Operational efficiency under pressure: Insights from industry leaders across Energy, Water and Transport

The pressure across all industries is mounting. Many organisations are trying to maintain compliance and reliability while navigating day-to-day complexities.

Technology promises efficiency and a better client experience, but adoption often stalls when solutions are elaborate, costly, or fail to integrate into existing workflows. This underscores how frequently complex or unwieldy solutions fail to deliver value in practice.

It’s clear, leaders need to do more with less, while building resilience for the future within the operations and maintenance phase of the asset life cycle.

So, what are the realities and challenges facing major utilities and infrastructure organisations? Here are the three insights that matter most.

Ageing infrastructure and siloed asset management systems remain a major barrier to efficiency. Spreadsheets and manual processes dominate, creating inefficiencies and limiting visibility.

This lack of integration limits organisations’ ability to derive meaningful insights to optimise asset performance, anticipate failures, and plan maintenance activities effectively. Organisations may then default to a reactive approach, prioritising risk avoidance over innovation and continuous improvement.

Nevertheless, more than 90% of the organisations we engaged with are facing growing pressure to modernise legacy control systems to embed resilience and comply with evolving regulatory requirements. Clients in asset-intensive industries are actively seeking integrated dashboards and user-friendly decision-making tools that replace static reports with real-time, actionable insights. However, the deeper challenge lies in the extreme degree to which critical operational data is locked within proprietary applications in safety-critical environments. This data isolation limits organisations’ ability to optimise assets and unlock the full potential of advanced technologies. Global leaders are now investing heavily to address this issue, recognising that enterprise-scale AI and predictive solutions cannot deliver real value until data is liberated from these silos.

Clients acknowledge that their enterprise isn’t reaching its full potential and not connected to a broader ecosystem. They need nimble and practical solutions that capitalise on the value of their legacy systems technologies that are straightforward, cost effective and genuinely improve day-to-day operations. Complex, high-cost projects that add unnecessary layers and ongoing expense are no longer sustainable. Instead, the focus is on practical tools like real-time monitoring and digital twins that integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. When implemented well, these solutions empower front-line operators to work more efficiently and make better decisions.

Reliability remains a non-negotiable, yet resources are stretched thin. Organisations have both limited OPEX budgets and funding from state or federal regulators to avoid negative outcomes. Recent failures, resulting in the public loss of service and blackouts, have had significant consequences like increased stress on stakeholders and the community and high-profile leadership changes, further highlighting the importance of operational resilience.

Clients face strict cost controls and intense scrutiny on every technology investment. Solutions perceived as non-essential simply do not get adopted. In practice, this means that many teams are focused on resolving immediate operational challenges, leaving little capacity for long-term optimisation or strategic planning. Regulatory requirements, such as Australia’s Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act, introduce another layer of complexity, as do equivalent infrastructure security and resilience mandates now emerging in New Zealand’s regulatory landscape. This is where digital technologies can help. An agile, use-case driven approach that leverages existing technology ecosystem and open-source tools is a cost-effective way to drive rapid operational improvements and scalable foundation, without added complexity.  

Technology alone won’t solve these challenges; capability and collaboration are key. The loss of institutional knowledge due to staff turnover is a recurring issue that requires a structured approach to knowledge transfer and upskilling to sustain improvements. This challenge is widespread, the American Productivity and Quality Center’s 2025 Workforce Shift study found that roughly 37% of technical know-how in some asset-intensive operations isn’t documented, leading to about 4–5% of critical knowledge lost each year as experienced staff retire.

Partners that can be a solution-agnostic advisor are going to play an important role in guiding change, building capability and sustaining improvements for organisations that aim for operational reliability and productivity. Clients value partners who combine trusted advisory capability with strong knowledge of software solutions. They want tailored analysis, practical case studies, and support for integration and change management.  

This can be enabled through collaborative models that embed advisory support and build internal champions. We’ve seen these models gain traction across sectors as they enable learning from successful projects and maintain improvements long after implementation. 

While the pressure is real, these challenges present an opportunity for transformation. We’re already working with clients to achieve measurable improvements in asset operations through three key areas:

• Digitised intelligence: Clients are moving from disjointed systems to integrated platforms that provide real-time insights, predictive maintenance and digital twins. Our work on Data-driven asset lifecycle optimisation helped a major utility save AUD1.8 million annually and improve data quality metrics by 100%, enabling smarter decisions and stronger financial reliability.
• Operational resilience: Strengthening compliance and resilience is critical under resource constraints. We’ve supported organisations to meet regulatory obligations such as SOCI and ESG disclosure requirements, like enhancing asset security for a federal utility.
• Capability and collaboration: We’re working with clients to introduce digital engineering frameworks that strengthen asset data quality and lifecycle management, while equipping teams with the skills and processes needed to maintain resilience over time. Our work with local government in New Zealand helped embed a collaborative approach that combines technology with capability-building, ensuring improvements are sustained well beyond implementation.

Ultimately, doing more with less isn’t about one-off fixes, it’s about a strategic journey. By focusing on practical quick wins and building long-term capability, organisations can continuously improve operations with a trusted partner beside them. In this way, we help clients achieve immediate results while laying the groundwork for larger-scale transformation over time.

Connect with us to discuss operational efficiency, technology adoption, and capability building within your organisational context.