Why Prevent When You Can Predict? Affordable PdM Has Arrived

By Saar Yoskovitz, CEO and co-founder of Augury

Many facilities managers use Preventive Maintenance (PM) to reduce losses from unforeseen downtime. While helpful in managing regular inspections and keeping up on maintenance, PM is fundamentally still a run-to-failure approach. It  attempts to extend runtime as long as possible, while hoping to catch failures in time to schedule repairs. Failures are just minimized to the point of being palatable.

Emerging affordable Predictive Maintenance (PdM) technologies bolster maintenance routines by filling the gaps. These technologies can take uptime to new levels by evolving maintenance into a more proactive activity. Technicians can find unforeseen failures during regular maintenance instead of having them to occur between inspections. For the first time, this powerful suite of predictive tools is affordable to mid-market organizations.

How Predictive Maintenance Fits Into PM

Beyond simply hoping to detect problems serious enough to be noticed during human inspections, PdM employs sophisticated measurement equipment and software to identify upcoming breakdowns well in advance of an actual outage. Trained technicians use oil samples, vibration measurements, and thermal imaging to collect precise data about the condition of equipment. Analysis of these data can identify the warning signs of leaks, wear, and bearing failures, among others.

These predictions allow maintenance personnel to schedule downtime for proactive equipment maintenance, resulting in lower emergency labor and downtime costs for the facility. Downtime can be minimized by ensuring that needed parts are on-hand before equipment is taken off-line, and consequently fewer spare parts need to be kept on-hand. This information is also precise enough to enable a kind of maintenance triage, where the most critical repairs can be scheduled first, and less-critical failures can be postponed until a time more suitable for the scheduled outage.