Sundeep V. Ravande, CEO of Innovapptive, leads innovation in AI-powered connected worker and execution-driven industrial AI solutions to improve industrial maintenance efficiency by solving visibility and collaboration challenges.
The industrial maintenance sector faces a significant challenge. Despite heavy investments in planning and scheduling, technicians typically spend only 25 to 30 percent of their time on hands-on tasks, known as wrench time. This persistent issue has drawn the attention of Sundeep Ravande, CEO and Co-Founder of Innovapptive, a company that specializes in connected worker solutions. Ravande argues that the conventional wisdom, that better planning leads to enhanced productivity, is flawed and often results in increased backlogs and frustrated technicians, rather than meaningful gains in efficiency.
Why Wrench Time Stays Low Despite Planning Efforts
For decades, industrial leaders have poured billions into complex planning tools and meticulous scheduling processes, assuming these investments would boost wrench time. However, Ravande highlights that this approach overlooks the underlying problems. Industry expert R. Keith Mobley notes that about one-third of every dollar spent on maintenance is wasted on unnecessary or poorly executed tasks. With over $200 billion allocated annually to industrial maintenance, this amounts to a staggering $66 billion loss. Ravande emphasizes the need to optimize maintenance labor, which accounts for approximately 42 percent of total maintenance expenses. Yet many organizations lack the systems to accurately measure, manage, and improve the factors driving this inefficiency in real time.
The Hidden Barriers: Visibility and Collaboration Challenges
Ravande identifies that the real issue causing low wrench time is not planning or scheduling, but gaps in visibility and collaboration among critical operational teams. He states, “It’s a visibility, transparency, and real-time collaboration problem between maintenance, operations, storerooms, and safety teams.” The reasons for lost wrench time are complex. Technicians may wait for spare parts due to visibility issues, face delays while awaiting instructions, or lose time because of safety permit requirements. These problems arise from disconnected departments that create bottlenecks, ultimately preventing meaningful productivity gains at the execution level. Ravande believes that without addressing these fundamental operational barriers, incremental changes to planning methods will have limited impact.
Why Traditional Planning and Scheduling Often Miss the Mark
In numerous organizations, planners tend to navigate around inefficiencies rather than eliminate them. This often results in reliance on estimates that produce unrealistic schedules. “You end up with unrealistic schedules that ignore reality,” Ravande asserts. Such guesswork undermines operational planning and can worsen the very issues it aims to fix. According to Ravande, a fundamental shift toward real-time, execution-level data and connected workflows is essential for effectively enhancing maintenance operations.
How Innovapptive Helps Industrial Companies Save Millions
A compelling case study demonstrates this transformative potential. A global chemical manufacturer challenged the status quo by implementing a strategy focused on real-time visibility and integrated communication across departments. By accurately capturing downtime and delay data, the company improved its scheduling practices, resulting in annual maintenance savings of $19 million. This success came not from better planning alone, but from first addressing the visibility and collaboration gaps that had long impeded productivity.
The opportunity extends well beyond a single site or isolated operational improvement. Based on the company’s broader global footprint, Innovapptive has also identified the potential to deliver savings exceeding $50 million across the company’s global operations, underscoring the larger enterprise-wide impact of execution-driven industrial AI and connected frontline workflows.
To accelerate this shift, Innovapptive has recently expanded its ecosystem through strategic partnerships with AWS, Seeq, and Dozuki, integrating advanced analytics, industrial data insights, and embedded workforce knowledge directly into frontline workflows. These partnerships are designed to close the gap between predictive insight and real-world execution, enabling organizations to act on data in real time rather than after the fact.
As industrial organizations face increasing pressure to do more with less, from workforce shortages to rising operational costs, the ability to connect frontline workers with real-time intelligence is becoming a competitive differentiator. Companies that can bridge the gap between insight and execution are not only improving efficiency but also redefining how industrial work gets done, shifting from reactive maintenance models to more proactive, data-driven operations.
Ravande’s message to industry leaders is clear: focus on the root causes of inefficiencies before further investing in planning and scheduling. Each percentage point increase in wrench time can mean millions in savings, making it crucial to address these fundamentals. Under his leadership, Innovapptive aims to assist asset-intensive companies globally in overcoming these challenges, reimagining traditional maintenance strategies, and achieving measurable operational advancements. Sundeep Ravande continues to innovate AI-powered solutions that enhance workforce efficiency and operational excellence in an ever-changing industrial landscape.
