Asset Management in Australia: What the Industry’s Best Practitioners Are Focused On Right Now
Asset management in Australia in 2026 looks different to what it did even three years ago. The technology conversation has accelerated. The workforce challenge has become more urgent. The compliance and sustainability landscape has shifted. And the gap between organisations managing their assets well and those struggling to keep up has become harder to ignore.
MAINSTREAM, Australia’s largest asset management conference and research community, surveys hundreds of maintenance, reliability and asset management practitioners each year to understand what is driving performance and what is holding teams back. Their 2026 research, shaped by input from 715 practitioners across asset-intensive industries, identified 12 challenges at the convergence of technical, human and process issues. Together, they paint a clear picture of where the industry stands and what the best teams are doing differently.
MCGlobal has been working across this community for more than 20 years. Here is our perspective on what that research means in practice, and what it takes to be on the right side of each challenge.
The 12 challenges defining asset management in Australia right now as per the “The State of Asset Management in Australia & New Zealand“
1. The Knowledge Exodus
The retirement of experienced maintenance and reliability practitioners is accelerating. Industry data suggests 69 per cent of maintenance professionals are aged 50 or older. The knowledge those technicians carry — about specific assets, specific failure modes, specific workarounds — rarely makes it into the EAM or CMMS system in a form anyone else can find and use.
The organisations handling this well treat work order history, fault codes and technician notes as knowledge assets, not just compliance records. They attach procedure documentation to assets inside their systems. They enforce recording standards consistently. The result is a maintenance operation that builds capability over time rather than losing ground with every departure.
2. Data Abundance Without Insight
Most asset-intensive organisations generate more data than they can act on. SCADA systems, condition monitoring platforms, CMMS records, IoT sensors; yet many maintenance teams report making decisions based on gut feel rather than the data sitting in their systems.
The gap between data and insight is rarely a technology problem. It is a data structure and discipline problem. When asset hierarchies are inconsistent, fault codes are vague and work orders link to areas rather than specific assets, no amount of dashboarding turns that into reliable intelligence. The organisations winning on this challenge start with the data foundation, not the visualisation layer.
3. AI Pilot Purgatory
MAINSTREAM’s research found that 72 per cent of Australian asset-intensive organisations are implementing AI in maintenance and reliability, but only 23 per cent are seeing meaningful returns. That gap has a name: AI Pilot Purgatory. Organisations run proof-of-concept projects that show promise and then stall before reaching operational scale.
The consistent finding from the organisations making AI work is that the technology is not the constraint. The constraint is the organisational and data foundation underneath it. AI tools produce useful output when the training data is clean, consistent and complete. Most organisations are not there yet, and building that foundation is the work that unlocks the rest.
4. The Execution Discipline Gap
There is a widespread gap between what the maintenance plan says and what actually happens at the technician level. PM tasks get deferred. Work orders get closed without meaningful records. Fault codes get left blank. The plan looks reasonable on paper and falls apart in the field.
Closing this gap requires two things working together:
- The right system configuration to make good recording easy and poor recording visible
- The right management practice to enforce standards consistently, rather than only when an audit is approaching. Neither alone is sufficient.
5. The Middle Management Bottleneck
Maintenance and reliability strategy often gets set at the leadership level and executed at the technician level. The middle layer, i.e. supervisors and team leaders, frequently lacks the tools, data and mandate to translate strategy into daily practice. When that layer is not equipped to make good scheduling decisions, enforce recording standards and escalate emerging issues, the gap between strategic intent and operational reality widens.
EAM and CMMS configuration plays a direct role here. Systems that surface the right information to supervisors, upcoming workload, overdue tasks and asset condition trends, enable better decision-making at the point where it matters most.
6. Workforce Wellbeing and People Metrics Gap
The 2026 research highlighted a growing recognition that maintenance team wellbeing is a performance variable, not just an HR consideration. High-pressure reactive environments, skills shortages and an ageing workforce, create conditions that contribute to errors, safety incidents and turnover, all of which carry operational cost.
Organisations that measure people metrics alongside asset metrics, including workload distribution, overtime patterns and near-miss reporting, tend to manage these risks more effectively than those treating workforce health as a separate conversation from asset performance.
7. Strategic Misalignment and the Language Barrier
Maintenance and reliability leaders consistently report difficulty securing investment from finance and executive leadership. The core reason is a language gap: maintenance teams speak in asset condition, PM completion rates and mean time between failures. Whereas, finance and leadership teams speak in risk, return and capital allocation.
The organisations bridging this gap successfully connect maintenance data to business outcomes, translate asset condition into production risk, frame PM investment in terms of avoided downtime cost, and they use their EAM or CMMS to produce the evidence that makes those conversations credible rather than relying on anecdote.
8. System Fragmentation and Data Trust Deficit
Many asset-intensive organisations run maintenance data across multiple disconnected systems: a CMMS for work orders, a separate condition monitoring platform, a different system for safety records, and spreadsheets filling the gaps. The result is that no single system holds a complete picture of any asset’s status.
When data is fragmented, trust erodes. Maintenance reports conflict with operations reports. Finance cannot reconcile maintenance spend against asset performance. Leadership loses confidence in the numbers. The organisations with high data trust tend to have fewer systems, better integrated, with clear ownership of each data element.
9. The Apprenticeship and Training Pipeline Crisis
The skilled trades pipeline feeding asset-intensive industries is under significant pressure. Fewer young people are entering maintenance and reliability roles. Those who do often face a steep learning curve in environments where institutional knowledge is poorly documented and mentoring capacity is stretched.
This challenge connects directly to how EAM and CMMS systems are configured. When systems surface the right procedure, the right asset history and the right guidance to a technician at the point of need, they accelerate capability development for newer team members. When systems are difficult to use or poorly maintained, they add to the burden rather than reducing it.
10. Safety, Risk and Asset Management Silos
Safety management and asset management are frequently run as separate functions: different teams, different systems, different reporting lines. Yet asset failures are among the largest sources of workplace safety incidents. When maintenance records, safety observation data and risk assessments live in separate systems without connection, the full picture of asset-related safety risk is never visible to anyone.
The organisations managing this well have integrated safety checkpoints, isolation procedures and permit-to-work requirements directly into their maintenance workflows as a built-in part of work orders.
11. Decarbonisation and the Asset Transition Challenge
The transition to lower-carbon operations is not just an energy procurement question. It is an asset management question. Organisations across mining, utilities, manufacturing and renewables face decisions about which assets to retire, which to modify, and how to manage the performance of new asset classes that their maintenance teams may not have experience with.
Reliable asset data underpins these decisions. Lifecycle cost analysis, condition trends and energy consumption data at the asset level are what turn decarbonisation strategy from aspiration into an operationally grounded plan. Organisations with strong asset data governance are better positioned to navigate this transition than those making capital decisions on incomplete information.
12. Shutdown and Turnaround Excellence
Planned shutdowns and major turnarounds remain one of the highest-risk, highest-cost events in asset-intensive operations. Scope creep, poor work pack preparation and inadequate parts planning consistently drive cost and schedule overruns. Yet shutdowns also represent the primary window for major maintenance and capital work that cannot happen during normal operations.
The organisations executing shutdowns well do the preparation work rigorously: work packs developed well in advance, parts reserved in the system, contractor scopes defined clearly, and a post-shutdown review process that captures lessons for next time. EAM systems that support shutdown planning as a distinct workflow provide significant advantage here.
What this means for asset management teams in Australia
The 12 challenges in MAINSTREAM’s 2026 research are not independent problems. They connect and compound. Data that cannot be trusted makes AI investment futile. A workforce that is ageing and under-resourced accelerates knowledge loss. Systems that are fragmented make the language barrier between maintenance and leadership harder to bridge.
The organisations performing well across these challenges tend to share a common characteristic: they treat their EAM or CMMS system as the operational backbone of the maintenance function, not a record-keeping obligation. They invest in configuration and data discipline, not just in new technology. And they connect asset management practice to business outcomes in a language that leadership can act on.
MCGlobal has been working alongside Australian asset-intensive organisations through exactly these challenges for more than 20 years. We were at MAINSTREAM Melbourne 2026 as exhibitors, which gave us a direct view of where the most urgent conversations are happening across the industry right now.
If any of the 12 challenges in this blog reflect issues your team is navigating, we would welcome the conversation. Talk to us about where your asset management practice stands against these benchmarks.
