Maintenance data overload? How to cut through the noise and gain actionable insights.

Data is everywhere in asset maintenance, but insights are in short supply

Mainstream’s 2025 State of Asset Management report reveals a growing problem: 78% of organisations collect more data than they can meaningfully use. That overload is costing frontline teams dearly, with maintenance professionals spending 14.6 hours each week just trying to make sense of it all - that is nearly 40% of their time!

That’s two full days lost every week to ‘data busy work’ instead of more valuable maintenance problem-solving, planning, or preventative action. For any organisation focused on asset uptime, operational cost reduction, or workforce productivity, this is a major and avoidable performance drain.

In short, maintenance professionals have too much hard-to-access data and not enough time to make meaningful decisions.

The high cost of hidden asset and maintenance data

Maintenance professionals know the pain well. Valuable asset and maintenance data gets trapped in paper dockets, siloed spreadsheets, or disconnected systems. When something goes wrong, teams waste hours trawling through old records to pinpoint when, where, and why the problem started. It’s a reactive cycle that adds stress and slows maintenance response time.

It’s common to hear of maintenance teams having to trawl through storage sheds full of old paperwork just to confirm details like a torque setting. Or building intricate spreadsheets to piece together incomplete logs from past inspections. This isn’t just frustrating, it’s time-consuming and expensive.

So, how do you move from the tedious task of finding and collating data to spending quality time taking decisive action with insights easily accessible and clear to understand.

From data collection to real-time insights

The issue isn’t data collection, it’s the clarity of that data. Mainstream’s 2025 report confirms what many already know...

Organisations don’t need more data; they need faster and easier access to the right data at the right time.

Digitising maintenance workflows and fieldwork execution is a critical first step in managing, collating and using the wealth of asset, maintenance and operational data available to asset intensive organisations. Moving to digital work execution and mobility ensures that consistent, high-quality data is captured at the point of work, with its full context intact. Once captured, your digital work management solution must translate this raw captured data into accessible insights as well as sync it back to critical business systems such SAP or Pronto to improve the data available across operations.

Critically for maintenance teams, asset and maintenance data must be accessible in real-time through easy to view insights and interactive dashboards to drill down on areas such as asset health, maintenance performance, trends and anomalies, team productivity and safety compliance. With this type of visibility and functionality, maintenance teams can move from reacting to problems and searching for data to anticipating issues and taking decisive action.

The advantage of a mobility solution with built-in analytics

Obzervr enables organisations to go beyond digitising maintenance and helps them transform how information is viewed and decisions are made.

Uniquely, Obzervr’s Digital Work Management Solution includes a built web-based Analytics Portal with customisable dashboards and reports:

• Need to drill down to an asset, asset class, or even machine reading level – you can in a single click
• Want to analyse performance from a specific date? Quickly adjust the date range
• Need to isolate valve failure trends across a specific plant line over six months? That’s just a few clicks away.

Most importantly, the value of built-in analytics does not stop at access - it’s what you can do with the data that really counts.

Turning maintenance data chaos into a competitive advantage

As sensors, inspections, and compliance demands grow, so will the volume of maintenance data. Without the right tools, that growth quickly becomes noise.

With Obzervr, data becomes an asset that works as hard as your people do. Our clients are using dashboards to spot failure patterns before breakdowns happen, improve technician efficiency, and have faster, more informed conversations with operations. And importantly, they’re getting back two days of precious time to do higher-value work every week.

All of this adds up to a measurable shift in how maintenance teams work and what they can achieve.

If your team is spending more time finding data than using it, it’s time to change the equation.

Obzervr’s Digital Work Management Solution delivers more than digital transformation of your asset maintenance function, it gives you the clarity, context, and control you need to improve performance, reduce risk, and make every maintenance decision count.

A leading end-to-end fieldwork automation and mobility solution for asset-intensive industries, Obzervr brings maintenance strategies to life and allows teams to manage all aspects of maintenance work in one integrated platform – from identification, planning and management to execution with data capture, review and analysis.

Ready to make sense of your data?

Let’s talk about how Obzervr can help you capture quality data in the field and turn it into easy-to-access insights for smarter, evidence-based decisions and free your maintenance teams to work on higher-value tasks.

Contact our team or book a 30min Discovery Session. During this initial session, we'll:

• Discuss your organisation’s asset management priorities and maintenance challenges
• Provide a tailored overview of Obzervr’s Digital Work Management Solution
• Explain how our 90-day implementation approach makes the digital transformation of maintenance easier and faster.

HEADING TO THE MAINSTREAM CONFERENCE?
See us on booth P2 of the 2025 Mainstream Conference - 28-29 July 2025 in Melbourne, Australia