landed in the top three. These problems aren’t likely to relent as more experienced technicians leave the workforce. According to the Hudson Institute, up to 40% of maintenance professionals could retire in the next five years.

Daniel’s take

To cope with these workforce pressures, Daniel highlights the importance of capturing your team’s expertise. “What I think folks should be paying attention to in this industry is just how much tribal knowledge is exiting the workforce… I think there's an opportunity for us to engage these folks before they leave."

Finding ways to keep and share tenured technicians’ knowledge isn’t just convenient, it’s key to your organization’s survival. “If you don't capture and document how this stuff works, you’re going to find yourself up a creek when it comes to sustaining operations long term.”

The rapid evolution of equipment over the past few years is also contributing to labor cost increases. As Daniel puts it: “You’re also paying somebody to keep labor trained and up to speed.” As newer technology and older equipment appear together on the factory floor, there’s a growing need for maintenance workers with more varied skill sets. 

“Say I have a piece of equipment that’s tied into an IIoT device, but it's also mostly mechanical—do I want two different people working on that piece of equipment? It's no longer good enough to just get a mechanic to work on a mechanical piece,” Daniel explains. “As equipment becomes more digital and we replace it rapidly, the ability to train people is growing dramatically more challenging.”

Hear from 1,300+ maintenance leaders

Download the 2025 State of Industrial Maintenance report for more on what’s working for teams (and what’s not), plus actionable strategies to future-proof your maintenance operations.