Xempla + IBM Maximo: How Sodexo Created An Unfair Advantage With This Powerful Combo

If you’re already using IBM Maximo, you've probably built a solid digital foundation for managing your assets and maintenance operations. Its familiar design and functionalities give you a structured way to capture and organize critical information. 

But here’s the thing: as the focus and expectations around reliability, efficiency, and sustainability outcomes grow, many of us are starting to feel the limits of what a System of Records (CMMS / EAM) solution like IBM Maximo can deliver. It’s a great tool for logging work orders, tracking assets, and monitoring performance, but when it comes to moving the needle from insight to outcome, it often hits a glass ceiling. And as your operations get more complex and your team is asked to do more with less, this gap will start to grow bigger. 

If you’ve ever felt like your team is spending more time managing systems than improving operations, or that valuable data sits unused because you can’t interpret or act on it, this is a conversation worth having.

In this article, we’ll let you in on how companies like Sodexo have unlocked a truly powerful combo by pairing IBM Maximo with Xempla — a new-age AI platform for outcome-driven engineering and maintenance operations. This pairing helped them streamline operations, reduce downtime, and empower teams to act faster with greater precision in one of their most critical hospital environments.

Ready to explore how Xempla + Maximo could be the unfair advantage you’ve been waiting for? Let’s begin.

Decoding IBM Maximo: Core Offering, Philosophy, Strengths

Let’s take a moment to give Maximo credit where it's due. At its core, IBM Maximo is a robust enterprise asset management (EAM) system built for structure, standardization, and control. It’s your digital filing cabinet for everything related to assets — work orders, maintenance schedules, spare parts, compliance logs, you name it. The philosophy behind Maximo has always been clear: get everything in one place, make it traceable, and keep operations accountable.

And it works. Maximo shines when it comes to:

• Maintaining a clean, auditable trail of asset activity
• Standardizing maintenance processes across large portfolios
• Integrating with enterprise systems like ERP or finance
• Ensuring teams follow defined workflows and procedures

In many ways, it’s the digital backbone of maintenance and facilities teams in asset-heavy industries. If your goal is to ensure data integrity, manage risk, and keep records tidy, Maximo is hard to beat.

But here’s the flip side: Maximo was never designed to think, learn, or act autonomously to go from insight generation to end outcome. It wasn’t built to connect and contextualize data points across systems or to help engineers prioritize issues based on operational impact. And that’s not a knock on the product — it’s just a reflection of its deeper philosophy.

Today, maintenance teams need more than just documentation and control. They need systems that help them make decisions, not just record them. Systems that can interpret the noise, surface what matters, and act as digital teammates rather than just digital filing cabinets.

That’s where the conversation starts to shift.

What’s Missing? The Three Systemic Gaps in IBM Maximo

If you're using Maximo, you're already doing a lot right. But as your maintenance strategy matures, especially if you're moving toward condition-based or predictive models, some cracks begin to show. Here are three system-level gaps we see again and again, even in the most well-configured Maximo environments:

1. A System of Record, Not a System of Outcomes

Maximo is excellent at recording data. Work orders, inspections, asset logs—all of it gets captured, timestamped, and stored. But if you're expecting that data to translate automatically into engineering decisions, prioritized actions, or predictive insights, that's not something Maximo was designed to deliver.

It’s a system of record at heart. It tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you what to do next or why it matters now. That’s a critical distinction, especially for teams looking to shift from reactive maintenance to data-driven reliability programs.

The market is filled with point solutions and bolt-ons trying to patch this gap, but most fall short because they weren't built to deliver outcomes holistically. They were designed to report, not recommend. To monitor, not decide.

2. Clunky Design, Disconnected Workflows

Even with smart add-ons and digitized checklists, Maximo still functions in silos. Data exists, but it’s not activated. You’re left relying on engineers to manually interpret and connect the dots. That’s slow, inconsistent, and frankly unsustainable as your asset portfolio grows.

Here’s a common scenario: a technician completes an annual maintenance task. The checklist gets logged in Maximo. But that’s where the story ends. There's no automatic workflow that correlates that new data with past investigations or performance trends. There's no trigger to flag an anomaly or alert the compliance team if something's off. It’s a closed loop on paper, but not in practice.

This matters even more when you're running CBM or PdM strategies. Because in those models, every piece of new data — a vibration reading, an inspection note, a failed task — should feed back into your maintenance logic. If it doesn’t, you’re just going through the motions.

3. Lack of Agility in a Fast-Moving World

Let’s be honest: the pace of change in tech, AI, and operations is brutal. What was considered cutting-edge a year ago now feels standard. But large, legacy platforms like Maximo can’t pivot at that speed. Their development cycles are long, customizations are heavy, and updates often lag behind the real needs of operations teams on the ground.

That’s a problem when your engineers are expected to move fast, when your clients want real-time insights, and when your operations are evolving every week. Relying on a system that updates quarterly — if not annually — creates drag. You don’t want to wait for your system to catch up to your strategy.

So what does this all mean? It means Maximo still plays an important role, but if you expect it to be your strategic engine, your decision-support layer, or your intelligence hub, you’re asking it to be something it’s not.

Which brings us to the question: What if you could keep Maximo exactly as it is, and just add the intelligence and impact to create a complete system of outcomes?

Xempla + IBM Maximo: A Power-Packed Combo

While Maximo was built to manage records, Xempla connects the dots from an outcomes perspective. So what happens when you bring Maximo and Xempla together?

You get the best of both worlds — structure and intelligence, compliance and agility, logging and action. Maximo continues doing what it does best: serving as your system of record, managing asset data, and anchoring your operational processes. Xempla fills in what’s missing: intelligent triaging, autonomous decision-making, and a framework that helps your team resolve issues faster, with more confidence.

The integration is seamless. Xempla pulls data from Maximo, makes sense of it, and feeds insights, actions, and verified outcomes back into your CMMS. Bringing Xempla and Maximo together isn’t just about systems talking to each other. It’s about unlocking new levels of performance, agility, and decision-making across your operations. Here’s what that looks like for your team:

1. Real-Time, Impact-Based Triaging

Stop sifting through alerts manually. Xempla applies intelligent triaging on top of your Maximo data, helping your team focus on what matters most — whether it’s an asset trending toward failure or an issue that could affect compliance or SLAs.

2. Smarter Automation, Enhanced Workflows

Instead of just logging events, your system starts acting on them. Anomalies detected by Xempla get auto-qualified and pushed to Maximo as ready-to-go work orders, complete with context, diagnostics, and resolution paths. Engineers don’t waste time chasing vague alerts — they act with clarity.

3. Seamless Loop from Detection to Verification

Once an issue is addressed, Xempla closes the loop by verifying the impact of the intervention. This outcome — energy saved, performance restored, downtime avoided — gets logged back into Maximo, enriching your records and driving future decision quality.

4. Institutional Knowledge, Captured and Reused

Every decision, insight, and fix gets documented and structured, not buried in logs or siloed in email threads. New team members can ramp up faster. Experienced engineers can focus on complex problems, not repetitive triaging.

5. Acceleration Toward Autonomous Maintenance

With both systems working in tandem, you can move beyond reactive and scheduled maintenance into a truly data-driven model — one where assets signal their own needs and maintenance becomes leaner, smarter, and more cost-effective.

That’s what happens when a system of record meets a system of outcomes. It’s not just smarter maintenance — it’s better productivity, reliability, and performance overall. For teams already invested in Maximo, this isn’t about starting over. It’s about evolving. And as you’ll see in the next section, companies like Sodexo are already proving just how powerful this combination can be in critical environments like healthcare.

Xempla + IBM Maximo in Action: Sodexo’s Success Story at UK’s Largest Healthcare Facility

When Sodexo Health & Care sought to enhance operational efficiency at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), they recognized the limitations of relying solely on traditional systems. While IBM Maximo provided a solid foundation for asset management, it lacked the dynamic capabilities needed for proactive decision-making. To bridge this gap, Sodexo partnered with Xempla, integrating its intelligent asset performance management software with Maximo to create a more responsive and efficient system.

Key Outcomes Achieved:

• Energy and Cost Savings: Within 18 months, the integrated system led to over £300,000 in energy cost reductions, a decrease of 1 million kWh in electricity consumption, and a reduction of more than 2,000 tonnes in carbon emissions.​
• Enhanced Asset Reliability: The proactive monitoring capabilities of Xempla enabled the early detection and prevention of 85 potential asset failures and 69 critical outages, ensuring higher availability of essential equipment.
• Streamlined Maintenance Operations: By continuously analyzing data from over 2,000 assets and 12,000 data points every 15 minutes, Xempla provided real-time insights into asset performance. This allowed for swift identification of anomalies and immediate corrective actions, all seamlessly integrated with Maximo's work order system.
• Improved Sustainability and Clinical Outcomes: The increased reliability of critical hospital assets directly contributed to better patient care, minimizing disruptions and ensuring that essential services remained operational.​ The performance measurements from these critical assets also contributed significantly to their client’s Green Plan and UK Net Zero targets.

The Power of Integration:

The collaboration between Xempla and Maximo exemplifies how integrating advanced platforms with established asset management systems can lead to transformative results. By leveraging Xempla's real-time monitoring, diagnostics, and decision-making capabilities alongside Maximo's robust record-keeping, Sodexo created a proactive maintenance environment that improved operational efficiency and enhanced patient care.​

This case underscores the potential for facilities management teams to achieve significant improvements in performance and reliability by adopting a combined approach that utilizes both traditional and new-age technologies.

The Bottom Line: From Records to Results

IBM Maximo isn’t going anywhere — and it shouldn’t. As a system of record, it’s proven, powerful, and trusted by engineering and FM teams worldwide. But if your ambitions go beyond documentation, if you're aiming for real-time decision support, autonomous workflows, and proactive maintenance strategies, then it’s time to evolve your stack.

That’s exactly what Xempla offers: the missing piece that transforms Maximo from a static system of record into a dynamic system of outcomes. It enhances what you already have, accelerates your journey toward predictive and condition-based maintenance, and helps your teams move faster with greater confidence.

Sodexo has shown what’s possible when these two systems come together. Now the question is — what would it look like for your organization?

If you’re looking to create an unfair advantage for your engineering or facilities team, you don’t need to start over. You just need to build smarter on what you’ve already got. Maximo captures the past. Xempla powers the future. Together, they unlock a whole new level of operational excellence.

Ready to see it in action? Book a demo of Xempla today!