ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS PREDICTIVE AND PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE Mani Nambiar, Emerson, Austin, Texas
Drive up plant production, quality with asset management programs Replace reactive and preventive maintenance with asset management strategies that use continuous monitoring, analytics and intelligent sensors to avoid failures, eliminate waste and strengthen operational resilience.
M Learning
Objectives
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•W ith the right asset management strategy, improved availability and reduced maintenance costs can be achieved simultaneously •P redictive maintenance costs less than reactive maintenance due to increased uptime and less unneeded servicing of assets in good condition •A ssets running at peak performance reduce energy costs, while driving increased throughput and higher quality.
odern reliability teams have come to understand that asset management is now a strategic imperative. Consequently, there is more urgency than ever to ensure that continuous operations remain truly continuous, with no unplanned downtime due to asset failures. Global markets are increasingly volatile. To stay competitive, organizations need continuous operations, peak availability and lower maintenance costs — simultaneously. On the surface, accomplishing both cost reduction and improved availability may seem to be a contradiction, especially in the face of shrinking teams and few reliability experts. However, with the right asset management strategy, improved availability and reduced maintenance spend reinforce each other. Predictive maintenance simply costs less than reactive maintenance and assets running at peak performance reduce energy costs and drive increased throughput and higher quality. Forward-looking teams are exploring ways to implement and/or improve their asset management strategies. However, in the wake of a digital transformation boom, executives face an overwhelming technology landscape with too many point solu-
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tions and seemingly unclear pathways to return on investment (ROI). As a result, many teams stall before they even begin implementation. Fortunately, there is a viable path forward and it is not nearly as challenging as many people think. By approaching asset management with strategic clarity, clear technology alignment and expert-driven deployment, reliability teams can shift from isolated experiments to an ROI-driven strategy.
Aligning assets and budgets Many organizations already have a preventive maintenance strategy in place for their reliability teams, following standard manufacturer recommended practices to ensure their assets receive the attention they need. However, relying solely on preventive maintenance comes with risks. First and foremost, in the era of workforce shortages and few available expert personnel, it can be easy for preventive maintenance schedules to slip when the right people are not available. If preventive maintenance is delayed or skipped, unnoticed asset issues can quickly turn into asset failures. Even if a plant stays perfectly on top of its preventive maintenance schedule, the reliability team may be spending too much time and money by over-maintaining assets. If an asset is overhauled on a regular cadence, regardless of need, the team may be using parts and initiating outages that are completely unnecessary, as the asset may have months or years of remaining lifespan in its cu rrent condition. Worse, disassembling an asset that is running well runs the risk of introducing issues where there were none before — and if that asset is not maintained again until the next scheduled cycle, that issue could become a failure before anyone can intervene. Plant engineering — www.plantengineering.com
7/28/26 10:14 AM