Maximo is, on its day, the best heavy-asset platform on the planet. It is also a platform built around the assumption that you have plant engineers, reliability analysts, and a small army of integrators on hand. If your operation does not look like that, you have probably noticed that the day-to-day return on what you spend has narrowed. The IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) repackaging, with its AppPoints model and shifted infrastructure expectations, has made that gap harder to ignore.
Triggers for the conversation
A few situations push Maximo out of the comfort zone. The MAS migration itself is the most common. AppPoints licensing is not a free re-platform: most existing customers are looking at materially higher costs over a five-year horizon, plus a non-trivial migration project to get there.
Asset complexity drift is the second. Maximo earns its price tag on heavy industrial assets where Reliability-Centred Maintenance, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, and warranty tracking carry real money. If your fleet is mostly buildings, vehicles, and IT, you are running an aircraft carrier to deliver groceries.
The third is integration debt. Maximo deployments collect bespoke integrations like a coat collects pet hair: ESB connectors, custom Java classes, scripted import flows, and the inevitable Excel spreadsheet someone built in 2014 to bridge two modules that never quite spoke to each other. Each renewal is a chance to look at that pile and ask whether starting cleaner would actually be cheaper.
What you would lose
Be honest with yourself about which Maximo capabilities you actually use. The asset hierarchy depth, the failure code taxonomy, the mobile work execution apps, the calibration module, the predictive maintenance with sensor data: these are world-class if you use them. Most replacement projects find that the customer has used about a third of what they have been licensed for.
The capability that consistently survives a replacement project intact is asset hierarchy and warranty tracking, where Maximo's data model is genuinely deep. If your operation lives or dies by those, the conversation should be about which challenger has the most credible story for that depth, not whether to move at all.
A phased migration that does not break operations
The temptation is a project plan with one box on it labelled "cutover." The reality is that asset registers do not migrate cleanly, integrations do not respect deadlines, and engineers do not appreciate finding out at 8 AM that the system has changed.
The pattern that works is read-first, write-last, by domain. Stand the new platform up alongside Maximo. Replicate the asset register and the work order history into it, read-only. Engineers can use the new mobile app for reference but Maximo is still the system of record. This usually catches the majority of the data quality problems before they become operational ones.
Once the read mirror is stable, take the easiest domain first. For most organisations that is the service desk: tickets are short-lived, the migration cost is low, and the visible improvement in tenant or staff experience builds momentum. Then PPM, then asset condition surveys, then warranty and inventory. Each domain you migrate, you decommission the corresponding Maximo workflow. By the time the cutover comes, Maximo is doing very little, and the move itself is quiet.
Plan six to twelve months for this depending on integration count. Do not let anyone sell you a three-month replacement. The platforms that try are the ones that leave the messy 20% undone, and that 20% is where the operational risk lives.
What to put in the RFP
Most Maximo replacement RFPs are a translation of the existing Maximo configuration into requirements. That is the wrong shape. You end up scoring vendors on whether they have a feature called "Service Request," not whether they actually solve the operational problem.
Score outcomes. How long does it take to add a new asset class without a vendor change request? What does mobile work look like with no signal in a basement plant room? How is data governance handled when an engineer photographs a piece of regulated equipment? Can compliance certificates expire and trigger workflows without a developer writing custom logic? What does the platform do when a regulator asks for an audit trail spanning seven years?
A scoring framework based on outcomes is harder to game and easier to defend in a procurement panel. Bidders cannot tick a box; they have to show you the platform doing the thing.
Common pitfalls
Asset data quality is always worse than the project assumes. Asset numbers that do not match physical labels, locations that no longer exist, hierarchies that were copy-pasted from a sister site and never updated. Plan a data cleansing workstream that runs parallel to the build, not after it.
Integration owners disappear. The person who maintains the Maximo to BMS bridge will retire, leave, or be on holiday at exactly the wrong moment. Document every integration in writing before the project starts and assume nothing is self-evident.
Workflow shadow knowledge is the third killer. Every Maximo deployment has at least one workflow where the documented behaviour and the actual behaviour have drifted, and the only person who knows why is two roles removed and refuses to attend meetings. Build dry-run capability into the new platform from day one so you can validate workflow output against Maximo's before you switch over.
Where Jarsis fits
Jarsis Platform is not pretending to be a like-for-like Maximo replacement for a refinery. It is a credible alternative for organisations whose Maximo deployment is, frankly, the wrong tool for the job they actually do. UK FM providers, public sector estates, housing, education, and healthcare teams who bought Maximo because nothing else looked serious enough at procurement time. Configurable workflows, AI classification, multi-tenant operation for FM providers, GOV.UK alignment, and pricing that does not assume you are running a power station.
We do not ship a calibration module and we do not pretend to. If your operation needs Maximo's heavy asset depth, stay where you are. If it does not, we are the conversation worth having.
Talk to someone who has run a Maximo migration
Book a 30-minute conversation. We will look at what your Maximo deployment is actually doing, what your renewal position is, and whether replacement makes sense. No slides.