Leaner teams, persistent hiring challenges and aging assets are increasing the pressure on maintenance professionals to keep critical equipment running longer with fewer resources. Much of the expertise required to maintain those assets still resides only with experienced employees, putting organizations at risk when those individuals retire or leave.
In fact, 74% of maintenance organizations have critical assets that depend on a single person’s knowledge, according to Limble’s inaugural State of Maintenance Report.
“Maintenance professionals solve complex problems every day and keep the world’s assets running, often without receiving the recognition they deserve,” says Gary Specter, CEO of Limble. “But as teams get leaner and experienced workers retire, the expertise they’ve built over decades becomes increasingly valuable and vulnerable. This Summit is about celebrating their contributions while exploring how better data and technology can preserve their expertise, strengthen decision-making and help them operate smarter.”
Key takeaways:
● Two-thirds of maintenance professionals personally hold critical knowledge that exists nowhere in their organization’s systems.
● 47% reported losing knowledge they could not recover when someone left.
● Organizations with a larger staff of 51–100 were 50% more likely than average to report this, suggesting that larger teams don’t necessarily have the documentation needed to preserve institutional knowledge.
● When asked which improvement would have the greatest business impact, maintenance leaders ranked hiring and retaining technicians ahead of AI.
