How Do We Make Maintenance Sexy? A Conversation with Kevin Clark, Siemens
Maintenance has never lacked for importance. The question is whether organisations actually treat it that way. Despite decades of progress and a growing body of work around asset management as a discipline, maintenance is still framed as a cost centre in most organisations. Kevin Clark has spent more than 40 years trying to change that.
In this episode of Assets UNSCRIPTED, Berend Booms sits down with Kevin Clark, Head of Industrial Strategy and Asset Management at Siemens. Kevin started his career as a maintenance technician and has since worked in engineering, strategy, and leadership roles at Johnson and Johnson, Caterpillar, Fluke, and Accruent, among others. He's also held the title of Chief Evangelist Officer, a role he describes as part of a long-running mission to make maintenance a profession people aspire to.
The conversation covers how maintenance has shifted from reactive firefighting to something more predictive and strategic, why the gap between boardroom ambition and plant floor reality is harder to close than most people admit, and what it would actually take to make maintenance an aspirational career. Kevin's answer to that last question is pointed: invest in people. Watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
From Recovery to Prediction, Honestly
Kevin traces his career alongside the industry's evolution. When he started, maintenance meant getting equipment back up after it had already failed. The shift toward condition-based and predictive maintenance has been real. But Kevin is careful about the gap between where the industry claims to be and where it actually is. 'Right now it's just a swag,' he says about today's predictive analytics. A well-informed guess, not a true prediction. Progress is happening, but the honest version of that progress is more modest than the marketing suggests.
The Boardroom Gap
One of the sharpest observations in the episode is what happens when smart manufacturing conversations move from the executive suite to the factory floor. In the boardroom, people rally around the vision. On the plant floor, the first question is: tell me exactly what smart means and how much is it going to cost. The gap isn't about scepticism. Plant floor teams are managing active failures, budget constraints, and workforce pressures that boardroom conversations don't feel. Kevin sees the gap narrowing as technology delivers more tangible insight to the people who need it, but it hasn't closed yet.
Global Strategy Needs Local Reality
Kevin has worked across organisations with global footprints, and he's direct about what goes wrong when global asset management strategies ignore local context. Cultures, languages, environments, and operating conditions differ significantly across sites. A standard that doesn't account for those differences won't be adopted. 'It's less of a technology problem, more of a people problem,' he says. Technology doesn't exist without people, and when organisations put technology at the centre rather than people, they consistently miss the mark.
What Makes Technology Stick
Kevin has spent a career watching technology come and go. Brilliant products that never found traction, and simpler ones that changed industries. His conclusion: the differentiator is almost never the technology itself. It's whether it reaches the right people at the right moment, in a way they can understand and adopt. He uses the automobile as the example. So many inventions were built into cars decades before the market was ready for them. You can build the best product in the world, but until you can get it into people's hands, it won't take off. Engineers often miss this, he says, because building something that works and getting it adopted are two entirely different challenges.
Making Maintenance Sexy
This is the question Kevin has spent 40 years trying to answer. His response is measured rather than triumphant. Maintenance is getting more recognition as predictive analytics and smart manufacturing raise the profile of the profession. Maintenance degrees are appearing. Universities are engaging. Organizations are starting to view maintenance as part of the manufacturing system rather than a separate cost line. But the cultural shift is generational. 'Several generations of ugly kids are getting a little prettier,' he says. That's a more honest assessment of the pace of change than most people offer.
If You Had Five Years and One Budget
The episode closes with a hypothetical: a blank-cheque, five-year budget in asset management, spent on one thing. Kevin's answer is unambiguous. He'd invest in people. Technology only exists because of people, he argues. When organisations focus on developing technology at the expense of developing people, they consistently lose. People aren't moving as fast as technology right now, and without deliberate investment in their development, they risk being left behind. It's a hard case to make in a boardroom, he admits. He'd make it anyway.
"If I was given the ability to go develop something with five years of investment, I would go develop people." Kevin Clark, Head of Industrial Strategy and Asset Management, Siemens
Assets UNSCRIPTED is the Future of Assets podcast series hosted by Berend Booms. Each episode brings together leaders from across asset-intensive industries for authentic, unscripted conversations on the ideas, challenges, and innovations shaping the future of asset management. New episodes are published on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.