Many readers have expressed curiosity about Objective-Based Maintenance (OBM) and how it can fit within established asset and maintenance management practices without requiring an extreme overhaul. In this blog, I’d like to show you how OBM enhances your current maintenance strategies, ensuring a seamless evolution towards smarter, more strategic operations. Be sure to check out my previous two blogs, Next Steps in Asset Maintenance Strategy and Amplifying Organisational Value with OBM, for even more insights into how OBM can best support your organisation.
What is Objective-Based Maintenance (OBM)?
Adopting more strategic maintenance management approaches has enabled organisations to maximise their efficiency and cost savings around maintenance operations. Tools such as CMMS have allowed teams to collect and analyse their facilities and operations data in new and exciting ways. Objective-Based Maintenance is another step in the strategic direction. With OBM, teams can organise their asset and maintenance management data and processes in new ways to directly show their leadership the important correlations around maintenance activities and the organisation’s strategic objectives.
For instance, if your organisation is juggling goals around compliance, sustainability, and operational efficiency, taking an objective-based maintenance approach will allow your teams to demonstrate how your maintenance strategy can support those goals.
Rather than replacing your existing practices, OBM builds on condition- and predictive-based maintenance by using real-time data, observations, and strategic planning tools. This ensures that maintenance decisions are not only data-driven but also directly support asset life cycle performance and business priorities. OBM transforms maintenance into a measurable, strategic function—helping teams gain insight, efficiency, and recognition across the organisation.
What OBM isn’t
OBM is not about discarding the maintenance systems and processes that you already have in place. Instead, it’s about augmenting them to be more strategic and proactive. OBM should not complicate your current operations. Instead, OBM can simplify your maintenance by centralising observations and automating the planning of activities through standardised, goal-driven workflows—reducing manual effort and guesswork. Instead of managing fragmented data and tasks across different tools or teams, OBM provides one clear framework to connect asset conditions directly to strategic actions. This results in fewer disconnected processes, more informed decisions, and a more manageable, scalable approach to maintenance.
Why Adopting OBM Matters
Adopting OBM allows maintenance teams to clearly demonstrate their impact on business outcomes—providing transparency into how their work supports strategic objectives like sustainability, compliance, and cost efficiency. By connecting daily maintenance activities to measurable goals, OBM enables teams to earn recognition from stakeholders and leadership. This visibility not only boosts engagement and job satisfaction, but also helps refine existing processes to be more efficient and goal-driven. In doing so, OBM turns maintenance management from a routine necessity into a strategic contributor to long-term business performance.
Enhancing AMM with OBM: A Seamless Integration for Strategic Success
Now is the time to elevate your current maintenance practices with smarter, more strategic operations. Discover how Planon’s Objective-Based Maintenance can seamlessly integrate with your current AMM setup to help you meet and exceed your business objectives.
Contact us now and request free access to our e-learning course (in English) on Asset and Maintenance Management. You can view details on the course in Planon Marketplace. This course provides detailed insights and best practices around asset and maintenance management practices, including information about objective-based maintenance. Discover whether an OBM strategy is right for your team and organisation.