How to minimise plant downtime in the construction downturn

Inflation and weak demand are fuelling a prolonged, structural slump in UK construction activity. In this climate, builders need to do all they can to control what they can. The first place to start is to stop losing money to asset downtime.  

Despite calls from the government to ‘build, baby, build’, the construction industry is battling an extended recession. Purchasing Managers Index readings show that output has contracted for 16 consecutive months. Every construction manager knows why this has happened—input costs have rocketed, while order books have got thinner. 

These harsh business conditions have a real human cost. Between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, the construction industry shed 4% of its workforce, and listed 4,000 fewer vacancies. When teams are stretched this thin, every working hour counts. 

Right now, the last thing you need is for a failed digger to eat up your budget and leave your team stalled while it waits for repairs. But that’s what’s happening in sites across the country—and firms’ maintenance approaches are making it worse. 

What’s costing you up to 8% of your budget? 

According to industry analysis, a typical mid-sized UK construction firm makes around £12 million in annual revenue. But they lose up to £1 million—8% of that revenue—to the miscellaneous costs of unplanned downtime. That figure covers idle labour, late deliveries, compliance failures, and programme disruption. 

You could do a lot with 8% extra revenue per year. You might upskill your staff, or develop your edge when bidding for extra-competitive, higher-margin contracts that will tide you through this fall in the business cycle. But to get anywhere close to that kind of saving, you need to understand why assets go down, and why they cost you so much when they do.  

The reactive maintenance trap

Far too many companies follow a familiar received wisdom: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it (and only fix it when it breaks). But while this sounds like common sense, it’s actually one of the main sources of costs for any physical operations company.

Grouptyre Wholesale Ltd learned the hard way that reactive maintenance leaves you vulnerable to sudden disruptions. "One missed service can cost £12,000 in warranty claims," says John Kingman, Chief Technology Officer. It only takes one little oversight to understand why waiting for defects is a liability, not a strategy. If a mixer truck breaks unexpectedly mid-project, a construction firm on tight deadlines has no choice but to pay a premium of up to 400% for emergency repairs. 

The costs compound in other ways too—a contractor who extends a project timeline due to faulty equipment is much less likely to win a bid with that client in future. 

Why it’s time to throw out the maintenance schedule  

Once firms have been stung by the costs of a fix-after-failure approach, they typically turn to the maintenance calendar. Maybe you service one asset after every 250 hours in use, and another every six months, depending on its use profile. This is better than just waiting for things to fail. But it’s not the same as knowing what your assets actually need.

Thanks to decades of data on asset maintenance from organisations like NASA and the US Navy, we know that only about 15% to 20% of industrial equipment failures are actually age or usage-related. These are the failures a scheduled maintenance approach can catch. 

But the same data shows that the other 80% of failures are much more random. Your equipment might go down due to stress, vibrations, contamination, or any number of causes. When most downtime is caused by these wildcard factors, your maintenance calendar is just an illusion of control that can’t protect you from unexpected outages. 

What’s worse, it also means spending money to take machines out of service for work they don’t need. Arte Logistik in Germany had this problem. Dispatchers had no choice but to estimate when an oil change was due based on kilometres travelled. It was an educated guess dressed up as a process, and guesswork is never cost-efficient. 

How to take back control of downtime and maintenance spend

In this downturn, excessive downtime is a major liability that most companies are using the wrong tools to address. The true answer comes in knowing as much as possible about the assets you already have. That means getting real-time visibility into the condition of each piece of equipment, and the ability to act on fault data before a problem becomes a breakdown on a live site. This is the Connected Asset Maintenance approach. 

Connected Asset Maintenance works differently from both the reactive and scheduled approaches. Instead of fixing a failure or bringing your assets into the shop on a calendar rota, you service only what the data tells you needs attention. You operate intentionally, with live data on engine runtime, diagnostic fault codes, and equipment health signals taking the place of guesswork. You stop pulling an excavator out of commission for an oil change it does not need, and you catch the hydraulic fault developing in your crane before it takes the machine down mid-lift.

An independent study of 130 Samsara customers across asset-heavy industries found that a Connected Operations™ approach helps organisations cut maintenance spend by an average of 9%, with 15% fewer equipment down-days. Data-driven maintenance also extends asset lifespans—the survey found equipment lasted 10% longer before replacement. 

All these compounding benefits helped these organisations save an average of $2 million each. In difficult business conditions, that buffer could make a lot of difference. 

How Connected Asset Maintenance really works

This more proactive model for your maintenance comes in three steps, each building on the last. 

Track 

Asset tracking is the prerequisite for an efficient maintenance operation. Samsara's 2026 State of Connected Operations research found that 77% of organisations without asset tracking reported a critical asset caused a major shutdown or delay in the past year. 

All your physical capital should be constantly producing data, with GPS location tracking on every powered asset. Your plant should be feeding through data on engine runtime and fault code monitoring, while your smaller equipment and tools should all be Bluetooth-tagged. 

Once it's all connected, you'll have a single picture of where everything is, its condition, and how it's been used. That data has immediate protective value. Lanes Group, an infrastructure operator, now has £7.2 million of equipment protected through Samsara Asset Tracking. But the value goes way beyond just preventing theft or loss. It comes in the continuous stream of condition data that tells you which assets are degrading, long before they fail onsite.

Act

But data is only useful if you can act on it at the right moment. In practice, this takes three mechanisms. 

1. Fault code triage: When a diagnostic code fires on a piece of plant, most maintenance teams receive a code number and nothing else, and it’s up to you to divine what this means. A connected system interprets it automatically and tells you the fault, alongside a recommendation of prioritised action steps. 

2. Smart work orders: Equipment often reaches the shop with a jumble of defects, active fault codes and already-scheduled works. If these are only patched up separately, the machine becomes a maintenance boomerang, back again and again with a new defect. A connected approach will surface all these problems and fix them in one order. A piece of equipment might stay in the shop longer, but you won’t see it there again for a long time. 

3. Usage-based maintenance schedules: Instead of calendar dates, the system automatically schedules service tasks based on engine runtime and odometer data—because a machine that has run six hard weeks on a groundworks contract will degrade faster than one on a quieter site. 

Waste management company Collard Group threw out their old maintenance calendar and replaced it with scheduling based on asset condition data. Soon, they’d reduced vehicle downtime by 30%. They didn’t need more staff to achieve meaningful maintenance savings—just better information, acted on at the right moment.

“Workshop supervisors can jump onto Samsara and start pre-checking faults. We can now see when vehicles are due a service before they even come in thanks to the fault codes." - Lee Troddyn, Transport Manager, Collard Group Ltd

Optimise 

Once you are tracking your assets and acting on clear recommendations from the data, the cycle will eventually create positive structural changes to your cost base. That’s when you start turning incremental, one-off savings into compounding returns. All it requires is taking stock of what’s worked for you, and repeating it at scale. 

The first compounding benefit is cost visibility. Most construction firms know their total maintenance spend. Far fewer know which makes of assets cost the most to maintain,  which are being over or under-utilised, and which depot is running up the highest repair bills. Connected Asset Maintenance shows you all this in real time, so you can make better procurement decisions, fleet rotation choices, and supplier negotiations. 

That visibility also tells you where assets are sitting idle when they could be working. VP Brandon Hire Station use their operational insights to guide redeployment decisions. "This data helps us maximise efficiency during high-demand periods like festivals”, said Antony Draper, their Director of HSEQ. "Instead of renting additional vehicles, we can identify underutilised assets in nearby regions and redeploy them temporarily."

A more connected operation is also better for your insurance costs. A documented record that proves your operations are well-run and well-maintained can completely change your risk profile with insurers. That principle holds beyond your maintenance budget and into other cost centres, such as accident claims. 

Infrastructure engineering contractors OCU Group reduced their total claim costs by 42%, simply by using telematics devices and cameras to provide consistent evidence of their staff’s safe driving behaviours. There is a golden thread linking operational records, compliance documentation, and insurance exposure. The more data you have, the lower your potential costs. 

None of this is available to a firm running reactive or calendar-based maintenance. It requires a data layer that’s always on. The longer that data accumulates, the more precisely you can see where your maintenance budget is working and where it is not.

Weather the downturn by lowering your costs 

One day, UK construction is likely to rebound, with some evidence already emerging of a recovery in some areas. When that happens, the firms most able to capitalise on a rosier picture will be those who have already got their maintenance costs under control. 

That means knowing what your plant is doing before it fails, acting on fault data before it becomes an emergency callout, and using accumulated data to make smarter decisions about every pound of maintenance spend.

If you want to see how this works in practice, Samsara recently hosted a webinar on exactly this topic: Next-gen fleet maintenance: Boost uptime and cut costs. The session covered how operators can keep assets out of the shop, cut time spent on manual compliance, and gather real-time diagnostics. You can watch the recording on demand now.