Page 70 - Intro Predictive Maintenance

Benefits of Predictive Maintenance 61

4.1 PRIMARY USES OF PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
When used properly, predictive maintenance can provide almost unlimited benefits;
however, when the scope of the program is artificially limited by the scope or work
or restrictions imposed by the plant, the benefits may be substantially reduced. Typi-
cally, predictive maintenance is implemented for one of the following reasons:

• As a maintenance management tool
• As a plant optimization tool
• As a reliability improvement tool

4.1.1 As a Maintenance Management Tool
Traditionally, predictive maintenance is used solely as a maintenance management
tool. In most cases, this use is limited to preventing unscheduled downtime and/or
catastrophic failures. Although this goal is important, predictive maintenance can pro-
vide substantially more benefits by expanding the scope or mission of the program.
As a maintenance management tool, predictive maintenance can and should be used
as a maintenance optimization tool. The program’s focus should be on eliminating
unnecessary downtime, both scheduled and unscheduled; eliminating unnecessary
preventive and corrective maintenance tasks; extending the useful life of critical
systems; and reducing the total life-cycle cost of these systems.

Benefits Derived from Maintenance-Only Use
A survey of 1,500 plants that had implemented predictive maintenance programs
solely as a maintenance management tool indicated a substantial reduction in poten-
tial benefits. Results of the survey disclosed that 85.9 percent of the plants are
currently using one or more of the traditional predictive maintenance technologies as
an active part of their maintenance management activities and that the remaining 14.1
percent planned to start a program within the next three years. Five years ago, the
reverse was true, with only 15 percent of surveyed plants using these technologies.
One can conclude from this statistic that most plants have recognized the potential of
predictive maintenance and have made an attempt to incorporate it into their main-
tenance management program.

Reasons for Implementation
The reason that plants implement predictive maintenance programs is also changing.
In earlier surveys, the dominant reasons for which predictive maintenance was imple-
mented focused on traditional maintenance issues, such as lower maintenance costs
and reductions in unscheduled downtime caused by catastrophic machine failure.
Although the companies polled in our May 2000 survey continue to cite these two
factors as primary considerations, several nonmaintenance reasons have been added.
Product Quality. Almost 77 percent (76.7%) of the respondents cited improved
product quality as a dominant reason their program was implemented. A few years