Everything you need to know about prescriptive maintenance and how to use it with Fiix

Maintenance teams are often looking to optimize their processes to extend the life of their assets and save on costs. Prescriptive maintenance (PxM) is a relatively new and proactive approach to maintenance that involves predicting an equipment’s maintenance needs, identifying the optimal maintenance actions required to prevent failures or further damage, and taking corrective actions based on these predictions. These corrective actions or corrective steps are often referred to as prescriptions.

In this blog, we’ll review prescriptive maintenance, its use cases and examples, its benefits, and discuss how Fiix conducts it.

What is prescriptive maintenance?

Prescriptive maintenance (PxM) is a proactive approach to maintenance that utilizes advanced analytics, machine learning algorithms, and real-time data to predict equipment failures before they occur. Unlike traditional maintenance strategies that rely on scheduled or reactive repairs, prescriptive maintenance aims to prevent downtime and optimize asset performance by prescribing specific actions based on data analysis.

Prescriptive maintenance use cases

Prescriptive maintenance can be applied to various industries, including manufacturing, transportation, and energy. Here are some use case examples by industry:

• Manufacturing: In manufacturing plants, prescriptive maintenance monitors machinery health and predicts potential breakdowns, ensuring uninterrupted production processes.
• Transportation and fleet management: Transportation companies use prescriptive maintenance to monitor vehicle performance, schedule timely repairs, and minimize unplanned maintenance costs.
• Energy and utilities: Energy companies leverage prescriptive maintenance to monitor power generation equipment, optimize maintenance schedules, and enhance overall operational reliability.

Examples of prescriptive maintenance

One example of prescriptive maintenance is vibration analysis. This technology uses sensors to detect machine vibrations that may indicate the presence of defects. By analyzing these vibrations, maintenance teams can accurately predict a breakdown, be prescribed a solution, and schedule preventive maintenance before equipment failure. Another example is infrared thermography. This technology analyzes infrared radiation to detect heat patterns that result from excessive friction or electrical resistance, which may indicate the presence of a defect. A solution will be prescribed to fix the problem, and the team can schedule a work order.

How does prescriptive maintenance work with Fiix?

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that our prescriptive maintenance features work in tandem with our Fiix Asset Risk Predictor (ARP) product. Fiix ARP is a complete predictive and prescriptive maintenance solution. It can be used alongside Fiix, or as a standalone product. Fiix ARP uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze the machine and process data you’re already producing and detect the risk of oncoming asset failure. Then, Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance takes it one step further by automatically creating detailed, AI-generated work orders when those potential failures are detected. With Fiix ARP, you can plan for failure days in advance instead of finding it during a scheduled inspection or responding to a sudden change in asset condition.

Fiix ARP also learns from your data and improves over time to predict failures even sooner, and creates more comprehensive work orders for your team. This can save your maintenance team a lot of time since they won’t need to generate work orders themselves with manual entry.

What are some of the use cases and benefits of Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance?

According to Mohammad Esmalifalak, Lead Data Scientist at Fiix, ARP and Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance can save maintenance teams hundreds of hours on work order creation. “Fiix ARP and Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance remove a lot of the time that technicians and maintenance managers spend filling out work orders digitally,” says Mohammad.

He added that things like safety and asset knowledge are better organized since Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance works by navigating asset histories, asset manuals, and technicians’ notes. But what happens if these sources of knowledge are only sometimes input into Fiix ARP for prescriptions?

“If the AI doesn’t see a specific safety step mentioned in the manuals or the past work orders, for example, it’s going to go into its knowledge base,” says Mohammad. But what does this knowledge base look like for the AI?

He adds, “We utilize an AI which ensures the security of our customer data by maintaining it within Rockwell’s cloud infrastructure.”

The AI creates a safety net with information for an asset, so the teams don’t need to worry too much about missing information, although it’s ideal to input the asset manual information and asset histories whenever possible.

Mohammad added that Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance’s true purpose is to obtain as much knowledge as possible about an asset and store it in a centralized place. This way anyone on the maintenance team can access it and understand the asset, how it works, its weaknesses, and its strengths.

Some additional benefits of Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance include:

• Improved reliability and availability of equipment
• Reduced maintenance costs through predictive maintenance planning
• Reduced downtime and losses associated with unscheduled maintenance activities
• Improved equipment usage through preventative maintenance activities
• Enhanced safety, as potential hazards are detected and addressed before accidents occur
• Fill knowledge gaps using existing CMMS data to provide tailored labor recommendations

Learn how to get ARP and Fiix Prescriptive Maintenance working for your operations (opens in new tab)

Prescriptive maintenance offers numerous benefits for teams looking to improve their maintenance practices

By combining data analysis, machine learning, and proactive maintenance techniques, maintenance teams can streamline their maintenance processes and achieve improved efficiency, reliability, and cost savings.