January 13, 2026 How Maintenance Drives U.S. Manufacturing Performance

Supply chain shocks, retirements, and rising costs have now made preventive maintenance a critical driver of U.S. manufacturing performance.

By Nick Haase MaintainX co-founder

Tariffs, geopolitics, and a once-in-a-century pandemic have put real pressure on U.S. manufacturers. In the past two years in particular, you’ve faced higher material costs, supply chain shocks, and a growing wave of retirements, all while new plant construction slowed. On paper, it can look like the U.S. industrial engine is wearing out.

The reality is more specific. A big part of the story is how we run maintenance. Shutdowns, fragile supply chains, inflation, and workforce gaps all show up first in reliability. Maintenance is no longer a support function. It is one of the main ways manufacturers defend capacity, control costs, and decide where to invest next. How you deploy your maintenance program is a major driver of how your operations perform under pressure.

Weak Maintenance Practices Risk Growth

Reliability is what turns nameplate capacity into real production. When equipment is down, or running below spec, you get less output, more scrap, and higher operating costs. When leaders compare facilities or regions, those hidden reliability gaps can make one site look “too expensive” to reinvest in, even if the physical assets are sound.

The problem is that most performance reviews don’t start with maintenance health. They start with lagging financials. Many conversations stay focused on unplanned downtime line items or the apparent cost of spare parts. Roughly 80% of manufacturers still classify nearly all spare parts as expenses, not capital assets. That keeps finance teams blind to the real value sitting on shelves and the capital at risk if tariffs or trade rules change overnight.

On top of that, there is a gap between strategy and execution. While 71% of teams say they are adopting preventive maintenance, 58% of facilities still spend less than half of their maintenance hours on preventive work. The result is predictable: more reactive firefighting, less stable throughput, and fewer dollars left to reinvest in equipment or new capacity. Operations can look more expensive to run than they need to be, not because the assets are bad, but because the maintenance system is immature.

When maintenance is treated as a cost to minimize instead of a business strategy, you shrink your options. You underfund the very system that could turn unreliable lines into reliable profit centers.

Preventable Downtime and the Supply Chain

The pandemic exposed how fragile U.S. supply chains had become. Lead times for even basic components stretched from weeks to months. Labor shortages made it harder to service critical equipment. Under that pressure, many companies cut costs in the simplest way they could find: treating spare parts as a pure expense and deferring strategic decisions about inventory.

That choice became even more expensive once tariffs and other trade shocks raised the cost of the “nuts and bolts” of American industry. Price spikes and delays ripple across production lines, driving shutdowns, overtime, and last-minute sourcing at a premium.

A Director of Manufacturing Engineering overseeing a company making $800M+ revenue, recently shared with me, his team has had to rethink inventory management, move to smarter sourcing and strategic stockpiling, and lean on better tracking and predictive tools. Even with that work, the uncertainty around tariffs makes long-term planning difficult.

This is where preventive maintenance becomes a strategic lever, not just an engineering best practice. A disciplined PM program gives you visibility into when equipment will need inspection or repair and what parts that work will consume. When you pair that with a cross-site view of inventory, you can shift parts between facilities instead of paying premiums for rushed orders. You cut the cost of emergencies and reduce the need for every site to stock the same slow-moving parts “just in case.”

Whatever 2026 brings, the same logic holds. Strategic preventive maintenance reduces the inflated costs of emergency parts, extends the useful life of current equipment, and helps assets run closer to their design potential. That frees up capital for growth instead of constantly backfilling failures.

The Workforce Challenge

The weak link isn’t only in supply chains. The U.S. is losing maintenance expertise at a dangerous pace. A generation of experienced technicians is retiring, and younger workers are not replacing them fast enough. Even when you have the right part on hand, you still need people who know how to install it, troubleshoot the failure, and prevent it from happening again. Tariffs make parts more expensive. Workforce shortages make downtime more likely.

Industry leaders, including those at Ford, have been clear: without sustained investment in training and modern maintenance practices, the skills gap will continue to threaten the reliability of manufacturing operations.

Preventive maintenance can’t solve the labor shortage, but it can help your existing teams do higher-value work. Well-structured PM programs give technicians clear priorities, reduce repeated emergency callouts, and make better use of the data and infrastructure you already have.

There is still a major barrier: data silos. Operational technology systems were not built to share information easily. For maintenance teams, that can mean guessing when to service equipment, hunting for the root cause of failures, or trying to decide what to do next without a full picture. When preventive maintenance platforms bring sensor data, usage data, and work history together, teams gain a clear view of where to focus.

For example, instead of relying only on calendar-based inspections, you can trigger work orders based on the actual condition or usage of a machine. Vibration data, cycle counts, or temperature shifts can automatically generate urgent tasks before a minor anomaly becomes a major failure. When a repair is needed, your teams can use the data trail to narrow down likely causes, such as spotting misalignment when vibration levels spike after a coupling change.

The trap right now is skipping these fundamentals and expecting AI or “digital transformation” to clean up the mess. Advanced analytics only work when you have accurate work histories, standardized PMs, and connected systems that frontline teams actually use every day.

Why This Matters Now

Many manufacturers are watching 2026 with a mix of caution and optimism. No one knows whether the next shock will come from a new tariff regime, another wave of retirements, or something entirely different. What we do know is that the need to treat preventive maintenance as a strategic discipline is not going away.

Treating preventive maintenance as an afterthought has already cost U.S. companies billions in downtime and financing risk. Reactive work raises operating costs and hides the true potential of existing assets. Strategic maintenance does the opposite: it gives you more stable output from what you already own and a clearer line of sight for where to invest next.

So what should leaders do now? A practical playbook includes four moves:

1. Make critical spares visible assets. Reclassify key spare parts so finance has a real view of capital at risk when tariffs or lead times change.
2. Shift hours into preventive and condition-based work. Drive PM compliance up and link it directly to fewer unplanned stops and more production hours, not just more work orders.
3. Connect OT data to the tools your frontline uses. Bring sensor data, usage data, and work orders into one system so technicians get context at the point of work.
4. Capture and standardize know-how. Turn the expertise of your senior technicians into digital SOPs and checklists before they retire, so every new hire can perform work the right way.

The fragility of industrial maintenance is not just a technical issue. It is a competitiveness issue. Without data-driven practices, disciplined inventory strategies, and serious investment in workforce development, the next shock will hit harder than it should and could stall American industry when we can least afford it. With a stronger foundation in preventive maintenance, manufacturers can not only absorb the next disruption, but use it as an opportunity to grow while others are still reacting.

About the Author:
Nick Haase is a co-founder of MaintainX, an AI-powered maintenance and asset management platform transforming how frontline teams operate. Over the past seven years, he has helped scale MaintainX into a global leader trusted by more than 13,000 manufacturing and other industrial companies to boost production, reduce unplanned downtime, and build more resilient operations. Today Nick continues to drive MaintainX’s rapid growth and innovation, shaping the future of industrial maintenance and operations.

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