When managing physical assets—whether they’re pipelines, pumps, trains, boilers, generators, you name it! —one of the most pressing questions is: What’s their current condition? Understanding asset health is FOUNDATIONAL to effective maintenance planning, risk management, and cost optimization. That’s where Maximo Health comes in.
Here at Interloc, we’re super excited about the new Maximo Health. It comes with Maximo MAS 8 and 9 as part of the new “application suite” (the “AS” in “MAS”). In the past this has been referred to as “Asset Health Insights” and you may even hear it referred to as “Maximo Asset Health”, but the new official name is Maximo Health. This new module is fully integrated with Maximo Manage (in case you’re still on an older version of Maximo, “Manage” in MAS 8/9 is the new name for the Maximo we’ve all come to know and love over the years). We’ve now completed two Health implementation projects and working on a third. We love the potential we see in Health to greatly cut costs and, very importantly, downtime, which can severely affect your bottom line.
In this blog post, I want to give you an overview of what Maximo Health is, why it matters, and how it can help your organization move toward more proactive and informed asset management. Consider this your introduction to the tools, concepts, and benefits of Health. But just a quick note, I’ll be leaving out screen shots of Health since my colleague Khalid included lots of screen shots in his Health post back in October. You can see his entry here if you’d like to check out what Maximo Health looks like.
What Is Maximo Health?
Just what is Maximo Health? At its core, Health leverages data to provide a snapshot of the current state of your assets. It combines information from various sources—like asset age, expected life, maintenance history, sensor data, condition monitoring, and even external factors such as weather forecasts or regulatory requirements if you want—and boils it down to a health score.
This score is a single, easily interpretable value that helps you quickly assess which assets are running smoothly and which might be at risk of failure. And for organizations with thousands (or even millions) of assets, that kind of visibility is HUGE.
But it doesn’t stop there. Maximo Health also enables users to identify trends, prioritize maintenance tasks, and justify investment decisions. Essentially, it’s the Elmers glue between operations, maintenance, and strategy.
Why Asset Health Matters
Health tools in Maximo MAS 8 and 9 bridge the gap between reactive and proactive asset management. For years, many organizations relied on reactive maintenance—fixing assets only after they failed—or periodic preventive maintenance based on manufacturer recommendations, even if those schedules didn’t align with the actual conditions of the assets. Do you have a regularly scheduled review to tighten up the PM schedules of aging assets? For most of you reading this, I’m gonna take a wild guess and go with a NO on that.
So these approaches can lead to inefficiencies, from unexpected downtime to wasted resources on unnecessary maintenance.
Maximo Health, by contrast, empowers you to:
How Maximo Calculates Asset Health
One of the most exciting features of Maximo Health is how customizable it is. The system allows organizations to tailor their health scoring models to align with their specific needs and priorities.
Here’s a high-level breakdown of how it works:
1. Scoring Groups
Assets are often grouped by type, function, or criticality. For example, you might have one scoring group for boilers and another for generators. Each type of asset, defined as a scoring group, can have its own scoring model based on the data most relevant to those types of assets.
2. Scores
I’ve mentioned the Health score several times, and indeed that is the score we are typically most interested in. But there are other scores as well that are typically added to the scoring groups. For example, there is a Criticality score that can be a very simple calculation based on your asset’s priority field value. The Risk score in Maximo Health typically reflects the likelihood of asset failure or operational disruption. MAS includes a good out-of-box risk contributor based on the asset’s criticality and its current health score, but your risk score can be customized to what you want.
3. Contributors
These are the factors that influence an asset’s health score. Contributors can include things like:
4. Weighting and Aggregation
Once you’ve defined your contributors, Maximo lets you assign weights to them based on their importance. For example, the asset’s age might account for 50% of an asset’s health score, while work order history counts for 30% and a run hours meter counts for 20%. The system then combines these into a single score.
5. Health Indicators
Maximo provides a color-coded dashboard to display health indicators: green for healthy, yellow for caution, and red for assets requiring immediate attention.
This flexible framework means you’re not locked into a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, you can continuously refine your scoring models as your understanding of asset performance evolves. For example, want to change the weighting of your health score on a scoring group to give work order aging 10% more and asset age 10% less? This can be done within minutes.
Integrating Health with Maximo’s Ecosystem
I’ve already mentioned how Health is seamlessly integrated with your assets in Manage. But one of the biggest strengths of Maximo Health is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other modules and tools in the new Maximo Application Suite, such as:
This integration allows you to move beyond just monitoring health and toward acting on it. For example, if an asset’s health score drops below a certain threshold, we can configure an escalation in Manage to alert you, we can create an automation script to automatically generate a work order, or both!
Health in Action: A Simple Example
Let’s say your organization manages a fleet of vehicles, and one of your contributors is oil analysis. The system detects that the oil in one of your trucks contains high levels of contaminants, which lowers its health score from 85 (healthy) to 65 (caution).
Because of this drop, you see the asset score turn yellow and you generate a work order for an oil change, then flag the truck for further inspection. By catching the issue early, you avoided engine damage that could have taken the truck out of service for weeks.
Now multiply this example across your entire fleet, and you start to see the value of having a data-driven approach to the health of your assets.
Getting Started with Maximo Health
Implementing Maximo Health for your assets can feel overwhelming at first, especially if your organization is still heavily reliant on reactive maintenance. But the good news is, you don’t have to do it all at once.
Why not just start with your most critical assets? Focus on the equipment that has the highest impact.
Define your scoring models…this means working with your stakeholders to identify the contributors that matter most for the asset types.
Leverage your existing data: will it take a long time to enter all the installation dates and the manufacturer-supplied expected life for your assets that you haven’t entered already? That’s ok! You have work orders, right? You can get MTBF, work order aging, and a count of CM work orders from that existing data. You can add the asset age contributors once you have the data in place.
Next Steps
We hope to bring you more blog entries about Maximo Health in the future.
So, what’s your next step in the journey toward better asset health? Of course, Interloc is well-equipped to help you implement Health. Click here to contact us to start your asset health journey.
The key takeaway: Maximo Health isn’t just about numbers on a dashboard. It’s about enabling better decisions, reducing risk, and maximizing value. With the right approach, this awesome tool can transform how you manage your assets and give your team the confidence to tackle challenges head-on.
We hope to talk to you soon about how you can take advantage of Maximo Health. But first things first! Remember that the Health module comes with MAS 8/9. If you’re not on MAS 8/9 yet, what are you waiting for?!