42nd FVI Expert Breakfast

Topic: "Global Maintenance in Focus" – Standards, networking, and change across plant, country, and cultural boundaries.

The session showed that Global Maintenance is less about technical solutions and more about acceptance, communication, and organizational perseverance. The practical report from a global industrial corporation was complemented by experiences from other participants in international maintenance organizations.

• Lighthouse plants are a starting point, but not a sure thing: A plant in Korea was selected to develop and test digital solutions for corrective and preventive maintenance as well as spare parts management. The central insight: A technically successful pilot does not yet create a global standard. Other plants quickly react with "Not invented here" if they are not involved early or consider their own solutions superior.
• Global standards need local co-creation: Participants warned against trying to "turn entire plants upside down." More successful are a few, low-threshold standards – for example, five easily measurable key figures – while the operational implementation remains locally flexible. As one participant aptly put it: "Better to set the small standard than not implement the big standard."
• Networking comes before unification: It was repeatedly emphasized that personal relationships form the basis for the exchange of best practices. Virtual and personal Maintenance Days, regular project presentations, and informal encounters help plants recognize that they are not alone with their problems. The practical advice was: "Visit the plants, get to know the people."

• Maintenance must make its value visible: As long as equipment is running, the performance of maintenance often remains invisible – the term "Ninja Maintenance" was used in the conversation. At the same time, it was made clear: The product of maintenance is technical availability. Key figures, structured feedback, and visible successes are therefore necessary to win top management for resources, global teams, and long-term change processes.

Classification: Enabling global standards with ADAM without slowing down local processes

The episode fits perfectly with our strategy because Global Maintenance does not require another rigid software, but a pragmatic level for operational intelligence, knowledge transfer, and cross-location collaboration.

• Local island solutions versus global standard: Plants develop their own tools because central systems are often too complicated, inflexible, or insufficiently understood in everyday life. However, a forced exchange of functioning solutions generates resistance and prolongs the change process. We therefore do not position ADAM as a replacement for SAP PM or existing CMMS systems. As an open SaaS platform, ADAM complements the existing landscape with a simple, asset-centered access. Data and knowledge from different sources are bundled in a digital lifecycle record, while existing core systems are retained.
• Best practices remain hidden in individual plants: The episode made it clear that good solutions are created locally but are rarely documented and shared across locations in a structured way. Often time, motivation, or a suitable form of feedback is lacking. With ADAM, we make documentation a by-product of daily work. Technicians can record disruptions and solutions by voice; the AI structures the content and stores it in the asset context. Through hybrid search and vector search, experiential knowledge can be found even when names, master data, or formulations differ between plants.
• Big-bang rollouts overwhelm organizations and people: The discussion confirmed that global transformation must occur gradually. Small visible successes create more acceptance than years-long programs, whose benefits become apparent only after the full rollout. We therefore start ADAM-First with a clearly defined use case and a real bottleneck. Local processes can be quickly digitized, tested, and then transferred as proven building blocks to other locations through no-code workflows. This creates standardization from functioning solutions – not from theoretically perfect process models.

Conclusion: Global Maintenance will be successful when central guidelines, local experiential knowledge, and human acceptance come together – ADAM creates the connecting level of operational intelligence for this.