Water and wastewater utilities depend on assets that rarely get a break. Pumps, lift stations, blowers, and treatment systems are expected to run continuously, often in environments that accelerate wear and failure.
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Most utilities already have maintenance programs in place. The challenge is not whether maintenance is happening but whether the right maintenance is being done at the right time.
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Rather than building maintenance programs from scratch or relying on legacy schedules, Reliability Strategies provides a structured, data-driven, and expert-built foundation based on how assets fail and what actions prevent those failures.

What Reliability Strategies Is in Maximo

Reliability Strategies is a capability within Maximo Manage that brings reliability-centered maintenance directly into the system. At its core is a strategy library built on RCM and FMEA principles. It includes more than 800 asset types and over 50,000 failure modes, along with recommended mitigation activities tied to each failure scenario. Users can explore how specific assets fail, review recommended actions, and then translate those actions directly into maintenance plans inside Maximo. What makes it valuable is not just the depth of the content but how easily it connects to execution.

What Users Actually Do in the Application

Reliability Strategies is not just a reference library. It is designed to be used directly within Maximo.
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A typical workflow includes:

• Selecting an asset type and configuration
• Reviewing failure modes associated with that asset
• Evaluating recommended mitigation activities
• Comparing how effective different tasks are at preventing failure
• Converting selected activities into job plans and PM records
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This is where the value becomes practical. Instead of asking “what PM should we create,” users are asking:

• Which failure modes matter most
• Which activities best mitigate those failures
• How those activities should be implemented in Maximo
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Once those decisions are made, the strategy is pushed into execution. That includes:

• Building job plans with detailed tasks and labor requirements
• Generating preventive maintenance schedules
• Aligning maintenance with time-based, meter-based, or condition-based triggers
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From that point forward, it behaves like any other part of Maximo work management. The difference is that the logic behind it is structured and traceable.

How Reliability Strategies Connects to Work Management

One of the biggest strengths of this capability is how tightly it integrates with the rest of Maximo. Reliability Strategies does not live in isolation but feeds directly into how work is planned and executed.
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At a high level, the flow is straightforward:

• Strategy defines failure modes and mitigation activities
• Activities are converted into job plans
• Job plans drive preventive maintenance records
• Preventive maintenance generates work orders
• Work execution provides feedback for refinement
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This connection matters. It ensures that reliability decisions are not just documented, but actually carried through into field work.
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For utilities, this is often where the gap exists. Strategies are defined, but execution does not always follow. This closes that gap.

What Makes Reliability Strategies Different

Traditional reliability-centered maintenance studies are often time-intensive and resource-heavy. They require teams to identify asset functions, define failure modes, assess risk, and determine maintenance actions through workshops and analysis. Reliability Strategies stands apart because it is not solely a planning tool. It links failure modes to maintenance actions, and those actions flow through the system into real work.
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Instead of building everything from scratch, organizations begin with a prebuilt library of failure modes and mitigation activities. This allows teams to:

• Accelerate the development of maintenance strategies
• Focus on validating and refining rather than creating from zero
• Apply consistent logic across asset classes and sites
• Reduce reliance on spreadsheets and disconnected documentation

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From a system perspective, it connects several core components:

• Strategy content defining asset types, failure modes, and mitigation activities
• JOBPLAN for detailed task execution
• PM for scheduling and recurrence
• WORKORDER for execution and feedback
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Teams can spend less time defining basic failure scenarios and more time adapting strategies to real operating conditions. Because these pieces are connected, Maximo supports a continuous loop where strategies are defined, executed, and refined over time. For utilities managing large asset populations, this difference is significant. It allows reliability practices to scale without requiring a full RCM study for every asset type.

Why This Matters for Water and Wastewater Utilities

Utilities tend to manage large numbers of similar assets, but those assets rarely behave the same way. A pump in one part of the network may be exposed to different loading conditions, debris, or environmental factors than the same model elsewhere. Over time, those differences show up in failure patterns, but traditional maintenance programs do not always reflect that.
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Reliability Strategies gives utilities a way to standardize without oversimplifying. Instead of applying the same PM schedule everywhere, maintenance can be built around known failure behavior and adjusted based on real operating conditions. That creates a more balanced approach where effort is focused on the assets and risks that matter most.

How Utilities Analyze and Improve Reliability Strategies

Once strategies are in place, the focus shifts to performance. Utilities are not just asking whether work is being completed but if the existing strategy is working. For water and wastewater utilities, reliability is tied directly to service delivery and regulatory compliance.
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Maximo makes tracing that possible by tying strategy data directly to execution data. Teams can review:

• Which failure modes continue to appear despite defined maintenance
• Whether tasks are being performed at the right frequency
• How inspection and condition data align with expectations
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This type of analysis helps identify where strategies need to be adjusted. The key is that decisions are based on actual performance and not general assumptions based on outdated processes.

Where Risk and Prioritization Fit In

A key part of reliability-centered maintenance is understanding not just how assets fail but which failures matter most. Within Reliability Strategies, this is supported through structured risk and prioritization concepts such as Risk Priority Number (RPN). These approaches help evaluate:

• The likelihood of a failure occurring
• The impact of that failure on operations, safety, or compliance
• The ability to detect the failure before it happens
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This allows maintenance teams to focus on the most critical risks rather than treating all assets equally.

In a water or wastewater environment, this is especially important. A failure at a critical pump station or treatment process can have very different consequences than a failure in a lower-risk part of the network. By incorporating risk into strategy design, utilities can:

• Prioritize high-impact assets and failure modes
• Align maintenance effort with operational risk
• Make more informed decisions about where to invest time and resources

Practical Use Case: Standardizing Pump Maintenance Across a Utility Network

Consider a water utility managing hundreds of pumps across treatment plants and distribution systems. Historically, maintenance has been based on fixed schedules. Every pump is inspected and serviced at the same interval, regardless of how it operates or where it is located. The result is predictable work but not always effective maintenance.
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With Reliability Strategies, the utility takes a different approach.
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They start by reviewing pump-related asset types in the strategy library and looking at the associated failure modes. These might include wear, cavitation, or seal-related issues, each with recommended mitigation activities.

From there, they build maintenance strategies that reflect their actual conditions. Those strategies are converted into job plans and preventive maintenance records, then applied across similar assets where they begin to see differences emerge. Some locations require more frequent attention, while others can be maintained less aggressively. The strategy evolves based on real-time data and visibility. The outcome is a maintenance program that better matches how the assets actually behave.
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For example, for a centrifugal pump, a failure mode such as seal degradation may include a mitigation activity like:

• Perform visual inspection for leakage and wear
• Check vibration levels against defined thresholds
• Verify seal integrity and alignment
• Replace seal if condition exceeds acceptable limits

In Maximo, this activity can be:

• Converted into a JOBPLAN with defined tasks, labor, and materials
• Scheduled through a PM based on time, meter, or condition triggers
• Executed as a WORKORDER with results captured for future analysis

This ensures that maintenance tasks are not generic. They are directly tied to a known failure mode and designed to either prevent or detect that failure before it leads to downtime.

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Reliability Strategies provides a way to bring structure to that challenge. It gives organizations a starting point based on proven failure data, then allows them to adapt and refine that approach over time. It provides a structured understanding of how assets fail and building maintenance programs around that information. For water utilities, this means fewer surprises, better use of resources, and a clearer connection between strategy and execution.