A reliability engineer is asked to produce a bad actor list for 240 pumping stations before the November investment panel. The query runs in five seconds and returns almost nothing that can be defended in the room: of the corrective work orders raised on the highest-criticality pumps over three years, roughly six in ten were executed by a framework contractor, and on those records the problem, cause and remedy fields are empty, actual labour appears as a single day rate line, and a third carry the parent location as the asset instead of the pump (figures illustrative). Nothing in the configuration is broken. The maintenance contract that bought the work never asked for the data, so the asset record does not hold it. That framework goes back out to tender in eight weeks, which makes this a procurement decision.
Plant Engineering’s 2021 maintenance study found that 88% of facilities outsource some or all of their maintenance operations, with the average facility outsourcing 23% of them. On an estate at that average, close to a quarter of everything done to the plant is recorded by an organisation whose obligations sit in a commercial schedule written around response times, rates and safety documentation.
Transcription decides which job sheet fields survive
The artefact that crosses the boundary is a returned job sheet, usually a PDF or a photographed carbon copy, typed into IBM Maximo Manage by a client coordinator two or three days later.
| The job sheet carries | The asset record needs | Where it belongs in Maximo Manage |
|---|---|---|
| Site name and plant description in free text | The maintainable item as ASSETNUM | Asset field on the work order |
| ”Attended, made safe, returned to service” | Problem, cause and remedy from the asset’s failure class | Failure Reporting tab |
| One visit line at a day rate | Actual hours by craft, priced from the rate schedule | Actuals, labour, as outside labour with vendor and contract |
| ”Seal kit and gasket fitted, van stock” | Item numbers issued, or non-stocked line detail | Actuals, materials |
| Attendance date | Downtime start and finish | Report Downtime against the asset |
A coordinator working through forty sheets on a Friday afternoon copies free text and attendance dates accurately, and cannot diagnose a cause code from a sentence written by someone else on Tuesday, so the coded fields go in blank or as the first value in the list. Paper and delay cause that loss: the same fields are enforceable the moment the person who did the work is the person who closes the record.
Four clauses change what lands on the asset record
The place to fix this is the data schedule attached to the maintenance contract, and it is four clauses long.
- The completion route. Name the system of record in the contract, and the mechanism by which the contractor writes to it. Work completed in the contractor’s own system and summarised on a PDF is a different commercial product from work completed in the client’s work order.
- Data acceptance criteria. List the fields that must be present for a work order to count as complete: asset, actual start and finish, actual hours by craft, problem, cause and remedy on corrective work types, materials, and downtime where the asset stopped. Bind that list to the payment application, not to a monthly service review.
- A client-owned code list. The contractor codes against the client’s failure hierarchy, issued at mobilisation and kept short. Fifteen causes per equipment class is a list a fitter can use at 02:00; a supplier’s own taxonomy produces history that will not roll up across the fleet. Where the estate reports to a standard, ISO 14224 aligned at class and problem level gives both sides a common vocabulary without importing the whole standard.
- A rate schedule that maps to crafts and job plans. Labor Rate Contracts in Maximo Manage hold craft and skill rates for a vendor, and labour transactions price from them. Where the schedule is a flat visit rate, planned hours on the job plan and actual hours on the work order cannot be compared, and the estimating library never improves.
Completion routes decide who types the record
Three routes exist, and the choice belongs to the asset management function, not to IT.
Contractor users working directly in Maximo Manage or Maximo Mobile preserve the most data: the coded fields are entered by the person holding the spanner. That route needs named accounts, a security group with data restrictions so a contractor sees only work on their own contract, and a device policy that survives a substation with no signal. The supplier’s training cost appears in their rate.
An inbound integration from the contractor’s own field service system suits high-volume framework providers who have already tooled their crews. The mechanism is an enterprise service against the work order object structure, with the mandatory field set enforced as validation on the inbound message, so a return that omits a cause code is rejected at the interface. Both sides name an owner for message failures, because those errors arrive during the busiest week of the year.
Client-side transcription is the third route, and the default when no clause specifies otherwise. It is defensible for low-criticality reactive work and indefensible for assets that appear in a capital case.
Payment is the control that survives a busy month
The data gate belongs on the money, because payment runs every month whether or not the service review does.
In Maximo Manage, Labor Options in the Organizations application holds separate checkboxes for automatically approving inside and outside labour transactions. Leave outside labour off automatic approval and every contractor labour line has to be approved in the Labor Reporting application before it reaches the cost figures: unapproved hours stay out of the View Costs dialog on the work order, and the Approved? checkbox on the Actuals labour row shows the state line by line. The person ticking it is confirming that hours, craft and contract reference match the work order.
Since the contract enhancements in Maximo 6, the contract reference sits on the work order plan and actuals and on the labour transaction, and those rates carry into the invoice raised from Labor Reporting, so the commercial trail runs through the same record the data acceptance criteria apply to. Closure can carry the same discipline through an escalation that moves completed work orders to closed only where actuals and failure codes are present, the pattern behind closing work orders on a data gate instead of on assignment completion.
Add one reporting line to the contract: monthly field completeness by contractor and work type, expressed as the percentage of completed corrective work orders meeting the mandatory set, with a sample of twenty records checked by the contract manager. That figure gives the client something to attach a service credit or retention release to, and the supplier a target to be held to at a review.
Those two artefacts, the contract schedule and the completeness report, also answer an audit. Clause 8.3 of ISO 55001:2024 was rewritten and renamed “Externally provided processes, products, technologies and services”, and the standard now carries separate requirements on data and information (7.6) and knowledge (7.7). An assessor asking how externally provided maintenance is controlled will want both documents, and a monthly completeness figure is stronger evidence than a procedure note.
What stays hard
Subcontracting tiers dilute the clause. The crew on site may sit two contracts below the framework holder, and data obligations flow down only where each subcontract carries them.
Contractors price what the tender asks for. Ten extra minutes per job for coded close-out appears in the rate, and a framework awarded on lowest rate with the data schedule expected free will show compliance in the first quarter and drift by the third.
History cannot be retrofitted. Comparable failure frequency starts on the date coding is enforced, so a bad actor list built in year one of a framework covers year one only. Retendering resets the same clock, because a new provider needs a mobilisation period before their returns are usable.
Emergency call-outs stay thinly coded. The mandatory set has to be completable on a phone, in the rain, at the end of a twelve-hour shift, which means five fields rather than fifteen.
The position
Asset data quality on contracted work is set at tender, by people who mostly do not attend the reliability review. Operators who want a failure history that funds capital decisions should price the data schedule as a deliverable in the next framework, name the acceptance test in the contract, and approve payment applications against the work order rather than against the job sheet. The alternative is paying for maintenance twice: once for the work, and again for the reconstruction of what was done, every time an investment case needs evidence that the pump has failed the same way four times. The tender is the cheapest place to make that choice, and it is open for a few weeks every few years.
Sources
- Plant Engineering: The maintenance function, like manufacturing itself, is a rapidly changing environment
- ISO/TC 251: ISO 55001:2024 updated guidance on the asset management system
- IBM Support: A purchase order is required for approval, when approving an outside labour transaction
- IBM Support: Show all labour actuals on the View Costs dialog in work orders