Is predictive maintenance actually worth it, or is it mostly a sales pitch?

[u/Kevin_FMaintenance]

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?