Many readers have expressed curiosity about Objective-Based Maintenance (OBM) and how it fits within established asset and maintenance management practices without necessitating 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 blogs, Next Steps in Asset Maintenance Strategy and Amplifying Organizational Value with OBM, for even more insights into how OBM can best support your organization.
What is Objective-Based Maintenance (OBM)?
Taking on a more strategic maintenance management approach enables teams to maximize their efficiency and cost savings around maintenance operations. Tools such as CMMS have allowed those teams to collect and analyze their facilities and operations data in new and exciting ways. Objective-Based Maintenance is another step in this strategic direction. With OBM, teams can organize their asset and maintenance management data and processes in new ways to show their leadership how maintenance activities support the organization’s strategic objectives, like compliance, sustainability, and operational efficiency.
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 lifecycle performance and business priorities. OBM transforms maintenance into a measurable, strategic function—helping teams gain insight, efficiency, and recognition across the organization.
What OBM isn’t
OBM is not about discarding the maintenance systems and processes that you 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 centralizing observations and automating the planning of activities through standardized, 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 gives maintenance teams the ability 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
Interested in becoming more strategic in your maintenance practices? Discover how Planon’s Objective-Based Maintenance can seamlessly integrate into your current Planon Asset & Maintenance Management setup.
Learn More: Free OBM E-learning Course
Contact us to 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, including information about objective-based maintenance. Discover whether an OBM strategy is right for your team and organization.