Author | Stephan Kornelius – Pragma Professional Services Business Lead
In asset-intensive industries, leaders face mounting pressure to deliver sustainable performance amid budget constraints, rising risk, and scrutiny from boards and investors. Yet, many still lack an objective, repeatable way to understand how effectively their assets are being managed, or how management maturity translates into business value.
A structured, repeatable asset management maturity assessment offers that visibility. It establishes a reliable baseline, measures progress over time, and connects operational practices to measurable performance, cost efficiency, and risk outcomes.
The power of repetition
Maturity assessments are often mistaken for audits – a governance activity that identifies areas of non-compliance and thereby enables compliance with some internal or external standard. Assessments, on the other hand, are intended to objectively capture an organisation’s current state, understand its maturity, drive improvement, and create value. And in reality, their greatest value lies in repetition.
Stephan Kornelius, Business Lead of Pragma’s Professional Services division, explains, “A single assessment gives you a snapshot. Repeated assessments give you the movie. The full story of progress, setbacks, and learning over time.”
Evidence backs this up. A multinational mining organisation improved its asset management maturity by 23% and overall performance by 27% between its first and second assessment, three years apart. The company didn’t just comply; it created a structured pathway for continuous improvement.
By benchmarking against their own baseline, as well as against peers, organisations can demonstrate long-term value creation and build a clear case for investment. Over time, these repeated measurements become proof of performance and provide tangible evidence that improvement efforts deliver results.
A baseline for alignment
Asset management decisions cross multiple functions, such as engineering, finance, operations, procurement, sustainability, and risk. Each department interprets performance differently. A structured maturity assessment creates a common language for progress, enabling leadership to align around facts rather than perceptions.
“Once you have a shared reference point,” says Stefan Terblanche, Partner Consultant at Pragma. “You can prioritise with confidence. Everyone knows where you are and what needs to improve next.”
As outlined in the Asset Management Improvement Planning Report 2025, “The most important benchmark is yours… It’s your foundation for improvement and gives you a structured way to monitor your maturity as you progress,” says Terblanche.
This shared baseline serves as the foundation for strategic clarity and enables executives to link decisions directly to outcomes such as extending asset life, reducing downtime, and optimising spend.
From insight to execution
A maturity assessment delivers more than a report. It delivers a roadmap for execution. By mapping each improvement opportunity to measurable outcomes, organisations can focus their energy where it matters most.
The process identifies three types of practices. First, there are good practices that are not working well. This often happens because of compliance or skill gaps. Second, there are poor practices that slow things down. Lastly, there are “hero” practices that depend on individual skills instead of the strength of the organisation.
As Pragma consultant Philip Hanekom explains, “An improvement in practice drives improvement in performance.” This simple idea is the main goal of maturity assessment. It aims to turn best practices into actions. These actions should be repeatable and help improve key performance indicators.
This helps leaders move from reactive interventions to structured, sequenced improvement plans and ensure that effort translates into performance, which in turn becomes measurable business value.
From firefighting to forecasting
“Firefighting is expensive,” notes Terblanche. “It might look like progress, but it’s usually just spending more to stand still.”
Across more than 250 global assessments, only 30% of organisations were found to have a documented asset management strategy, while 40% had only a basic policy in place. Despite heavy investment in technology, maturity in foundational disciplines such as Maintenance Work Management has declined by 16% in the past decade, with a 36% drop in performance outcomes.
These results highlight a consistent truth: technology accelerates improvement only when it’s built on solid management fundamentals. Without structure, even the best systems deliver temporary results.
A maturity assessment provides the structure needed to move beyond firefighting, helping teams stabilise performance, embed accountability, and make informed trade-offs between performance, cost, and risk.
Playing the long game
“Asset management isn’t a sprint,” says Terblanche. “It’s a discipline that rewards consistency, patience, and evidence.”
Repeated maturity assessments embody that discipline. They create a continuous feedback loop that allows teams to measure, learn, and adapt – linking every improvement effort to tangible business impact.
As organisations face greater ESG expectations, supply chain volatility, and investor scrutiny, maturity assessments are emerging as a strategic necessity. They transform asset management from a maintenance function into a performance management engine. One that aligns technical, financial, and operational realities across the enterprise.
The investor’s perspective: Maintenance as a value signal
For financial institutions, lenders, and investors, asset maturity is a powerful indicator of enterprise health. Poorly maintained or poorly understood assets increase operational risk, reduce asset life, and weaken the return profile of entire portfolios.
“You can read the numbers in a financial statement,” observes Kornelius, “but they don’t tell you whether the assets behind those numbers are being managed sustainably.”
Repeated maturity assessments provide the missing visibility. They act as a form of technical due diligence, showing whether an organisation is protecting or eroding its asset base and, as a result, investor value.
“For investors, this means greater confidence in both performance and governance, the assurance that capital is being deployed responsibly and that underlying assets are generating stable, predictable value,” concludes Kornelius.
The bottom line
Maturity assessments are not about ticking boxes and “complying”, but about building confidence. Confidence that your assets are managed responsibly. Confidence that your teams are aligned, and confidence that your investments are creating measurable, sustainable value.
In an environment where capital, reliability, and resilience are inseparable, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t improve what you never assess. Book your assessment today and start measuring your performance.
To explore the data and insights shaping today’s asset management practices, download the Asset Management Improvement Planning Report 2025. Access the full report here.
