LEHI, Utah – Limble, a maintenance and asset management platform, will unveil findings from its inaugural State of Maintenance Report during the virtual 2026 Maintenance Hero Summit on Oct. 7 at 12 p.m. ET.
The free event will bring together maintenance, reliability, plant, facilities and operations professionals to explore how organizations can transform maintenance data and workforce expertise into better operational decisions. Built around the theme “Maintenance Intelligence: From Data to Decisions,” the summit will feature actor and manufacturing industry advocate John Ratzenberger, new industry research and a look at Limble technology designed to help maintenance organizations move toward more predictive and efficient operations.
“Maintenance professionals solve complex problems every day and keep the world’s assets running, often without receiving the recognition they deserve,” said Gary Specter, CEO of Limble. “But as teams get leaner and experienced workers retire, the expertise they’ve built over decades becomes increasingly valuable and vulnerable. This summit is about celebrating their contributions while exploring how better data and technology can preserve their expertise, strengthen decision-making and help them operate smarter.”
New Research Reveals the Risk of Lost Maintenance Knowledge
Maintenance teams have access to more operational data and technology than ever, yetmany organizations remain caught in reactive firefighting. At the same time, leaner teams, persistent hiring challenges and aging assets are increasing the pressure on maintenance professionals to keep critical equipment running longer with fewer resources. Much of the expertise required to maintain those assets still resides only with experienced employees, putting organizations at risk when those individuals retire or leave.
Limble’s inaugural State of Maintenance Report, which will be unveiled in full at the event, quantifies the scope of that risk.
According to the report, 74% of maintenance organizations have critical assets that depend on a single person’s knowledge, and another two-thirds of maintenance professionals personally hold critical knowledge that exists nowhere in their organization’s systems.
“When nearly half of maintenance professionals say they’ve already lost knowledge they couldn’t recover when someone left, that’s not a hypothetical workforce challenge. It’s an operational risk that’s already showing up inside plants. And with 74% of maintenance organizations saying a critical asset depends on a single person’s knowledge, the potential for further loss is significant," added Specter. "When teams are increasingly running leaner, and equipment needs to last longer, that’s a vulnerability manufacturers can’t afford to ignore. The goal should be to turn what one great technician knows into knowledge the entire team can use.”
The report found that 47% of companies reported losing knowledge they could not recover when someone left. Organizations with a larger staff of 51 to 100 employees were 50% more likely than average to report this, suggesting that larger teams don’t necessarily have the documentation needed to preserve institutional knowledge.
When asked which improvement would have the greatest business impact, maintenance leaders ranked hiring and retaining technicians ahead of AI.
“Everyone wants to talk about what AI will do for manufacturing, but these numbers are a reminder that the most valuable intelligence in many plants is still human," said Specter. "When two-thirds of maintenance professionals hold critical knowledge that exists nowhere in their systems, the first priority has to be protecting and extending that expertise. AI has tremendous potential, but it can’t replace the judgment technicians build over years on the plant floor — and it can’t learn from knowledge an organization never captured in the first place.”
The survey was conducted from July 29, 2026 to August 6, 2026, among 686 full-time U.S. employees directly involved in maintenance or operations, with a 95% confidence level and ±3.7% margin of error. Respondents included maintenance and operations leaders and frontline technicians across manufacturing, wholesale and distribution, facilities-intensive services, infrastructure and the public sector.
Maintenance Intelligence Starts With People
John Ratzenberger, known for playing Cliff Clavin on Cheers and voicing Hamm in the Toy Story franchise, will join Limble’s Chief People Officer Sara Patterson for the Summit’s conversation on how the industry can attract, develop and retain the people who keep the world running.
A longtime advocate for American manufacturing, skilled trades and apprenticeships, Ratzenberger will discuss how organizations can elevate technical careers, bridge the generational skills gap and transfer hard-earned knowledge before it disappears.
Additional sessions will examine how maintenance organizations can turn asset and work history into better decisions, including how to capture institutional knowledge, build trustworthy maintenance records and advance toward predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Limble will also introduce technology designed to help teams put Maintenance Intelligence into practice.
The summit will conclude with the Maintenance Hero Awards, honoring frontline professionals whose work often happens behind the scenes but delivers an outsized impact across their organizations. Nine peer-nominated winners will be recognized for achievements in reliability, innovation, leadership, operational excellence and dedication to the maintenance profession.
"The problem highlighted in [our] research isn’t simply that knowledge leaves when experienced technicians leave. It’s that too much of that knowledge was never captured in the first place," Specter said. "This is where modern maintenance and asset management systems can help — turning years of work history, technician observations and hard-earned fixes into institutional knowledge that the next person can actually find and use. That matters even more when teams are lean, and nobody has time to start from scratch every time something breaks."
