European operators are buying predictive maintenance capability, not “technology”

Watch the tenders long enough and you stop looking for buzzwords. You look for the quiet shifts: what buyers ask for, what they stop asking for, and which requirements have moved from “nice to have” to non-negotiable. Across European rail infrastructure procurement, the direction is increasingly clear. Operators are moving away from buying isolated monitoring pilots and toward procuring predictive maintenance capability that can survive reality: live operations, constrained track access, complex governance, and the slow grind of asset decision-making. Across European rail, tenders related to infrastructure monitoring are increasingly written less like shopping lists for hardware and more like specifications for capability.

One signal is the move toward longer-horizon frameworks and multi-year agreements that assume operational adoption rather than experimentation. In Belgium, Infrabel awarded KONUX a framework contract for condition monitoring of switches and crossings, explicitly tying it to the optimisation of maintenance and increased network reliability. That is procurement language with consequences: it implies the buyer expects a solution that can be delivered repeatedly, used consistently, and defended internally over time – not a one-off technology demonstration.

Another signal is how tenders define scope. You can see this shift in the open market. Increasingly, procurement documents describe end-to-end delivery – design, supply, installation, commissioning – rather than “equipment” in isolation. In Ireland, Iarnród Éireann’s current call for remote sensor monitoring is framed as the design, supply, installation, and commissioning of civil infrastructure remote and structural health monitoring systems. The important point is not that this is one tender for one operator; it is that the procurement framing treats monitoring as something that must be deployed and commissioned to an operational standard, not merely procured and trialled.

A third signal is the widening of procurement beyond sensing into decision support and asset management transformation. In parallel with monitoring procurements, operators are investing in the systems and partners required to turn condition information into maintenance execution. Iarnród Éireann’s procurement activity around intelligent asset management capability illustrates the same direction: connecting insights to planning and work delivery as part of a transformation programme rather than leaving monitoring stranded at the edge.

And then there are the cases where adoption is visible through deployment programmes that have already crossed the threshold into operational use. In Spain, trade coverage describes Adif using KONUX switch monitoring technology to support inspection, maintenance, and replacement decision-making. Again, the recurring logic: infrastructure managers are using condition intelligence to move the timing of interventions earlier and to prioritise maintenance more defensibly.

Portugal, too, is moving in this direction at the level of infrastructure strategy and technical development, with Infraestruturas de Portugal describing the development of predictive models and intelligent railway asset management tools, validated through pilots on the Portuguese network. While that is not itself a procurement notice for switch monitoring, it sits in the same family of institutional intent: shifting from episodic assessment toward predictive decision support.

Taken together, these procurements and programmes point to a common trend: operators are increasingly buying capability – durable, repeatable, operationally integrated – rather than buying “technology.” That changes what suppliers must prove. Success is less about feature lists and more about delivery competence: commissioning realities, data credibility over time, evidence from comparable networks, and the ability to support the buyer’s maintenance decision chain rather than merely producing dashboards.

The operational intent is not difficult to read between the lines: when monitoring moves into formal procurement, it signals that the buyer expects something durable enough to standardise. Operators are moving beyond questions of whether remote monitoring is possible and toward harder questions: how it integrates, how it scales, how it stays reliable over time, and whether insights can genuinely support prioritisation. That is the context in which KONUX participates in key European tenders. The market direction is visible: European operators are writing procurement in a way that assumes predictive maintenance is becoming part of infrastructure practice and they are increasingly selecting partners who can demonstrate they’ve delivered it before.