by Berend Booms, Associate Editor, Future of Assets
There is a particular kind of work that rarely makes headlines. It does not announce itself, and it does not generate the kind of enthusiasm that surrounds a major capital investment or a technology deployment. It happens early, it happens consistently, and when it goes well, the only evidence is the absence of anything noticeable: no failure, no disruption, no crisis. Maintenance is that work. And today, on Global Maintenance Day, it deserves more than a moment of passing recognition.
This year's theme is ‘Resilience in Maintenance: Securing Reliability for the Future.’ For me, it captures something that has been building across asset-intensive industries for some time. Reliability has always been the foundation of what maintenance professionals deliver. Resilience is what is now increasingly being asked of the assets, systems, organizations, and people around them. The two are deeply connected, and understanding that connection is, I think, one of the more important conversations our industry can have right now.
Reliability is Built Before it is Needed
Most people interact with the outputs of maintenance every single day without realizing it. It’s the train that arrives on time. Or the hospital that operates without interruption. And the power that stays on through the night. None of these things happen by accident, and none of them happen without people who understand that reliability is earned through consistent, disciplined effort - long before its effectiveness is put to the test.
What I keep coming back to is how invisible this work is when it is done well. In asset-intensive environments, the absence of failure is rarely celebrated the way a recovery from failure is. There is something deeply human about that tendency. We are drawn to visible effort, to the dramatic response, to the team that worked through the night to restore operations. The team that prevented the failure from happening in the first place tends to receive considerably less acknowledgment. A big part of the reason why I think Global Maintenance Day is so important is to address this imbalance.
Why Resilience Matters Now
The context in which maintenance professionals operate today is more demanding than at any point in recent memory. Aging infrastructure, workforce shortages, energy transitions, supply chain volatility, and the rapid introduction of new technologies have all converged at once. These are not temporary pressures; they are structural realities that will define how asset-intensive organizations manage performance and risk for the foreseeable future.
In that context, the theme of resilience feels both timely and precise. Resilience in maintenance is about more than the ability to recover from failure. It is about building systems, processes, and capabilities that hold up under pressure before failure occurs. It is about recognizing that reliability is not a fixed state you achieve and then maintain, but something you secure continuously, through investment in people, in knowledge, in the quality of your data, and in the discipline of your processes. Securing reliability for the future, as this year's theme puts it, is an active undertaking. It requires intentional decisions made today about capabilities that will matter most tomorrow.
The People Who Make it Possible
Workforce continuity is one of the most pressing challenges the maintenance community faces. As experienced professionals retire, the knowledge they carry does not automatically transfer. It has to be deliberately captured, shared, and built upon. This raises a concern that sits at the very root of resilience: an organization that loses deep technical expertise faster than it can develop new capability is building fragility into its future, regardless of how sophisticated its technology stack may be.
What strikes me most about the maintenance and reliability community is the depth of commitment this work demands. It is a discipline where experience compounds over years and decades, where judgment matters as much as data, where learning is continuous, where time is a rare commodity, and where the difference between a good decision and a poor one can carry consequences far beyond a single asset or a single site. Apprenticeships, mentoring, structured knowledge transfer, and the thoughtful use of technology to extend and distribute expertise are all part of what it means to invest seriously in long-term resilience. On a day like today, that investment deserves to be recognized as clearly as any other form of capital allocation.
What This Day is For
I appreciate how days like Global Maintenance Day create a shared moment of reflection, in which we can step back from the urgency of daily work and look at the broader significance of what the maintenance community contributes to the industries, communities, societies, families and individuals that depend on the assets and infrastructure those organizations maintain.
Resilience in maintenance is not built in moments of crisis. It is built in the decisions made before the crisis arrives: in the inspection completed on time, in the work order that was expedited instead of deferred, in the knowledge that was documented rather than left to walk out the door, in the conversation between an experienced engineer and a technician early in their career. These are the moments that secure reliability for the future, even when they feel ordinary in the present.
To everyone working in maintenance and reliability today: the work you do matters a great deal - far beyond what is typically visible. The performance organizations report, the safety workers depend on, the continuity that most people take for granted: none of it exists without you. Resilience is not something that appears on a dashboard. It is something you build, quietly and consistently, every single day.