Predictive maintenance (PdM)

Who uses predictive maintenance?

Generally speaking, a maintenance manager and maintenance team use predictive maintenance tools and asset management systems to monitor impending equipment failure and maintenance tasks.

How is predictive maintenance used?

Let's say you have a pump on your production line. If this pump breaks, it will stall production until you can fix or replace it, which could take hours. Your asset management system can monitor the pump’s temperature. If its temperature rises past a certain threshold, you know the pump is under stress and could possibly fail soon. You can then schedule some time to perform preventive maintenance before a complete failure stops production.

Predictive maintenance software can notify the maintenance team of the stress on a specific machine. It uses predictive analytics to flag issues and lets the team know to set up preventative maintenance, which helps reduce costly downtime.

Advantages of predictive maintenance

Compared with preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance ensures that a piece of equipment requiring maintenance is only shut down right before imminent failure. This reduces the total time and cost spent maintaining equipment.

This brings several cost savings:

• Minimizing the time, the equipment is being maintained
• Minimizing the production hours lost to maintenance
• Minimizing the cost of spare parts and supplies

In addition to these advantages predictive maintenance also:

• Increase asset life: Regularly monitoring equipment health and addressing minor issues before they become major can extend the useful life of assets.
• Optimizes maintenance activities: Instead of routine or scheduled maintenance (which might be over or underdone), PdM ensures maintenance is carried out only when required, leading to efficient use of resources.
• Allows for better spare parts management: Knowing in advance what parts might fail allows for better inventory management, reducing the need for overstocking and ensuring parts are available when needed.

Disadvantages of predictive maintenance

By using predictive techniques, maintenance can be performed just in time to avoid unplanned downtime and improve equipment lifespan. While there are many advantages to this approach, there are also some disadvantages to consider:

• High initial costs: Setting up predictive maintenance typically requires investments in sensors, data analytics software, and sometimes even IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructure. For many companies, the upfront costs can be quite high.
• Complexity: Implementing predictive maintenance requires integrating different technologies and systems, analyzing vast amounts of data, and retraining personnel. This can introduce complexities that not every organization is equipped to handle.
• Over-reliance on technology: Just because the system predicts that a piece of equipment is fine doesn't always mean it is. There's always a risk of becoming too reliant on predictive data and ignoring other signs of equipment problems.

Predictive vs. preventive maintenance