Corrosion Awareness as an Asset Management Discipline

A recent Plant Engineering feature makes an argument that will feel familiar to anyone who has walked a warehouse of rusted spares: corrosion awareness is an asset management discipline, not a one-off project. The piece, published on 21 July 2026, sets out the case for building corrosion control into predictive and preventive maintenance routines and into the operator mindset, rather than treating it as an occasional shutdown activity. For enterprise asset management teams running IBM Maximo or MAS estates in industries where corrosion actually moves the numbers, it is a useful moment to look at how much of the discipline currently lives in the CMMS and how much still lives in individual heads.

This piece looks at why the argument matters commercially, where the routine usually breaks in an operating estate, and what a corrosion-aware CMMS actually looks like in practice.

Why Corrosion Sits in the Asset Management Conversation

The commercial case is not new, but it is easy to underweight. The most cited number in the field is still the NACE International IMPACT study, which put the global cost of corrosion at roughly US$2.5 trillion a year, or about 3.4% of global GDP, and estimated that 15% to 35% of that could be avoided by applying available corrosion control practices. Even at the lower end, that is a very large recoverable loss sitting behind a discipline that most operators treat as a specialist concern.

The downtime side has moved even further. Siemens’ 2024 True Cost of Downtime research put the cost of an hour of unplanned downtime at roughly US$36,000 in fast-moving consumer goods and US$2.3 million in automotive, with heavy industry considerably higher again. A rusted valve, a seized pump on a critical spare rack, or a corroded instrument tap in the wrong place can easily be the trigger event behind those hours. The Plant Engineering piece makes the point plainly: warehouses of idle spares are quietly degrading while no one is looking, and the value at risk is often larger than the cost of preserving them.

The regulatory backdrop reinforces the same conclusion. Pipeline, pressure system, and structural inspection regimes are all tightening, and integrity engineers are being asked to evidence not only that they inspected but that they controlled the environment between inspections. Corrosion under insulation, atmospheric attack on structural steel, and layup corrosion in idle boilers and cooling systems are all named risks in current guidance from bodies such as HSE and API. Asset registers that cannot show a controlled preventive routine around those risks are increasingly hard to defend.

Where the Routine Usually Breaks in a Maximo Estate

In an operating estate, corrosion routines tend to fail in three specific places. None of them are complicated. All of them are common.

Preventive Maintenance That Stops at the Asset

Most Maximo PM libraries are built around the operating asset. Pumps get lubrication PMs, valves get stroke tests, boilers get water treatment routines. What tends to be missing is a PM against the environment the asset lives in: the warehouse, the electrical cabinet, the sprinkler dry side, the insulated line. Corrosion under insulation, in particular, is almost never in a standard PM library, even though it is one of the more expensive failure modes in oil and gas and process plants. The Plant Engineering piece notes vapour corrosion inhibitor materials in electrical cabinets should be replaced every two years. Very few Maximo estates carry that as a job plan.

Spares Preservation Treated as a Warehouse Problem

Spares corrosion sits in an awkward gap between maintenance and stores. The maintenance planner assumes the store keeps the spare in good order. The store assumes the spare arrived preserved and will be reissued in the same state. Neither side owns the periodic re-preservation. In a Maximo estate this shows up as inventory items with high value, low turnover, and no PM. A quick way to see the scale is to run inventory by ABC class against issue frequency and look at what has not moved in two years. Those items are the corrosion candidates. They deserve their own job plans, not a general warehouse instruction.

Inspection Findings That Do Not Become Work

Corrosion is almost always spotted before it fails, usually by an operator on a routine round or a technician on an unrelated job. What breaks is the path from that observation to a controlled piece of work. If the only route is a verbal handover at the end of shift, the observation is lost. Operator rounds in Maximo Mobile or a comparable field tool, with a corrosion finding as a specific tick and a defined follow-up flow, close that gap. Without it, corrosion inspection is a slogan on a poster.

Building the Culture Without Another Change Programme

The Plant Engineering framing is that culture comes first and specific initiatives come second. That is the right order, but the culture is built by making the correct behaviour the easy behaviour, not by running awareness campaigns. In an EAM context that means three practical moves.

Put corrosion inspection on the operator round, with a small number of well-chosen questions. Two or three tick items per round beat a long checklist that gets scrolled past.
Give the finding a place to go. A follow-up work request with a corrosion classification, routed to the reliability engineer or integrity team, keeps the observation in the work management system rather than in email.
Close the loop back to the operator. If the finding leads to a job, the person who raised it should see the outcome. This is the single strongest lever on future reporting behaviour, and it costs nothing.

None of this needs a new module or a new tool. It needs a small number of Maximo configuration decisions and a supervisor conversation. The organisations that make corrosion awareness stick tend to be the ones that treat it as a work management pattern rather than a training programme.

What Good Looks Like in the CMMS

A corrosion-aware Maximo estate has a few consistent features. The PM library covers not only the asset but the environment: layup PMs for seasonal boilers and cooling systems, VCI replacement PMs for electrical cabinets, insulation integrity inspections on hot and cold service lines, and warehouse condition PMs for high-value idle spares. Failure codes include a corrosion class with enough granularity to tell atmospheric attack from CUI from layup corrosion, so the failure history is actually useful for reliability analysis under ISO 14224. Operator rounds carry corrosion observations as first-class findings, with a defined routing. And the spares register carries a preservation status on the high-value, slow-moving items, with a PM to inspect and re-preserve them at a defined interval.

Estates that get there generally did it in small steps. A single asset class, a single warehouse, a single site. The work is not glamorous, but it is the kind of quiet operating discipline that shows up in downtime numbers a year later. For operators looking at where to start, our view is that spares preservation on high-value critical stock is usually the fastest payback: the loss is visible on the balance sheet, the PM is simple to write, and the improvement is easy to measure. MaxIron works with clients on this kind of Maximo configuration and support, and it pairs naturally with the broader maintenance backlog discipline that separates well-run estates from average ones.

Corrosion awareness will not make the headlines the way an agentic AI announcement will. It is quieter and older. It is also one of the few asset management disciplines with a well-established evidence base, a clear return, and no reliance on any technology that is not already sitting in the average Maximo estate. That is a rare combination, and it is worth using.