What sort of data will make or break maintenance success?

Machine data is all the rage right now. Organizations are collecting up to 40 million data points from equipment every year and will spend over $18 billion on industrial sensors in 2020. What’s the cause of the obsession? Look no further than the desire to establish predictive maintenance, which has skyrocketed alongside purchases of IIoT tech.

But for all these investments, predictive maintenance is bound to hit a wall. And that’s because there’s one huge source of data that’s being overlooked: Work orders.

The average maintenance team handles over 2,200 work orders every year. And buried inside are thousands of insights into how maintenance is done and the impact it’s having on equipment, budgets, and beyond. Those insights represent thousands of opportunities to prevent something bad from happening, like a mistake that causes equipment to break, or the wrong part to be ordered, or an accident.

The success of your maintenance program, and perhaps your entire organization, could rely on the stories that work order data is telling you. But there’s one flaw with this plan: No one has the time to search through every task, field, and note to find that information. Even if you did have the time, where would you start?

That’s why, for all the tools and technology that measure and analyze asset data, one of the best investments for maintenance departments may be a system that automatically analyzes work orders. When you start to measure the success of your operation based on the success of your people, you begin to see how to empower those people. And those people will empower your business.