OREANDA-NEWS. Manufacturers are increasingly seeing maintenance as a strategic business function as they seek to reduce both maintenance costs and downtime, and increase asset lifecycles. Gone are the days where maintenance was seen as a "necessary evil"; manufacturers now have more alternatives than ever to employ a costly "run until it breaks" reactive maintenance strategy, or an inefficient "fix it regardless" preventative maintenance approach.

Together with Castrol, Roland Berger has been exploring the use of predictive maintenance technologies by manufacturers in order to co-write this thoughtpiece.

Our findings reveal that there are now emerging predictive maintenance solutions available that allow manufacturers to streamline maintenance operations by using asset condition data to predict impending failures and therefore schedule maintenance only when it is needed. Best-in-class manufacturing companies that have adopted these solutions to predict when equipment fail may have seen a reduction of unscheduled downtime to c. 5% lower than the industry average and an increase in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE ) of more than 8%.

Predictive technologies are evolving, and we are exploring this evolution and the benefits predictive maintenance could bring to today's manufacturers. As part of this we have looked at the practical barriers and challenges that need to be overcome to increase adoption in the manufacturing sector.