How Maintenance & Reliability Determines Whether Mergers & Acquisitions Deliver Their Promised Value

Global mergers and acquisitions reached a record $2.8 trillion during the first half of 2026, driven by companies pursuing larger, more strategic combinations.1  The financial logic behind these transactions is straightforward: the combined organization should create more value than the two companies operating independently.

On paper, the value is easy to calculate but most mergers and acquisitions succeed on paper long before they succeed in the plant.  Once the transaction closes the challenge moves to execution.

Every site brings its own equipment history, maintenance practices, planning processes, spare parts strategy, leadership style, and organizational culture.  Each of these practices evolved to solve the problems that plant faced over many years.

When integration begins business leaders hear phrases like “We’ve always done it this way.”  What is unsaid but often follows is “so we have to keep doing it this way”.

This is where many integrations begin to lose momentum.

Maintenance and reliability rarely appear in acquisition headlines, yet they influence nearly all operational synergies executives expect to achieve.  Throughput gains require reliable assets.  Cost reductions depend on disciplined work management.  Capital optimization requires a clear understanding of asset condition.  Even safety performance and operational risk are heavily influenced by maintenance execution.

The question for executive leadership becomes: How do we objectively identify the greatest opportunities for improvement and build a common maintenance and reliability system capable of capturing them?

A Practical Framework for Maintenance & Reliability Integration

An effective integration begins with understanding three key dimensions of maintenance and reliability performance:

• Equipment
• People
• Systems

Together, these provide a practical framework for identifying opportunities, evaluating risks, and prioritizing improvements across the newly combined organization.

Equipment: Can the Assets Deliver the Expected Performance?

Every acquisition inherits equipment with different maintenance philosophies, operating conditions, and histories.  Before assuming projected goals are achievable, leaders should understand three fundamentals.

• Inherent Reliability: Are recurring failures caused by equipment design or maintenance execution?
• Remaining Asset Life: What capital investments are likely over the next several years?
• MRO Materials: Are spare parts, bills of material, and inventory practices supporting reliability or creating unnecessary cost and downtime?

Understanding the asset base helps determine whether the combined organization can realistically deliver the operational performance assumed in the acquisition business case.

People: Can the Organization Execute the Change?

The success of integration depends on whether maintenance and operations teams have the capability and capacity to adopt new ways of working.  Three areas deserve particular attention.

• Productivity: How effectively are maintenance resources converted into completed work?
• Reactivity: How much effort is spent responding to breakdowns versus executing planned work?
• Proactive Culture: Do teams actively prevent failures, or simply respond after they occur?

Understanding organizational mindset helps leaders distinguish between technical problems and execution challenges that could delay integration.

Systems: Are the Right Behaviors Built into Daily Work?

Equipment and people perform within the systems established by leadership.  Consistent management systems create repeatable results across newly combined organizations.

Focus on three core disciplines:

• Preventive Maintenance: Are PM programs aligned with known failure modes and generating meaningful corrective work?
• Work Management: Do planning, scheduling, and execution processes create predictable, efficient maintenance?
• Root Cause Analysis: Does the organization eliminate recurring failures or simply restore equipment and move on?

Strong systems allow best practices to spread across sites and help transform individual effort into sustainable organizational performance.

Together, equipment, people, and systems provide a practical framework for evaluating integration opportunities.  More importantly, they help translate operational observations into the business outcomes executives ultimately care about: higher throughput, lower cost, improved capital efficiency, and reduced risk. 

Together, these processes determine whether reliability improvements become institutionalized—or remain dependent on individual effort.

Frontline Experience: A CMMS Integration That Wasn’t Really About Software

I once worked with a public utility that had acquired a smaller company.  The two organizations weren’t trying to become one operating company and each would continue serving its own customers and operating much as it always had.

Both organizations had heavily customized CMMS platforms, and leadership wanted to consolidate them into a single system.  The expected business case centered on lower software licensing costs, reduced support requirements, and fewer systems to maintain.

On paper, it looked like a technology project.  In reality, something more fundamental was missing.

As we interviewed stakeholders, one issue surfaced repeatedly.  Both companies managed maintenance work differently.  They used different workflows for creating work requests, assigning priorities, planning jobs, scheduling work, and closing work orders.  Even basic terms like “emergency work” carried different meanings.

Neither organization was necessarily wrong.  Their processes had simply evolved to fit different operating environments.

Yet much of the project discussion focused on configuring the software rather than understanding how maintenance actually flowed through each business.  There were plenty of procedures and technical documents, but nothing clearly explained the end-to-end workflow people followed every day.

The software became the center of attention because it was tangible while the operating model received far less attention because it was harder to define.

For me, the experience reinforced an important lesson: A CMMS doesn’t create standardized maintenance.  It simply automates whatever process an organization already has.

Before two companies can successfully share a CMMS, ERP, or CRM platform, they first need agreement on something more fundamental: how work should flow through the business.

Technology can support a maintenance strategy.  It can’t replace one.

Turning Integration into Business Value

Assessing equipment, people, and management systems is not simply an operational exercise.  It’s a business exercise.

The objective is not to determine which company has the “better” maintenance program.  The objective is to identify which practices best support the strategy of the newly combined business. 

Each finding should connect to one or more of four financial outcomes:

• Higher throughput through improved equipment availability and performance
• Lower operating costs through greater maintenance efficiency and reduced failures
• Better capital utilization by extending asset life and optimizing investment decisions
• Reduced business risk through improved safety, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience

The sooner leadership objectively evaluates equipment, people, and systems, the sooner conversations shift from protecting legacy practices to building a stronger organization.

Ultimately, mergers and acquisitions create opportunity.  Maintenance and reliability determine how much of that opportunity becomes reality.

1Sakoui, Anousha, Echo Wang, and Kane Wu. “Mega-deals fuel record M&A as boards dream big on takeovers.” Reuters 1 July 2026. 2 July 2026 <https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/mega-deals-fuel-record-ma-boards-dream-big-takeovers-2026-07-01/>.