Maximo enthusiasts gathered in force in a frosty London this month for the last 2025 meeting of the UK and Ireland Maximo User Group (MUG).
The two-day event, held at IBM’s flagship Innovation Studio, was designed to bring together users with product and enterprise asset management experts to help them deepen their understanding of the Maximo platform and its capabilities and get the most out of their investment.
The event came amid a huge milestone for the Maximo Application Suite (MAS) which has recently been selected by the UK Ministry of Defence as the foundation for its ground-breaking new asset management platform for managing and maintaining its defence equipment.
As individuals who have dedicated our careers to the platform, we are so excited to see Maximo being deployed for such a prestigious and large-scale programme – and even more proud to have been selected to deliver it with IBM. (You can read more about it, here.)
Maximo – making the commute go smoothly
Day 1 of the MUG, with a title of ‘MAS unlocked’, focused on hands-on demos and in-depth technical sessions. These were designed to help users build a full picture of MAS’s capabilities and arm them with useful know-how to take back to their teams.
Day 2 was devoted to user stories. This was an opportunity to hear directly from organizations who have implemented or upgraded to MAS. These organizations discussed challenges they faced and how they overcame them and outlined the benefits and efficiencies that the platform has brought to their daily operations.
Fitting for the London location we heard from Richard Thomas, Senior Product Manager, Asset Management Systems, at Transport for London (TfL) – the organization which is responsible for operating the city’s public transport network.
The Maximo platform is used at scale within TfL – with more than 10,000 internal technicians within London Underground relying on it to help them manage and maintain its critical assets. The platform also helps TfL to track and manage multiple contracts with outside parties.
IBM has reported that TfL anticipates that its use of Maximo will net it over £21 million in savings in a decade for its London Underground responsibilities alone. These will be gained through Maximo helping it to extend the lifecycle of its assets, reduce the need for replacement parts and limiting the risk of significant failures.
Plain-sailing: The award-winning Stena Drilling and Cohesive MAS upgrade
We were delighted to be joined by Martin Eklund, our long-standing client and friend from Stena Drilling, the leading independent drilling contractor, to share the story of our award-winning MAS upgrade.
Together we completed what is believed to be the first example, globally, of a MAS implementation in a high-risk, disconnected environment – and it’s a story we will never tire of telling!
The on-time, on-budget upgrade was recognized for its ‘best-in-class’ approach and the outcomes that we delivered. You can read more about it, here. We are also holding a webinar later this month with Stena Drilling focused on how this upgrade was executed. You can sign-up to join us, here.
Making the most out of MAS
Naturally, hot topics including AI use-cases were on the agenda. But many participants were interested in more fundamentally basic areas of enterprise asset management – including the interplay between data quality and business processes.
Their quandary was this: They recognized that achieving greater automation within their Maximo environments requires the capture of specific data points at a consistently high standard. However, without additional resources, collecting more comprehensive data is not always practical. This classic “chicken-and-egg” dilemma creates significant friction.
From our perspective, the most effective approach is often a pragmatic one: begin by focusing on activities that are most closely aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives and that present the greatest opportunity to reduce risk or enhance performance. While this may be easier said than done, it provides a realistic and impactful starting point for improvement.
Waving goodbye to downtime
Our Stena Drilling presentation brought to the forefront of discussion another big cross-sector area of interest – data challenges during upgrades. In particular, teams are concerned about the risk of long downtime periods during upgrades, potential data loss and a problematic go-live.
Understanding these challenges (and being ahead of the game of course!), we developed, over a decade ago, a proprietary solution to manage them. Our Cohesive Data Utility (CDU) solution is an innovative Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) toolkit designed to help organizations eliminate downtime during Maximo upgrades and data migration programs.
The tool was successfully deployed for our Stena Drilling upgrade where, we are proud to say, there was zero operational disruption despite the complex offshore environment with which we were working.
Having completed upgrades since Maximo v4, right through to MAS, this is a tried and tested solution, built on years of intellectual development.
Maintenance in modern times
Understanding how Maximo supports proactive maintenance and enhances asset reliability (and so mitigates risks) was another key area of interest – and one that we presented on during Day 1.
This involves applying a first-principles methodology to systematically identify all potential failure modes of an asset and subsequently developing an evidence-based approach to minimize these failures through targeted interventions and inspections.
This is where the Reliability Strategies function in Maximo comes in – helping organizations to document, manage, and integrate this proactive approach into their maintenance operations and broader Maximo environment.
It helps organizations transcend basic statutory and regulatory maintenance requirements, enabling them to address and further reduce specific business risks associated with the unique characteristics of their assets.
Aside from the technical know-how that was exchanged, this was an event with great spirit and enthusiasm. The scale of attendance and the detailed questions being asked underlined the hugely important role that user groups play in the status and advancement of flagship products like MAS.
It concluded on what was a cold day, in the most British of ways – with warming tea.
If you’d like more information on the UK and Ireland MUG, or about how your organization can get more out of Maximo, please email [email protected]