From Firefighting to Foresight: Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Asset Management

Responding to Mainstream’s 2025 Asset Management Report

The Challenge: Firefighting Still Feels Like Progress

The 2025 Mainstream report highlights a sobering truth: many organisations continue to operate in reactive mode – solving today’s problems at the expense of long-term performance. In many teams, the "firefighting" culture is not only accepted, it's rewarded. When urgent breakdowns are resolved, the applause is immediate. When planned maintenance prevents failure, the impact is often invisible.

This cycle is reinforced by a lack of meaningful asset data. There’s either too much of it – unstructured and siloed – or too little in the right format to guide decisions. Teams are bombarded with sensor feeds, work order logs, and compliance requirements, yet still feel unclear on what’s critical, what’s failing, and where to focus.

Worse still, data often lives in disconnected systems. IT and operational technology (OT) remain siloed, dashboards are underused or misunderstood, and there’s no shared baseline for asset performance. This results in inefficient resourcing, poor morale, and decisions made on instinct rather than insight.

The Impact: High Downtime, Poor Prioritisation, and Wasted Effort

Operating reactively comes at a high cost:

• High downtime from unexpected failures strains both operations and budgets.

• Resources are allocated inefficiently, pulled into urgent issues instead of high-risk, high-impact tasks.

• Confusion over priorities leads to duplicated work, neglected assets, and a rising backlog.

• Failure to justify investment in replacements or renewals erodes leadership confidence.

• Morale declines as teams feel reactive, not proactive – constantly catching up rather than getting ahead.

And while organisations may claim to be “data-rich,” they remain insight-poor. Having a dashboard isn’t the same as understanding what the data means – or knowing what action to take next.

Secora’s Response: Make Insight the Goal – Not Just the Interface

At Secora, we work with clients who want to break out of reactive cycles and move toward predictive, performance-based asset management. We help make the shift not through complexity, but through clarity.

1. Visualise the Cost of Reactivity

By helping clients introduce simple dashboards that highlight the ratio of reactive to planned maintenance, we help make performance visible and trackable. This is not about flooding users with metrics – it’s about drawing a clear line between action and outcome. Seeing how much effort goes into fire drills vs planned tasks creates internal accountability and shifts mindsets.

2. Use Trends to Anticipate Failure

By working with the data already in your EAM or CMMS systems – work order codes, fault types, response times – we identify patterns in failures. These insights are used to forecast asset failure likelihood, support better scheduling, and reduce unplanned outages. The goal isn’t complexity, it’s visibility.

3. Embed Preventive Routines into the AMP

We help teams move from “fix-what-breaks” to “maintain-to-avoid-failure.” This means embedding preventive routines into the Asset Management Plan (AMP), informed by real asset performance and usage history. These routines evolve with the data and are tied to outcome-based KPIs, not arbitrary time intervals.

4. Integrate Siloed Systems for a Single Source of Truth

We support clients in consolidating sensor feeds, inspection data, and maintenance records into an Asset Health platform that integrates with existing tools. No need to rip and replace, just connect and streamline. Once this data is unified, decision-support tools can highlight risk, justify investment, and guide planning priorities.

5. Build Capability – Not Just Tools

We train teams to use data with confidence – to interpret dashboards, question trends, and use insights in their day-to-day decision-making. A living AMP becomes more than a document; it becomes a reference point and planning guide embedded in operational rhythm.

Why It Matters Now

The longer an organisation stays reactive, the harder it becomes to climb out. Work backlogs grow. Asset health declines. Capital decisions stall. Meanwhile, newer competitors and evolving expectations (including ESG and digital performance) raise the bar.

But shifting away from firefighting doesn’t require a big transformation. It starts with showing teams what the data is saying – in simple terms – and helping them use it to plan, not just respond.

Looking Ahead

In our next article, we’ll examine how workforce capability and leadership continuity shape asset strategy – and how to build systems that don’t fall apart when key people move on.

Let’s Talk

If you’re ready to move beyond reactive maintenance and turn your data into direction – Secora can help. Let’s design routines, tools, and AMPs that help your team shift from firefighting to foresight.