Companies pursue various maintenance strategies to increase operational reliability and reduce costs.

• Reactive maintenance
• Preventive maintenance
• Predictive maintenance

One strategy is reactive maintenance, in which the machine is used to its limits and repairs are performed only after a machine failure.

For example, if it's a light bulb, it may make sense to take the reactive approach. On the other hand, if you have a complex system - with some very expensive parts - you can't risk running it to failure, as repairing badly damaged parts would be extremely costly. But more importantly, it's a matter of timely availability of the parts you need and safety.

For this reason, many companies try to prevent failures before they occur by checking their machines regularly. A major challenge in preventive maintenance is determining when maintenance should be performed.

Since you don't know when a failure will occur, you have to plan conservatively, especially if you operate safety-critical equipment. If you schedule maintenance very early, you'll waste machine resources that are still usable, which will increase your costs. However, if you can predict when a machine failure will occur, you can schedule maintenance right before it happens.

Predictive maintenance helps you estimate the time to failure. It also highlights problems in your complex machines and helps you identify which parts need repair. In this way, you can minimize downtime and maximize equipment life.

You may be wondering how easy or difficult it is to set up such a system to get these benefits. Of course, an initial investment is required because you need to develop a procedure that predicts a time window that shows you in how many days your machine will be down and when you need to perform maintenance.

In the next blog post, we'll show you the steps to building a predictive maintenance system. Stay tuned!