What does leadership in asset management look like today?

Three organizations – Energia Group, East Kentucky Power Cooperative and Cirebon Energi Prasarana – offer compelling answers.

Each has delivered a standout initiative that has led to them being shortlisted for a 2026 MaximoWorld Award.

This is what they did:

Energia Group’s Trailblazing Integration Approach | Award category: Enterprise Integration Excellence

The Challenge  

Energia Group is a leading integrated energy company with substantial businesses in Ireland and Northern Ireland.  

Committed to strengthening its asset management, it set out, in 2025, to upgrade its Maximo system to MAS 9.0. But it faced one key challenge: Ensuring that the integration between Maximo and SAP, its core financial system, was not disrupted and that flexibility could be built into its systems landscape.   

Our solution: A Modern, Cloud‑Native Integration Architecture  

Together, we designed a cloud-native integration solution, focused on scalability, resilience, and operational simplicity.   

It uses AWS, Lambda and Step Functions to orchestrate event-driven workflows and enables the processing of data in a highly efficient and decoupled way. 

S3 is used as a durable, low-cost, central storage layer for handling and exchanging integration files. 

Benefits for Energia Group 

This solution contributed to a seamless, on-time and on-budget upgrade, which went live in February 2026. It has also ensured that:   

• The upgrade delivered long-term value, rather than simply maintaining legacy integration patterns  

• The integration is a reusable platform capability, rather than a point-to-point technical dependency  

• Maximo and SAP are more loosely coupled, enabling greater flexibility for future system enhancements  

The approach has been successfully applied to other Cohesive clients, demonstrating its reusability and broader value. 

East Kentucky Power Cooperative Turns Field Data into Actionable Intelligence | Award category: Field Workforce Enablement

The Challenge

East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) has been a long-time IBM Maximo user, having implemented the EAM system in the early 2000s, primarily in its Generation facilities.   

But by 2020 , the utility - on whom more than 1 million Kentucky residents and thousands of businesses depend for reliable, affordable energy every day – was facing growing challenges. Multiple ageing, fragmented data systems and paper-based processes were creating inefficiencies across its Transmission and Substation areas.    

Field data was collected manually, brought back to the office and entered by hand in a labor-intensive process that introduced delays, entailed limited visibility and increased the risk of error.   

The predominant approach had become reactive work management – responding to problems as they arose.    

 Always forward-looking, EKPC recognized that it needed to move into the next phase of asset management maturity. It wanted to adopt the latest technologies and capabilities and support its wider goal of moving to proactive and predictive maintenance.    

Our Solution: Mobilizing the Workforce and Modernizing Asset Health  

EKPC partnered with Cohesive to launch a major Field Workforce Enablement and Asset Health Program – a cornerstone of its wider asset‑management modernization journey.  

Cohesive equipped EKPC’s Transmission field teams with modern mobile capabilities, enabling technicians to:  

• Receive and complete inspections digitally  

• Capture photos, videos, GPS location, and barcode/QR scans  

• Record condition‑monitoring readings  

• Work online or offline  

• Sync  data directly into Maximo without manual re‑entry  

This eliminated paper forms and ensured that high‑quality data flowed directly from the field into EKPC’s asset‑management system, Maximo.  

In parallel, Cohesive worked with EKPC to design and implement a comprehensive set of Asset Health Indices. These indices combine:  

• Inspection results  

• Condition‑monitoring data  

• Transformer oil analysis  

• Power factor  

• Failure history  

• Age and lifecycle information  

• Environmental and operational factors  

When field data is captured, Maximo automatically calculates an AHI score for each asset. These scores feed into analytic dashboards that provide a single, easy‑to‑understand indicator of asset condition.  

This enables EKPC to answer critical questions such as:  

• Which assets are degrading fastest?  

• Where should maintenance resources be prioritized?  

• Which assets pose the highest operational or reliability risk?  

• What should be repaired, refurbished, or replaced?  

Benefits for EKPC

The results of this collaborative program have been transformative.  

EKPC’s bi‑monthly inspections at more than 500 substations across Eastern Kentucky are now fully digital. In addition, the program is being rolled out more widely.  

Kristy Green, EKPC, summarizes the impact well: “Putting in place this comprehensive asset health program is helping us in multiple ways - driving better budgeting, helping us to make more confident decisions and enabling us to readily answer key questions about our assets.  

“Data which once took many months to capture, consolidate and analyze, is now readily available to our maintenance and reliability teams.”  

The benefits of the program for EKPC have included:  

• A much clearer picture of the overall condition of Substation Assets and the ability to answer key questions such as ‘when should x asset be replaced?’  

• A return on its significant investment into collecting and storing inspection data.  Utilizing this data to calculate Asset Health Indexes puts the data to good use.  

• A move to proactive and predictive maintenance strategies that has enabled efficient workforce planning, leading to reduced costs.  

The initiative has also provided strong benefits for EKPC’s regulatory and funding approaches as it can now readily provide data to evidence compliance or to evidence its business case to secure finance.

Cirebon Energi Prasarana Revolutionizes Safety and Operations with IBM Maximo and Cohesive  | Award Category:  Health, Safety & Environmental Leadership

The Challenge

Cirebon Energi Prasarana (CEPR) is a provider of 1,000 MW of vital electricity to the national Java-Bali grid. Its vision is “to be the best-in-class power generation company in Indonesia with the highest standards of efficiency, safety, and environmental-friendliness.” It is committed to powering the nation’s future safely and sustainably.  

Its challenge focused on the Permit to Work (PTW) process, which is the administrative heart of plant safety and a critical control point for all high-risk maintenance and operational activities.   

CEPR’s PTW process was a legacy, paper-based system. While functional, it was fraught with inherent risks and inefficiencies that became increasingly untenable as its commitment to operational excellence grew. 

Our solution: A Strategic Partnership for a Safer, Digital, Future 

For CEPR the goal was clear: to implement a single, centralized, and fully digital PTW system that would eliminate manual inefficiencies, provide complete operational transparency, and create a foundation for its safety culture. 

After a thorough evaluation it selected the IBM Maximo Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) module as the platform for this transformation. Its industry-proven capabilities for managing complex risk, ensuring compliance, and integrating seamlessly with an existing Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system made it the ideal choice. 

The solution was tailored to CEPR’s specific operational needs, focusing on several key features: 

• Fully Digital Workflows and Mobile Approvals: This eliminated the need for physical paper, allowing permits to be reviewed and approved digitally, even via mobile devices, drastically reducing processing time. 
• Automated Conflict and Hazard Identification: The system automatically checks for potential conflicts between work orders and ensures all necessary precautions and isolations are identified and linked to the permit, acting as a critical digital safety net.
• A Centralized Digital Work Log: This provided, for the first time, a single, real-time view of all active and pending permits across the entire plant. This “single source of truth” gave managers unprecedented visibility and control.

Benefits for Cirebon Energi Prasarana

The implementation of Maximo HSE delivered immediate, measurable, and profound results. The most impactful metric was the radical reduction in permit processing time, which was slashed by over 80% – from an average of one hour to under 10 minutes.  

The system proved its immense value during CEPR’s recent 47-day major overhaul of the 1,000 MW ultra-supercritical power unit. The Maximo platform flawlessly managed the coordination of thousands of work activities and safety-critical permits for hundreds of contractors. This digital control was a key factor in ensuring the overhaul was completed safely and on schedule, a feat of efficiency and control that would have been impossible with its previous system. 

“After setting up and configuring a PTW system within Maximo HSE, we were able to reduce our permit issue times from about 1 hour on average to just minutes, all while maintaining our stringent safety and regulatory compliance goals. Cohesive was instrumental in helping us evaluate, design, and implement a better PTW system on schedule.” 

— Andy Saputra, ICT Manager, CEPR