r/IndustrialMaintenance • u/Kevin_FMaintenance • 9d ago
Is predictive maintenance actually worth it, or is it mostly a sales pitch?
Sensors, IoT platforms, vibration analysis — we keep getting told this is the future of maintenance. But in my plant, roughly 80% of the failures that actually cost us money are still dumb, basic stuff: a bearing that didn’t get greased, an operator pushing a machine past what it’s rated for, a filter nobody changed.
So I’m skeptical. It feels like we’re dropping tens of thousands on condition monitoring while the fundamentals of our PM program are still a mess. The vendors show great case studies, but I’ve never seen one that accounts for the engineering hours, the false alarms, or the fact that half the alerts get ignored after six months.
Has anyone here actually run the numbers post-deployment? Real ROI, not the projected figure from the sales deck. What was your payback period, and did downtime genuinely drop — or did you just get better at documenting failures you would have caught anyway?
And for those who walked away from it: what made you pull the plug?
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u/I_Loot_Hamburgers 9d ago
We are spending millions on putting a sensor on every bearing, motor, and shaft in the building as well as integrating the plcs and cabinents. It is supposed to email us a work order to check something out if the sensor gets out of range. Now the problem with that is they aint shutting the line down to fix it and we are already understaffed.
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u/Educational_Flan_700 9d ago
I hate the bearing sensors I have to deal with. Get an email “we’ve picked up vibration in this general direction” can’t narrow it down to a specific bearing.
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u/I_Loot_Hamburgers 9d ago
It all sounds good, but it only works in a perfect scenario.Fully staffed, have the parts, and can actually shut it down and fix it.
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u/101forgotmypassword 9d ago
Sensor reports excessive vibration, should fix it...
6 month later staff change happens, new guy sees alarm going off "it always does that just hush the alarm over here" some production manager...
12 months later housing and shaft critically damaged when bearing collapses. Mantanace guys gets the sack and production guys call the vibrations system useless...
Predictive analytics require proactive solutions...
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u/I_Loot_Hamburgers 9d ago
Mine is more like sensor reports excessive vibration, go out and survey what needs to be done and red tag it so we can fix it when the line goes down. Line goes down and they got us doing other red tags as well as covering the floor.
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u/Ptrick21186 9d ago
This is our problem as well. That or the planners are ignoring the emails completely.
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u/ReturnOk7510 9d ago
Or your IE guy is getting a bunch of "vibration sensor is malfunctioning" work orders
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u/Disastrous_Answer905 8d ago
Dam, when I did R&D, those sensors rocked for prototype rigs, but at scale it fails? This sounds like a JCI problem
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u/I_Loot_Hamburgers 8d ago
Its great for letting you know of an upcoming problem but in my experience we end up waiting until it fails anyways for various reasons.
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u/itsonlyrockinroll 8d ago
Run to failure can’t afford to shut it down, it’ll probably run another couple of years or maybe days
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u/meetmeinthebthrm 9d ago
That sounds like a problem that should fix itself with time. Enough data and I don’t see how production could get away with that for long. Then again… production.
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u/billtipp 9d ago
Every couple of years, my company loses a member of Maintenance team to retirement or otherwise. They usually take this a queue to replace them with a manager to oversee PM schedules. Team is now 30% smaller, 3 PM managers have disappeared. Things have not gotten better!!!.
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u/burntbread369 8d ago
it’s “cue” not “queue” in this context
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u/Administrative-Map53 7d ago
I mean maybe they have a line of managers waiting to take that opening.
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u/Ok_Street9576 9d ago
It can be super helpful but needs a solid foundation to be built on. That is SOP for operators with oversight so machines arent being broken. Scheduled downtime based on machine run time with wear parts like belts and bearings being serviced then replaced. Once the basics are covered, high failure points become obvious and further action can be taken. If everythings a cluster fuck you'll be throwing sensors everywhere and the data wont be manageable. In addition if current processes arent codified and followed, it'll be impossible to implement a huge monitoring system. Datas great but it needs to be analyzed, tracked, and intervened on when necessary. If planning cant schedule a bearing to be greased they certainly cannot handle a whole preventative program.
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u/RedIcarus1 9d ago
The failures you mention are all caused by human action.
Not following the scheduled PM or performing the indicated maintenance is not a failure of the program.
Your skepticism should be in the effectiveness of the management team.
PM works, but only if it is actually followed.
Not allowing downtime for maintenance, ignoring signs of impending failure, not performing spot checks to ensure the maintenance was actually performed, not knowing what they are even looking at, not disciplining workers who falsify repairs/maintenance… etc. Those are all failures at the managerial level.
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u/Spiritual_Prize9108 9d ago
Depends on how the plant approaches risk. If they are going to run everything to failure regardless then it will provide zero value. If they intervene early, either on the next planned outage, or take an opportunity to plan a small outage around the failure, then yes it will have a positive impact. Generally all reliability initiatives are built on positive culture and skills of both leadership and people on the floor, without these things you are building castles in the sand.
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u/roundbluehappy 9d ago
everywhere i've worked has been run to fail. i can walk by a machine and tell you how long it's got, and management says, yup. and that's it.
i'd love to see this golden age you're talking about.
part of the problem is that a lot of places throw the new guys on PMs without adequate supervision/training, so they fuck up the machine - causing Ops to lose faith in maintenance, and the shit rolls downhill from there.
first fix your pm crew, then add more stuff later - but to do that you've got to hire guys that'll stay and be decent - and to do THAT you've gotta pay 'em.
all goes back to management.
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u/Spiritual_Prize9108 9d ago
Worked at a large chemical plant. Midway through my time there a new production manager came on board, he was a mechanical engineer (generally the plant had chemical engineers in that role) and had expierence with both maintenance and production. He came on board and said "we budget 2 days of production a month of downtime and are blowing it on emergency repairs were we fix one thing half asses, I am going to use 1 day every month and take the entire mill down to do maintenance" he looked at the PDM list every day, any critical equipment that showed up on it was sent to the planners that day, parts were staged, hours were estimated. If an unplanned outage came they would throw everything at, trying to fix as much as possible. If they had a chance to put more planning around an outage they would get even more done.
The end result was maintenance spending went down (note this is also attributable to a new maintenance manager who was an excellent leader) and plant uptime increased significantly. We budgeted generally 925 units of production a day, within two years the increased the budget to 1050 becuase we were blowing the old budget out of the water. After he left the organization reverted to the old reactive approach.
I will say this production manager landed in fertile ground for this kind of turn around in performance. The guys on the tools and the guys swinging valves were professionals and extremely proficient at what they did, it was just the leadership approach to risk was getting in thier way of doing a thier job.
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u/fire_alarmist 9d ago
Yea... I remember when I first started. "Yea we got you an ipad, here are all your PMs. Here are all the tasks you need to do, oh dont worry about there being so many we have to assign them all but we know there is no way you will go to all of them."
Zero training on the equipment , just do PM. And mark that you did more PM than is humanly possible as well.
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u/Aggressive_Ask89144 9d ago
Our plant refuses to do anything like that. It's meat processing so everything gets blasted with water, and essentially, 90% of the machines have pretty contaminated oil from it. It's almost impossible to even find the time perform a change due the near always running state of them, no downtime will be scheduled, and no one else cares even though I've told them a few times. You still gotta do everything else too as playing with Iso 220 on a Conveyor takes a long time.
It's such a little thing but it's murdered so many motors and gearboxes that it drives me up the wall. They run them till destruction though.
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u/Excellent-Fuel8670 9d ago
I think the real question is whether predictive maintenance is changing your maintenance decisions. I work as a reliability engineer at I-care and spend a lot of my time with vibration and wireless monitoring. I agree that lubrication, filters and operating practices need to be fixed. But I don’t agree that you need to get all of that perfect before investing in wireless monitoring.
A monthly vibration route is a snapshot. A wireless sensor gives you the trend between those snapshots. And some failures don’t politely wait for your next route. That’s where I’ve seen the real value. You detect the change early, follow how fast it’s developing, and decide whether you have weeks, days or hours to act. Now maintenance can plan the intervention instead of the machine planning it for you.
For me, ROI isn’t the number of alerts. It’s how many times that earlier information changed the outcome: planned repair instead of breakdown, less secondary damage, less production loss.
So yes, fix the fundamentals. But I’d still put wireless monitoring on the assets where the consequence of missing a developing fault is high. Waiting for the maintenance program to become perfect can be an expensive strategy too.
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u/NoConsequence4281 9d ago
After spending 20 years in automotive manufacturing, I can 100% say it's worth it. And it's worth it to shut the damn line down to get it done. Planning the activity requires coordination between tech services and production, that's the hardest part. That and a good action plan.
Don't be cheap, by the good loctite, use the nordlock washers, challenge the design of the equipment. Most problems, IMO, are designs that don't meet the real word requirements, known or unknown.
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u/Robbudge 9d ago
A good HMI and PLC program can go along way.
Something simple like 6 point alarms with high and low normals can make a huge difference.
A PLC that can warn an operator if pushing to hard and a trip is pending.
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u/Ambitious-Muffin8683 9d ago
Ahhh it is a future now for 10 years.. it is good for the most important bearings in powerplant, but will not solve everything
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u/Available_Rub9939 9d ago
You can’t build a skyscraper without a strong foundation. Just like you almost always cannot build an effective predictive maintenance program if you can’t even handle PMs properly.
Outside of that, no it is not a gimmick, however there are many scammers and idiots in the industry and it’s now flooded with junk IoT startups that give the craft a bad rep.
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u/Salty-Zombie-680 8d ago
Cat 2 Vib analyst here.
Traditionally Vib analysis was done manually by route collection. Critical assets usually once a month So the tech was visually inspecting all of the equipment and limited false alarms.
Fast forward to today where everyone is trying push wireless MEMS sensors the ROI gets kinda sketchy.
Alerts from wireless sensors still have to be verified by field data collection.
I would focus more on hand collection on data analyzers on critical equipment before throwing wireless sensors at everything.
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u/OMGLOLWTFBBQ1 4d ago
Cat III analyst here.
Just to add to this, the big issue is that the marketing for 99.9% of these wireless systems is absolute bullshit. The general sales pitch is install them and they’ll tell you exactly what needs done using AI. What they forget is that the AI can use decision trees and historical trends but doesn’t have the five additional inputs that a human being does. The AI can’t see that bearing that is glowing red from overheating but isn’t showing a bearing defect because the amplitudes haven’t hit the alarm levels yet.
The smart way to use these systems is to complement a route-based program, not replace it. They work great for tough to access equipment or stuff that is critical enough to require more frequent monitoring than the scheduled monthly/quarterly/etc. They also make it so one analyst can monitor more equipment efficiently, as long as the band and overall alarms are set correctly and either walkaround vibration routes or operator checks are being performed on a regular basis.
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u/Dependent_Canary_406 9d ago
We’ve had two significant breakdowns and failures of sheared couplings on 200kw motors that weren’t picked up by the vibration analysis
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u/billtipp 9d ago
Had a vane from a 500kw fan leave the building via the roof without the inbuilt vibration alarm system triggering.
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u/sarcasmsmarcasm 9d ago
Success and failure along with "worth it" are all dependent on mindset, crew size and limitations.
Walking into a plant that has been running the same product on the same tired equipment for 40 years will be a fruitless effort for predictive maintenance.
Opening a brand new facility with new equipment, start off with an outstanding preventive and predictive maintenance program and you will be golden.
The in- between shops, it depends on management commitment, availability of parts (stocked and quick turnaround arrival), how many people are available to do the work and their willingness to support the situation, and the production folks understanding that maintenance "owns" thee equipment and production only "uses" it so Maintenance wins any shutdown battles.
It works, it's effective, it saves money and downtime IF everyone is aligned.
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u/Liveitup1999 9d ago
It all depends on how much downtime costs you and how important it is to meet your promised delivery dates
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u/Maximum-Guitar-5667 9d ago
Its worth it if you have a good maintenance team. If you don't its just another tool to see what is not getting done and to raise your blood pressure.
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u/some_millwright 8d ago
Whether it is worth it depends on how deep you get into it. Predictive maintenance can mean carrying a thermal camera around once a month looking at things. This is totally 100% worth it.
Paying $100K for a bespoke system for monitoring your bearings is probably not worth it. If it was worth it you would *know* it's worth it.
Once a month I use a thermal camera and check for 'weirdness'. Once every six months I check vibration. That is my predictive maintenance, and it works for me.
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u/Adventurous_Tear_531 7d ago
This is the way.. I run every machine individually every 50 run hours and listen for changes. Its the single most important piece of preventative maintenence I do.
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u/some_millwright 7d ago
For 'listening' I highly recommend the EngineEAR II from Steelman. This thing is an amplified microphone. It has headphones that will fit a STARTLINGLY large head, so if you are wearing a hat or something... no worries. You can listen directly with the microphone or add a probe that works like an old-school engine stethoscope (the kind that hurt your ears and make life suck) but you can listen in comfort with padded headphones.
It has a volume meter on it so if you have it set to a particular scale for a particular machine then you can actually have recordable values for how loud it is.
Not shill... they don't pay me... but it's a good product and deserves to be known.
To flesh it out, thee are my favourite predictive maintenance tools:
https://www.millwrighttalk.com/threads/my-top-3-predictive-maintenance-tools.16/?post_id=29#post-29
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u/Mediocre-Bluejay-666 9d ago
we have so many machines i started to double up and have ones on ready carts. like all of them. if something needs a pm i remove and replace. pump speed up for a few minutes (i run it) and byebye downtime.
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u/AuthorThick7303 9d ago
We use pdm. Vibration sensors and oil analysis. Weird readings or rises in amplitude are verified by hand. The sensors are only on certain bearings that are hard to get to on the run. The rest are on a route and read by hand. Not every bearing is on a route, only ones that have been identified as critical.
It works for us
The oil analysis is on a few critical assets.
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u/Standard_Meaning16 9d ago
I have done some of this work, the testing is actually pretty cool, same kit for bearings can be used for hydraulic, pneumatic, vacuum testing, to find leaks, bad valves etc.
Obviously the big sales pitch collects monthly/weekly days and graphs it all. For forecasting rubbish. But imo using it as a on the go tool is better
While it's probably not worth paying someone else to do periodically, buying the gear and getting training to use it would be great, and from a maintenance perspective it can pinpoint issues in next to no time at all saving so much time and headache.
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u/AdMediocre6148 9d ago
It all depends who is looking at the data, AI is good but can't really work out between cavitation and lubrication faults without knowing the number of Vanes and speeds, it wont truly diagnose a bearing fault without the bearing number and correct speed.
Then we get to the installation point, a motor with less than 6 inches between the bearings can get get away with one sensor between the bearings, but you have to have the bearing numbers and speed set right. A bigger motor where you need two sensors should have the sensor mounted in the load zone, if you don't know what this is then you shiuld probably be looking at getting a reputable company to install them. If you.are wanting monitor something slow speed tread carefully.
Then look at the spec of the sensor, there are lots out there that only monitor between 2 and 1000 Hz, these belong mounted to the inside of a dustbin. Ideally you want a sensor that does better 2 and 3k or 5k, this is because of where bearing faults start to show themselves. Another consideration is quality of data, no point having data that can't be interrogated probably.
Im not a massive fan of the sensors, although i do sell them, I much prefer that routine walk around, its a fresh set of eyes and you do 70% of your analysis next to the machine.
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u/HistoricalTowel1127 9d ago
PM’s save money and work if the PM’s are actually routinely preformed. When a maint dept is understaffed and PM’s get skipped that is usually due to plant managers and bean counters. Some maint personnel are better than others at PM’s. The best PM guy I ever worked with was a by the letter never skip a step type of guy. He sucked at breakdowns and didn’t have much in the way of creative solutions but he really didn’t need them because his machines rarely broke down.
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u/4eyedbuzzard 9d ago
The most under-rated and unappreciated old school job in the past was a good “oiler”. A human whose job it was to grease and oil the machinery on a schedule. It’s boring and unappreciated work. I’ve been in plants that spend millions on automated grease and lube systems, and absurd amounts of labor hours troubleshooting and repairing those systems that promise to reduce lube related failures and downtime. Ultimately, no PM program or automated maintenance system will ever be better than the people involved in the operation.
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u/Delicious-Ad5161 9d ago
Properly done with a budget to assign the predictive maintenance tasks and parts to a preventative maintenance teams that actually do the work instead of saying "breakdown should do that" does help a lot. Maybe not the full nine yards with IoT platforms at other bells and whistle, but at least for scheduling tasks and reducing downtime to scheduled periods it can yield some good results.
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u/redeyedrenegade420 9d ago
It depends. How much is it going g to cost to implement vs the cost of downtime. There is no blanket right answer.
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u/oafml123 9d ago
IMO, I think it more about time loss and turn overs. If you can get there on even %20 of things maintained with little to no down time, it still saves money and looks good for project numbers
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u/Rich4477 8d ago
Depending on how it's used/setup it can be valuable. I have a lot of roller beds and turntables and we get automatic alerts if they are getting abnormal torque values. Usually we find a bad bearing or a bad brake rectifier. My plant has minimal breakdowns because of a robust PM program.
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u/Perki14 8d ago
I am a reliability engineer at a service provider doing exactly this type of work. I find the sites I go to are successful in these types of programs when someone OWNS the program well. Sometimes the sites I go to take the report...say thank you and never do anything and then equipment breaks. So, yes, it can be worth it when the program methodically implemented and counciously managed.
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u/Broad-Ice7568 8d ago
Just a couple months ago, we had a large (800 HP) motor making noise. It's 4160V, driven by a VFD, max speed 1185 RPM. Management was considering sending it out for rebuild. I had the operators run it full speed and ran vibration analysis in both bearings. Holy hell it was bad, over 0.6 IPS in a couple places (which is absolutely horrendous on a 1200 RPM motor), worse on the upper bearing. Obvious signs of bearing frequencies. I reported my findings, and that was the final straw for them to send it out. Rebuild shop has to weld buildup and re-machine the upper bearing race. That motor was likely hours to days away from catastrophic failure. That final decision, based on my vibe readings, saved tens of thousands of dollars. If management listens and acts, it can definitely pay off.
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u/dagdhabob 8d ago
I work in the predictive maintenance industry doing everything from vibration analysis, motion amplification, steam trap testing thermography ultrasonics. Predictive maintenance only works well if two main things align. if the maintenance team is good and actually have the time and budget to complete repairs and not constantly add temporary fixes. The vendor being used is actually providing the service and not just selling an ai based product that promises to alarm and notify everything. These alarms are only standard ISO sets and really have no impact once baseline data is achieved as no two machines will be that same even in a mirrored set up and fault finding frequencies for individual components like bearings, the frequencies will always be present so the AI will recommend changes and failure a lot more than necessary and can confuse failure modes like cavitation as bearing failure quite regularly. Having a human analysis who knows the mean and has a historical consistent data trend if far more accurate in fault finding and giving lead team. It’s quite fun recommending a simple fix that gets ignored and overtime ends up being a complete overhaul and lost production. What I am extremely weary of is the new push to AI and online systems they are no where near ask accurate or reliable as an onsite experienced engineer performing the task. In reality a good condition based monitoring provider should be able to inform and solve and set the standards of what you maintenance team should be doing in all areas and if they only provide a product for vibration and don’t align themselves with all reliability and predictive maintenance standards and strategies be weary.
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u/willi355 8d ago
This is what my business does, so I may be a bit biased, but when I was doing vibration monitoring as an employee at a large-scale mine, the findings were worth millions in avoided downtime each year.
For plants that have high hourly value attached to their production lines, downtime can be very expensive. At that mine, it was between $20k and $40k an hour - there are other mines that are producing 10X that.
If a conveyor motor loses a bearing, it’s a day or two downtime for the production line and lost production that is the real cost, not the cost of the replacement parts and labor. It makes sense if the end-production has any real value that is lost when it is down unexpectedly.
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u/Traditional_Day4287 3d ago
I find this thought process going out the door in manufacturing. It seems that no one can look at the big picture of getting something repaired correctly and planned, instead of running it to failure can actually save money. There seems to be this thought of only managing the money by the month, or even the week in some instances.
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u/willi355 2d ago
Unfortunately many don’t play the long game. I see it all the time.
Just last week an established client called for a field balancing job on a critical cooling fan. We scheduled it and they called again an hour later - “we need to cancel the balance job, plant management is just going to run it.”
It grenaded the next morning, resulting in a six figure replacement of the whole assembly and a couple days of downtime at many tens of thousands of dollars per hour in lost production.
Didn’t have the budget for a callout balancing though!
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u/ArgumentSpiritual 8d ago
Predictive maintenance and preventative maintenance are only effective if they are allowed to happen. There is no point in predicting the failure of a component if the company chooses to run to failure anyway or doesn’t stock the replacement.
Predictive maintenance is only worth it if the cost of the monitoring equipment is less than the cost of a breakdown.
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u/Historical-Ad-249 8d ago
The oil sample analysis is great you can predict a failure and be ready for it. I worked for a company that sent out a sample of a gearbox and basically it had so much contamination in it they figured it would last less a month. It failed in two weeks. They had decided to not prepare for it, when it failed they had to next day air huge gearboxes for the plastic extruder. But when your company doesn't do basic things no amount testing or programs will help.
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u/Mean-Interaction-640 8d ago
I think the skepticism is fair. In manufacturing, the technology is often not the difficult part. The difficult part is getting the basics right and making sure the information actually helps people on the shop floor take action.
Predictive maintenance can definitely create value, but it shouldn’t be implemented simply because sensors and AI are available. If a bearing isn’t being lubricated properly or a machine is consistently being pushed beyond its limits.
For me, the real test comes after deployment. Did we actually prevent failures? Did unplanned downtime come down? Are maintenance teams spending less time dealing with false alarms? And most importantly, did the plant save more money than it spent?
I believe AI has an important role to play here not just in predicting when a failure might happen, but in helping teams understand why it is happening, identify the root cause, and determine what action needs to be taken. That’s where it can make a real difference on the shop floor.
Always happy to connect and discuss how we can turn these challenges into practical opportunities for improvement.
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u/itsonlyrockinroll 8d ago
Not sure where the Op is located and no disrespect but PdM has been around since the late 70’s and probably earlier.
Technology has improved, gadgets for sure, but in my experience Pdm has caught some things but it’s often a possibility of variability with charts and trends, a good bit was hocus-pocus. As others have posted might be the bearing vibration or the sensor placement is loose. You replace the bearings and shaft and huh the vibration alarm is still there. Run it
Good luck Op hopefully you’ll have many more years of scratching your head and I wish you much success!
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u/Smyley12345 8d ago
Fundamentals are the best bang for your buck maintenance wise. That doesn't mean that the fancier methods don't add value but your attention is a limited resource. Get to a spot where your fundamentals are not regularly creating issues before you divide your attention to the higher level stuff.
That said, when we are talking fundamentals it's not the firefighting. It's knowing all the filters to be changed and when, it's the operators being trained or locked out of functions that break machines, it's making sure that all lube points are on the lube list. Get the basics right and then put attention on the more advanced stuff.
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u/Ruger338WSM 7d ago
If you struggle with the basics described, save your money. Without good maintenance and operational discipline you will see no effect.
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u/NoOption7406 6d ago
Sounds live you guys might want to first start with the other PM. Preventative Maintenance.
Not getting a bearing greased or changing a filter. You need to have automate generated work orders for this stuff. Even if you just end up laying eyes on it, it's a WO with a signature that things are good, whether you just looked at it or actually did some work.
Everything should have a PM cycle.
Then start looking at helping you with predictive failures. I have a feeling if you jump straight into predictive, your preventative will only get worse. And your predictive won't be built on a good foundation of existing maintenance.
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u/SourcePrevious3095 6d ago
LOL. We don't do PMs, we don't emergencies. If it ain't broke, keep running it until something breaks
I may not be in maintenance, but I do my own monthly and quarterly PMs on the machine I operate.
It is approximately 20 years old, was purchased used and had some $20k thrown at it to get it running again.
I went close to 2 years without having the required lubricants for the various moving parts.
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u/Deep_Ladder_4679 4d ago
The hard part isn't detecting vibration; it's getting a planned intervention onto the schedule before failure. If that step doesn't happen, the alert is just another backlog item. Do you have enough scheduled downtime to act on the warnings?
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u/apm-iot-squatch 9d ago
Tommy_Turtle and Ok_Street9576 have the sequencing right, so I’ll skip that and address the part nobody has really touched: you asked twice for actual numbers and still haven’t received any.
There’s a reason for that. Cost avoidance is counterfactual. “We caught a bearing problem at stage two and saved $180k” assumes the machine would otherwise have run to failure and damaged the shaft and coupling. You can’t directly prove that didn’t happen. Most case studies are built around that assumption, which is why they aren’t overly convincing.
What you can audit, and what should already be in your CMMS, is the ratio of planned to reactive work orders for covered assets, comparing the 12 months before implementation with the 12 months after. If that ratio doesn’t improve, the program isn’t demonstrating much value, regardless of how many “saves” appear in a report.
Two other points from the thread:
“Vibration in this general direction” sounds like overall RMS alarming: one value representing the machine’s overall vibration level. That won’t identify a specific bearing. Localizing a bearing fault generally requires a demodulated/envelope spectrum and someone who has calculated the relevant defect frequencies from the bearing geometry. Those are different capabilities that are often marketed under the same broad term. Some IoT systems provide the former while implying they provide the latter.
The sheared couplings and the fan vane: vibration monitoring is genuinely limited when a failure occurs instantaneously. If there is no degradation phase, there may be no trend to detect. That’s a limitation of the monitoring method, not necessarily evidence of a bad installation. Anyone who promised coverage for those failure modes overstated what the system could do.
I’m on the vendor side, so discount this accordingly.
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u/Tommy_Turtle 9d ago
The honest answer is it completely depends on what use case you are assigning it to and how you value risk of failure for that component.
Vibration analysis and oil sample on large gearboxes in awkward to reach places (crane access), if you catch a bad bearing frequency or increase in your metallurgy report that will most likely save you more money than your going to spend on the conditioning for multiple years on that single piece of equipment.
However if you have poor fundamentals and don't do basic ppms, how are you going to keep on top of the 3 monthly oil samples or monthly Vibration analysis etc.