The Electra team had a fantastic two days at the UK & Ireland Maximo User Group at IBM York Road, London. Maximo Project Manager Donna McWilliams shares her summary and highlights from the event.
Day 1 focused on MAS Unlocked, showcasing demos, real-life use cases, and a glimpse into the art of the possible with MAS. The sessions covered everything from field service improvements to AI, with plenty of inspiration for what’s achievable now and in the near future. That was definitely a key theme of the event.
Day 1 – MAS Unlocked
Field Service Management (FSM):
A strong start with how FSM can improve planning, dispatching, productivity, and data quality, while reducing manual effort. A useful reminder of the power of fully optimising mobile capabilities.
Maximo Monitor, Health & Predict:
We walked through the full data journey – connecting sensors, preparing and visualising data, identifying issues, and taking action. Predictive modelling showed how grouped data, trained models, and scheduled insights can transform operations.
Grounded AI in Practice:
A standout session. We explored the hallucination problem with AI (very interesting!), the challenge of “dark enterprise” data behind firewalls and saw an impressive demo of AI acting like a skilled consultant or technician assistant.
Reliability Strategies:
We saw a demo of how Maximo can enhance failure reporting and generate pre-populated job plans, plus help with FMEA using GenAI recommendations – a big step for long-term reliability planning.
Maximo Visual Inspection:
Image-based inspections, faster training with visual prompting, and creative use cases from industrial assets to elephant monitoring!! Very cool!
Mobility for MAS:
Live demos comparing Maximo Mobile, Fingertip, and Opqo – each strong in different ways, especially around offline capability, inspections, GIS, and usability.
Day 2 – User Group Case Studies
We kicked off with the usual packed schedule of user stories in the morning before moving on to the Table Topics in the afternoon.
Toyota:
Shared their journey to rebuild a consistent, best-practice Maximo approach. Success came from listening to users, focusing on asset hierarchy and data quality, simplifying processes, and strong leadership engagement.
Stena Drilling:
Moved from six separate Maximo instances to one central MAS in the cloud – with almost no downtime. An award-winning project with a clear future roadmap.
Southern Water:
Early in their Maximo journey but already seeing wins thanks to strong engagement, on-site presence, face-to-face training, and making mobile tools simple for their highly field-based workforce.
Transport for London:
Focused on user adoption and future strategy. Richard Thomas’s reflection summed up the event perfectly: “The past two days have blown my mind as to what the art of the possible is”.
Key Takeaways
Across every session, the themes were clear:
- Strong strategy and direction is critical
- Early user engagement is key for success
- Maximo is a continued evolution, not one-time projects
- The User Group is essential for sharing learning and shaping the future Maximo roadmap
Next event: Dundee, May 2026 — it booked out fast this year, so keep an eye out for announcements.