Maintenance strategies are often categorized as reactive (wait until it breaks), preventive maintenance (PM), reliability centered maintenance (RCM), risk-based PM, condition-based monitoring—otherwise known as predictive maintenance (PdM)—and prescriptive maintenance, which uses analytics—such as AI—to indicate equipment is headed for trouble, and can prescribe and prioritize mitigation and/or repair).
You may think you have a well-defined maintenance strategy in place, which for example, uses sensors to track bearing temperatures on a critical 200 hp motor and has operators informed on what to do when bearing temperatures rise. But a bad decision in taking action can do more than shut down a line; it could be disastrous. A good example is last winter’s Norfolk Southern freight train derailment with a hazardous chemicals spill and resulting fire in East Palestine Ohio. And you can’t say they didn’t have data.