Arnaud Deziel-Richer on What Really Makes a Maintenance Strategy Work
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In a recent conversation with Arnaud Deziel-Richer, reliability engineer and maintenance strategist, we explored what truly defines a strong maintenance strategy in the industrial world.
For Arnaud, strategy isn’t just about frameworks or buzzwords. It’s about laying the right foundations, avoiding common mistakes, and ensuring that both culture and technology support the execution.
Start from What Already Exists
According to Arnaud, the first step is simple but often overlooked: don’t reinvent the wheel.
“Before designing anything new, I always check if the company already has strategies, templates, or corporate guidelines in place. Sometimes another department has already done part of the work.”
If nothing exists, then it’s about creating standards from scratch, but still using proven references, such as SMRP frameworks. These standards provide a baseline, covering essentials like failure modes, criticality, and nomenclature.
Arnaud stresses that this baseline should remain flexible. Templates, for example, should be adjusted to the company’s maturity level. If a plant isn’t ready for advanced condition monitoring, it makes no sense to include it just for the sake of theory.
Laying the Right Foundations
For Arnaud, everything starts with strong building blocks:
Clear standards that cover the essentials (failure modes, criticality, nomenclature).
A complete asset hierarchy down to the maintainable component, so nothing is left ambiguous.
Realistic, achievable tasks aligned with the actual context.
What Defines a Good Maintenance Strategy Today
So, what does “good” look like in 2025? According to Arnaud, four elements stand out:
- Granularity: tasks must go down to the component level, not just the equipment.
- Objectivity: tasks should clearly define who does what, with which tools, at what interval.
- Failure mode–based design: every task should be tied to a real, defined failure mode.
- Practical alignment: strategies must bridge the gap between theory and day-to-day execution.
Common Mistakes Companies Make
Arnaud sees the same errors repeated across organizations, regardless of industry or size. These mistakes often undermine otherwise good intentions and prevent companies from unlocking the full value of their maintenance strategies.
1. Optimizing at the Wrong Level
Too often, organizations try to optimize preventive maintenance (PM) tasks at the equipment level. While this may seem logical, it lacks the granularity needed to manage reliability effectively.
“The problem is that equipment is made up of multiple maintainable components, each with its own potential failure modes. If you only optimize at the equipment level, you miss the details that actually drive downtime.”
For example, optimizing PMs for a pump as a whole might ignore the fact that most failures happen at the seal or bearing level. Without tasks aimed directly at those components, unplanned downtime remains high, even though the PM schedule looks good on paper.
2. Paper-Only Strategies
Another common issue is when companies invest time and money to create comprehensive strategies but keep them trapped in binders, spreadsheets, or isolated documents.
Arnaud warns that this leads to:
- Siloed data: strategies end up disconnected from actual execution.
- No centralization: technicians can’t easily access the latest version or see updates.
- Lost visibility: leaders can’t track performance against the strategy.
“I often see plants spend months creating what could be a great strategy, but then it just sits on paper. Without digitalization, you can’t centralize, you can’t connect to asset health data, and you can’t evolve.”
The result is frustration: teams know they worked hard to design improvements, but execution doesn’t follow because the tools don’t support it.
3. Forgetting the Balance: People, Process, and Tools
The third mistake is a classic one: focusing too heavily on one dimension while ignoring the others.
- Some organizations invest in advanced software without fixing their processes.
- Others rewrite processes but don’t involve the people who will actually execute them.
- In some cases, culture is left behind, and without buy-in, strategies collapse.
“It’s always about balance. You need the right tools, but you also need processes that make sense and people who believe in them. If one of those three is missing, the strategy doesn’t stick.”
A maintenance strategy is not a static document. It’s a living system that requires alignment between people, process, and technology. Neglect one, and the entire system becomes fragile.
How to Evaluate a Maintenance Strategy
For Arnaud, evaluating a maintenance strategy is less about reviewing documents and more about observing real-world outcomes. The first metric he looks at is unplanned downtime.
“If you already have a strategy in place but still suffer constant unplanned downtime, that’s a red flag. It usually means you’re either missing the right failure modes, or you’ve overloaded your strategy with too many tasks and lost focus on what actually matters.”
Unplanned downtime is a powerful indicator because it directly reflects whether preventive and predictive measures are working. High downtime signals that, somewhere in the strategy:
- Critical failure modes are not being monitored effectively
- Tasks are misaligned with actual risks
- Maintenance resources are spread too thin across non-critical activities
By starting with unplanned downtime, organizations can quickly identify where to focus improvements, whether it’s adjusting tasks, revising failure modes, or refining resource allocation.
Barriers to Digitalization
Digital transformation is another area where Arnaud notices recurring challenges.
“The biggest hurdle is the idea that the CMMS should do everything. Companies want F1-level performance but don’t want to move beyond their NASCAR-level tools.”
For him, expecting one system to cover every need is unrealistic. Traditional CMMS platforms were designed primarily for work order management, scheduling, and cost tracking. They are effective in that role but rarely provide the depth of analytics, predictive capabilities, or real-time insights needed for advanced asset health management.
This mindset creates several barriers to digitalization:
- Overreliance on legacy tools: Organizations try to stretch the limits of their CMMS instead of adopting complementary solutions built for condition monitoring, reliability analysis, or predictive maintenance.
- Fear of complexity: Teams worry that adding new tools will increase training requirements or disrupt daily operations, even if those tools ultimately simplify decision-making.
- Budget misconceptions: Many leaders assume that expanding beyond the CMMS means major costs, when in fact, specialized platforms often deliver ROI through reduced downtime and better asset performance.
- Data silos: By sticking to a single-system approach, companies miss the opportunity to integrate diverse data sources that can dramatically improve maintenance decisions.
Arnaud emphasizes that digitalization is not about replacing the CMMS but about building an ecosystem where each tool plays its role. The CMMS remains the backbone for planning and execution, while advanced solutions handle monitoring, analysis, and prediction.
Why Culture Matters
Technology and processes won’t succeed without cultural alignment.
“If employees don’t believe in the strategy or see the value of preventive maintenance, it’s worthless. You absolutely need buy-in at every level.”
For him, strategy without culture is strategy on paper only.
Engaging Operators and Technicians
The best way to secure that buy-in? Involve the people who do the work. Arnaud insists on consulting operators and technicians during the design phase:
- Ask for their feedback when creating templates. They can point out missing steps, unrealistic intervals, or redundancies that planners often overlook.
- Validate if the tasks make sense in practice. A procedure that looks perfect in a spreadsheet may be impossible to execute safely or efficiently on the shop floor.
- Provide training and context, don’t just hand them a list of tasks. Understanding the why behind a maintenance activity helps transform it from a checkbox into a meaningful contribution to reliability.
“Operators and technicians know the equipment better than anyone. If you ignore their input, your strategy is already set up to fail.”
Arnaud notes that this engagement also creates a positive feedback loop: as technicians see their input respected and acted upon, their willingness to embrace new technologies and practices increases. In turn, this accelerates digital adoption and strengthens the culture of reliability.
Emerging Factors and the Future of Maintenance
Looking ahead, Arnaud believes the content of maintenance strategies will largely stay the same, but the execution will radically evolve. The principles of preventive and predictive maintenance are already well established; what will change is the speed, accuracy, and adaptability with which they are applied.
Key shifts on the horizon include:
- AI and IoT managing the heavy data work. Connected sensors will continuously collect data, while AI will filter noise, detect patterns, and surface only the insights that matter.
- Dynamic strategies powered by AI. Instead of static plans, strategies could be adjusted in real time, based on actual performance and failure trends observed across industries.
- Agility at scale. Companies will move beyond reactive adjustments and adopt predictive, adaptive strategies that evolve automatically with their assets.
“Imagine if AI sees that a specific component type is failing more often across the market. It could automatically adjust your strategy to increase monitoring before you even face the issue.”
This is where maintenance is heading: predictive, agile, and sustainable. Digital ecosystems will allow organizations not only to react faster but also to anticipate disruptions before they occur.
Conclusion: A Pragmatic View of Maintenance
For Arnaud Deziel-Richer, the heart of maintenance strategy hasn’t changed: build strong foundations, make it practical, and ensure culture supports execution.
What is changing is how technology enables these fundamentals. The strategies of the future won’t just be static documents or rigid templates; they will become living, adaptive systems powered by data, IoT, and AI. These tools will automate complexity, accelerate insights, and help organizations anticipate problems before they occur.
Yet, Arnaud insists, technology alone will never be enough. The success of any maintenance program still depends on human expertise, cultural alignment, and frontline engagement. Machines can predict failures, but only people can build trust, foster accountability, and make reliability a shared value across the organization.
In his view, the winning formula is pragmatic: combine the timeless principles of maintenance with the transformative potential of digital tools, always keeping people at the center. That balance is what will define reliability excellence in the years to come.
Raphael Tremblay,
Spartakus Technologies
[email protected]
