Most asset management programs are financially illiterate. Organisations frequently obsess over technical engineering metrics such as uptime, preventive maintenance completion rates, and mean time between failures, but rarely connect these indicators directly to the corporate balance sheet or true financial return. This raw, provocative roundtable breaks down traditional functional silos across operations, maintenance, finance, and supply chain to confront the hard financial realities of industrial operations.

Led by Graham MacLeod, this interactive, slide-free debate exposes data-backed truths that are often overlooked in standard reporting. Participants will examine why sixty to seventy percent of routine preventive maintenance tasks deliver zero predictive value, how conventional operational dashboards routinely mask severe total cost of ownership leaks, and why corporate warehouses frequently become massive graveyards for trapped working capital.

The session provides a candid forum to help maintenance and asset leaders transition from purely physical asset management to speaking the clear financial language required by the CFO. Attendees will explore practical approaches to auditing maintenance programs, eliminating waste, and leveraging existing SAP enterprise data alongside artificial intelligence and natural language processing to restore governance, reconcile work orders, and achieve true financial control.

Key discussion areas:
• Auditing existing preventive maintenance programs to eliminate waste and differentiate genuine reliability strategies from expensive comfort blankets
• Uncovering hidden capital traps by identifying unneeded open commitments, addressing vendor pricing variances, and quantifying warehouse carrying costs
• Applying artificial intelligence and natural language processing to existing SAP data to automatically flag poor failure data and reconcile work order variances
• Moving from traditional passive oversight models toward proactive financial verification and control across maintenance and supply chain operations