What Maintenance Leaders Need to Prioritize in 2026

We recently asked 2,234 maintenance and operations leaders to tell us about the changes and challenges they’re coming up against in 2026.

Some of the highlights:

• 79% of teams saw unplanned downtime stay the same or increase. The cost of downtime is also rising, so every failure matters more.
• The labor shortage and skills gaps ranked among the top 5 challenges for maintenance leaders.
• Despite greater adoption of preventive strategies, half of maintenance teams still spend less than 40% of their time on planned maintenance work.

While many of these problems aren’t new, the pressure to find fixes for them has intensified. But where should maintenance leaders start when everything feels urgent? 

We’ve outlined a few habits to leave behind as you strengthen your maintenance strategy, and where to focus instead.

Don’t: Watch expertise walk out the door 

Do: Make knowledge capture a priority

Every maintenance department has veteran technicians who know the ins-and-outs of every machine on the line. If their knowledge is stored in their heads, on paper, in spreadsheets, or scattered across disconnected tools and inboxes, it tends to disappear instead of spreading to others. 

That’s how a single retirement or extended absence can set a plant back months. When the team loses this hard-earned expertise, the same failures repeat while new technicians relearn lessons the hard way. 

The fix many companies miss is treating knowledge capture like any other critical job and building it into the maintenance team’s day-to-day processes. 

You can avoid accumulating “knowledge capture debt” by: 

• Standardizing work orders, failure codes, asset histories, and photos in one system your technicians can use in the field. 
• Making “document as you go” the default requirement for every repair and inspection. Over time, this creates reliable data that strengthens your planning and training.

AI can accelerate the process of turning a senior technician’s knowledge into shared expertise. The technology can pull from equipment manuals, completed work orders, and repair notes to create procedures and tie knowledge to the right assets. 

This way, when senior technicians retire, their judgement stays in the workflow as a searchable resource. This means newer team members can quickly get up to speed without having to make sense of hard-to-navigate manuals or incomplete notes from their predecessors.

Don’t: Look at maintenance advancements as a cost 

Do: Reframe maintenance as a competitive differentiator

Many companies still treat maintenance as an expense to minimize. That’s part of why so many teams can plan on implementing proactive approaches and still spend less than half their time on planned preventive work. While the strategy exists, the conditions to apply it (like budget, training, and time on machines) often don’t. 

The fastest way to change how maintenance is prioritized in the organization is to reframe maintenance improvements as a lever for profitability through better throughput and quality. 

Maintenance leaders can do this by: 

1. advocating to add reliability to the company’s operating goals, and
2. consistently sharing KPIs and updates with leaders across the organization

When maintenance is visible and measured in business terms, it earns the executive sponsorship teams need to protect their preventive maintenance schedules and move from reactive firefighting to sustained reliability improvement.

Don’t: Assume advanced maintenance automatically translates into less firefighting

Do: Turn machine signals into maintenance work, and maintenance work into operational insight

Especially if you’ve already investing in advanced maintenance technologies, your greatest reliability gains may come not from adding more tools to collect data, but from making sure the data you’re already collecting is reaching the right people. 

Teams are adopting usage-based maintenance, condition-based maintenance, and real-time monitoring at higher rates than ever. Yet most technicians still spend most of their time on unplanned work. 

One reason for this is that real-time asset health data often stays trapped in PLCs, SCADA, and other OT systems, disconnected from the systems where teams actually plan work. This means teams don’t have a simple way to see what’s wrong, work often doesn’t get scheduled, and proactive tasks get crowded out.

The first fix for this problem is to connect asset signals to your CMMS, where your team already spends their time. MaintainX helps teams do this with pre-built integrations for Ignition, Kepware, and MQTT, which stream live data from the factory floor directly into the CMMS. This allows work orders to be triggered automatically based on live usage and condition data, giving technicians helpful context and helping supervisors schedule the right work sooner.

And the benefits shouldn’t stop with technicians. When machine monitoring and your team’s work live in one connected system, the signals become immediately usable across the organization. Operations and engineering can see how asset issues are getting resolved, and maintenance leaders can see which failure patterns are repeating and where preventive strategies can be refined. Accessible data fuels a feedback loop that can improve planning and reliability. 

Over time, advanced strategies stop being aspirational and start showing up as fewer emergencies, fewer repeat failures, and more hours spent on work that prevents downtime.

Dont: Miss the full report

If you want more insights on 2026 trends, you can get the full State of Industrial Maintenance report for free. 

Or book a demo to see how a modern CMMS can better equip your maintenance team to face today’s challenges.