Thousands of assets in streamlined processes

Industrial organizations are discovering there is a faster path to AI value than building it themselves. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Median Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) across our cloud portfolio has fallen by more than 40 percent since the 2022 peak, marking the end of a three-year COVID disruption period (2020 to 2022) marked by workforce shortages and supply chain delays. Continuous product improvements drove the recovery through 2023 and 2024, and in January 2025 we opened embedded AI to all new customers. From that point, the decline has accelerated even further, with the downward trend continuing into 2026.

Every year, AI Appreciation Day generates a wave of commentary about artificial intelligence (AI) - its promise, its risks, and the pace of change. Most of it is written for a general business audience. Not much of it speaks directly to the people running factories, maintaining critical infrastructure, managing increasingly complex asset landscapes with rapidly shrinking teams. This is a CEO's perspective on AI in Asset Management.

Ultimo announces today that Enterprise Asset Management solution has achieved SAP® certified integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The integration helps organizations to supports key business processes, including master data synchronization and procurement workflows, helping organizations connect their SAP and Ultimo environments more effectively.

What separates a working demo from a system you can trust every shift - and why it matters more than you think

Nine out of ten manufacturing leaders say they expect AI agents to become part of their operational workforce within the next 12 to 18 months. That finding, from Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, tells you something important. For industrial leaders, the question is no longer whether AI will enter maintenance and operations. It is how to adopt it without increasing operational risk, adding hidden cost, or pulling scarce expertise away from the work that keeps production running.

Ausnutria is an international manufacturer of high-quality infant formula. In the Netherlands, the company has multiple production locations, including factories in Kampen, Leeuwarden and three in Heerenveen. Historically, these were independent companies, each with their own working methods and systems. Based on the desire to operate as one organization, Ausnutria decided to develop a uniform strategy in the area of maintenance management as well.

A maintenance director once told me a story that captures one of the most common reasons maintenance change programs stall: adoption is treated as a behavior problem, when it is often a workflow problem.

His plant was operating in a reactive mode. Teams fixed what broke, but work was rarely documented. Standards were inconsistent. Planners had limited visibility into what was happening across the floor.

For multi-site manufacturers, maintenance standardization is no longer an operational housekeeping issue. It directly affects uptime, cost control, compliance, capital planning, and the ability to scale improvement across the enterprise. 

Castrol Ghent is part of the international Castrol organization and produces lubricants for various industrial applications. This case study tells the story about how Castrol Ghent halved equipment failures and saved €360,000 annually by transforming reactive maintenance into a streamlined, data-driven operation powered by Ultimo.