Maintenance Matters Focus on: Smart Maintenance 12 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk June/July 2026 For much of the past twenty years or so, the direction of engineering has been ever-increased digitalisation. IIoT, connected assets, predictive analytics and autonomous systems have long promised a more efficient, more visible, more controllable industrial environment. In this vision – now brought right up to the fore with the emergence of AI – knowledge becomes something to be captured, structured, and surfaced through systems. Total automation is almost assumed to be the ultimate goal across almost all industry forward-thinking and ambition. Yet in actuality, the picture is less straightforward. Across sectors, many organisations find themselves caught between the aspiration of seamless digital integration, and the persistence of work that resists being neatly captured or codified. When systems meet the real world Engineering environments are rarely as orderly as the models used to design them. Legacy assets coexist with modern systems. Processes evolve. Constraints change. Factors from outside the production plant come into play. And, at the heart of the matter, it’s people who adapt. The recently published ERIKS MRO Supply Chain Report offers a useful window into this reality. Its findings suggest that, in many organisations, formal systems struggle to fully reflect operational practice. In some cases, controls and data are described as “incomplete” or even “useless” when set against what actually happens day-to-day. One telling example is the report’s reference to the widespread use of so-called “squirrel stores”. According to the report, more than half of engineers surveyed admitted to maintaining these informal “secret” caches of spare parts kept outside official inventory systems, because they never fully trust the reliability of the supply chain system. From a purist systems perspective, this is would seem to be evidence of a failure. Systematically, it undermines visibility, distorts data, and introduces inefficiency. But from an operational perspective, is it so bad – if it works? These behaviours do not emerge for no reason. They arise in response to real-world pressures: delays in procurement, uncertainty in availability, and the very real cost of downtime. In that context, holding a private cache of critical Are humans the problem or answer to bridging the digital divide? In engineering, obsolescence is usually associated with parts, platforms and systems. Yet in a world increasingly focused on digitalisation, Kate Houlden of Like Technologies argues that realising the value of long-term human experience could be a solution in plain sight.
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