Distinctions
Maintenance and asset management
Sustaining or trading off.
Sustaining an asset's function within a given strategy.
Setting that strategy: invest, retain, phase out or dispose, weighing cost, performance and risk against each other.
The difference in one sentence
Asset management decides what to do with assets over time; maintenance management keeps them working now.
Why they get conflated
A long-term maintenance plan is labelled asset management while it presupposes a strategy that is never questioned.
Why it matters
Without asset management, components are maintained that would be better replaced or disposed of.
How to tell them apart
Can the plan conclude that an asset should not be maintained? If not, it is maintenance planning.
Back to distinctionsLast reviewed: 2026-08-23