In this op-ed, Pierre-Alexandre Quinault, Head of International Development, Fives Maintenance explains that on the industrial fleets they audit, this ceiling rarely comes down to the technical skills of the teams. It comes down to what the maintenance contract measures.
Maintenance contracts should not be measured by the number of interventions carried out, but by how equipment performance evolves. On complex production assets, an in-house team usually plateaus at an availability rate of 85 to 88%. Under a performance-based contract, the committed level stands at 95 to 98%, and holds for the full term of the contract, generally three to five years.
Those ten points never appear on an invoice. They are scattered across unrecorded micro-stoppages, waits for spare parts, corrective work that keeps pushing preventive maintenance back, and restarts that eat up half a day. The plant organises itself around them and ends up treating them as normal.
Outside Europe, Industrial Maintenance Is Still Bought by the Hour
In these markets, outsourced maintenance is still purchased in hours, interventions and resources deployed. The hourly rate shapes how bids are compared and decides who wins. This is the main obstacle to the growth of performance-based contracts, and it is cultural before it is technical.
A service bought by the hour can be compared in a single meeting. Three bids, three rate cards, one price gap. Yet the time spent in front of a machine says nothing about whether it will still be producing next month, or whether the next stoppage will last twenty minutes or two days.
A performance-based contract shifts what is being bought. The provider no longer commits to the resources it deploys, but to a contractual availability rate and to equipment reliability, measured against shared indicators. Under this type of contract, performance targets are met 90 to 95% of the time on average, compared with 50 to 60% for an in-house organisation.
Outdated Routines and Poorly Ranked Criticality Set the Ceiling
Unplanned downtime often rises despite a high volume of preventive work. Three causes come up again and again on the sites we audit: outdated maintenance routines, failures poorly logged in the CMMS, and equipment poorly ranked by criticality.
Preventive maintenance then gets carried out on the wrong equipment, at the wrong time. Indicators pile up without leading to any decision. A CMMS can hold thousands of data points without holding a single answer.
The Maturity Audit Opens the Contract, It Is Not a Precondition for It
The objection comes up every time in discussions outside Europe. How can anyone commit to an availability rate when nobody on site knows what it is?
That is precisely the starting point. A performance-based contract opens with a maturity audit. The audit assesses the actual condition of the fleet and ranks equipment by criticality. It rebuilds failure histories, runs an FMECA on sensitive equipment, measures MTBF and MTTR, and checks the reliability of OEE records along with the state of the CMMS and the maintenance routines.
Failure histories, CMMS data and feedback from the field are then cross-referenced to revise the maintenance plan and make the most critical equipment more reliable. Teams focus their efforts on the tasks that genuinely reduce the risk of failure. The committed level is built on these findings, not ahead of them. On complex assets, moving from 85-88% to 95-98% takes two to six months, depending on how complex the equipment is.
The gap translates directly into capacity. Ten points of availability recovered on a fleet of CNC machining centres free up the equivalent of around 30% additional operational capacity, without buying a single machine.
What an Audit Brings to Light
A recent maturity audit shows what this phase can reveal. On an industrial site that handled its maintenance in-house, the entire organisation rested on a single manager. His absence for six months was enough. Preventive work slipped, emergencies swallowed the teams, and nobody was left to decide between two interventions. Technical skills were not the issue. Planning, equipment knowledge and management all lived in one person’s head, and nothing was written down.
A performance-based contract rules out this kind of set-up. Routines are documented and standardised, criticality is decided in advance, and operational continuity is ensured by a team rather than by one man.
Holding 95% for Five Years Takes Maintenance Engineering
Committing to a fleet’s availability over several years means taking on part of the client’s industrial risk. Few players have the size and organisation to do so, and in most countries the maintenance market remains highly fragmented.
Such a commitment draws on several disciplines at once. A maintenance strategy defined equipment by equipment. Spare parts management aligned with criticality. Preventive maintenance scheduling that fits the production plan. Systematic failure analysis, and maintenance technicians trained in the technologies on site.
Technology does not do the maintenance. It helps maintenance technicians make better decisions. Monitoring and condition-based maintenance detect drifts, provided the data is reliable and contextualised. Predictive maintenance, for its part, is no substitute for quality monitoring, reliable data or field expertise: it only becomes relevant once those fundamentals are in place.
The Need Is Already There, Purchasing Practices Will Follow
Where a culture of commitment has taken hold, manufacturers find service providers able to deliver on it. Where technical skills are plentiful, purchasing departments still think in hourly rates and compare rate cards.
This gap explains why the model now established with European manufacturers cannot be transposed as is. It will advance at the pace of local purchasing practices and of how the market becomes structured.
The need, however, will not wait. Improving industrial performance over the long term means bringing methods, data and field expertise together. Ten points of availability remain the cheapest resource in the plant. Provided you are willing to measure them.
