Within five years, the value from equipment and service data will exceed the value of equipment itself, according to a new Forrester Consulting study, commissioned by ServiceMax.

Forty one percent of organizations say they don’t know if they are retiring equipment prematurely, and a lack of service data insight means they have no knowledge of how much capacity remains in their capital assets.

The Forrester Consulting study, From Grease To Code: What Drives Digital Service Transformation, surveyed 675 digital transformation decision makers across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, that are currently undergoing or have already completed significant portions of their digital transformation.

Respondents are in infrastructure roles at global industrial enterprises, including the manufacturing, healthcare, utilities and telecommunications industries.

“Firms struggle with understanding the lifetime of their equipment and how to improve it. As a result, they face high maintenance costs and unplanned downtime that affects their revenue and customer experience,” said Mark Homer, Senior VP of Global Customer Transformation at ServiceMax. “Most have high maintenance and operating equipment costs, as well as a lack of knowledge on how to reduce these costs. More than half of organizations surveyed say unplanned downtime is becoming a bigger issue, which means this directly impacts both customer experience and revenue.”

While the average lifespan of equipment is under ten years for most companies, eighty percent of firms say they need better insight to extend the life of their equipment, and close to seventy percent say extending equipment life would result in financial gains.
“There’s an assumption that information about a capital asset resides in the company ERP system, but that’s a record of business transactions of the equipment “as sold”, which doesn’t describe what the equipment looks like today,” added Homer. “Parts get replaced, some after-market components get added along with multiple software upgrades and patches over time. Accurate data about ‘equipment as-maintained’ is critically important. It not only enables companies to see how much longer they can ‘sweat’ their assets, but also ensures they’re dispatching the right technicians, with the proper tools, and the most likely needed parts to determine the correct diagnosis and solve equipment problems. In short, you need a system of record for equipment as it is maintained to prevent downtime, lost revenue, negative customer experiences, and prevent expensive and unnecessary premature retirement of capital assets.”