September 1, 2025

Outsourcing or strategic partnership? How maintenance supports business goals

Industrial companies face many challenges: balancing availability with cost pressures, managing the risks of an aging and shrinking workforce, and keeping operations reliable under increasing strain. A strategic partnership that supports or fully manages production maintenance can offer a sustainable solution.

Why strategic partnership matters now

When resources are limited, every investment must be carefully considered. With the support of an experienced maintenance partner, companies gain efficiency and cost savings, but above all, a strategic partnership enables joint development and the achievement of shared goals.

“A partner who shares the same strategic goals helps the customer reach their business objectives. This also creates a shared commitment to finding the best solutions,” says Lauri Kaiharju, Sales Director, Quant Finland.

Strategic partnership vs. traditional outsourcing

Many industrial companies struggle with maintenance challenges that slow down production performance. Reduced technical availability, recruitment difficulties, a growing maintenance backlog, and cost control issues are becoming more common. Solving these problems requires expertise, flexibility, and the ability to scale solutions to changing conditions.

“This is where strategic partnership differs from traditional outsourcing. In a traditional model, resources, processes, and systems are simply transferred to the service provider as they are, with little change to how things are done. Strategic partnership, on the other hand, is built on shared goals and long-term development,” Kaiharju explains.

Traditional outsourcing transfers existing work to a provider. A strategic partnership is created when development is carried out together, and value is generated in collaboration.

Quant’s way of building strategic partnerships

Quant builds every partnership around the customer’s specific needs.

“Each customer relationship is tailored individually, while we also leverage globally proven practices and tools. Digital solutions enable mobile work management, efficient data collection, and predictive maintenance – all of which strengthen production performance and reliability.”

In addition, Quant’s Service Center model brings flexibility to resourcing. Mobile experts provide support whenever needed, without the customer having to maintain all capacity in-house. This creates significant synergies and cost savings, especially when production needs fluctuate.

“Partnership can also be partial, with a model designed to match the customer’s situation. For example, with one customer we created a solution where in-house activities were combined with outsourced services in a flexible and cost-efficient way. This allowed the customer to focus on core business while ensuring maintenance continued to support their goals in the best possible way.”

Tangible customer benefits

The benefits of a strategic partnership can be seen on many levels. It can improve plant availability and production predictability, enhance safety and quality, bring cost control and long-term savings, and free up customer resources and leadership to focus on developing their own business.

“Partnership allows the production plant to focus on what it does best, manufacturing products and optimizing processes. We ensure the desired availability and continuously develop our services to support the customer’s goals,” Kaiharju notes.

“In one long-term process industry partnership, we have managed the plant’s maintenance for over 20 years and improved availability and OEE by tens of percentage points. In another, we created a model where day-to-day maintenance is always present on-site, while other maintenance services are delivered flexibly from our Service center site. This allows maintenance costs to be adjusted according to production volumes, without compromising availability.”

The future – more collaboration, more synergies

The importance of partnerships will only continue to grow. One clear trend is the consolidation of support services, such as maintenance, facility management, and spare parts management, under a single provider. Managing the whole in an integrated way creates efficiency, transparency, and significant synergies.

“At the same time, discussions about full-scope outsourcing are becoming more common. The goal is not just cost optimization, but above all operational development and improved production availability.”

Towards more productive maintenance

“The decision between outsourcing and strategic partnership should not be based on unit price alone. The real value comes from managing the whole and achieving goals together with the partner. A strategic partnership in maintenance is a powerful and profitable tool for developing a production site or business unit.”

If you are considering how maintenance could better support your business goals, get in touch with us. Together we can build a tailored strategic partnership model that strengthens competitiveness and supports growth.

Contact us – let’s design the right partnership model for your business.