Condition-Based Maintenance: The Art of Predicting Problems Before They Happen

Imagine a world where production lines run smoothly at optimal levels all the time — because you know when your equipment may fail. This is the reality of a condition-based maintenance (CBM) approach. 

While CBM isn’t like peering into a crystal ball to see issues brewing in the future, it is exceptionally good at preventing cataclysms before they happen. This practice relies on performance indicators, measurements, and data to reveal potential problems, which gives your team enough time to intercept warning signs and spring into action.  

Keep reading to discover the various types, uses, and benefits of condition-based maintenance and how you can successfully implement this approach into practice. 

What Is a Condition-Based Maintenance System?

According to Reliable Plant, condition-based maintenance is a maintenance strategy that implements real-time monitoring practices to assess the real-time condition of an asset and determine what maintenance needs to be performed.”

Condition-based maintenance may be performed using predictive maintenance tools like sensors that provide around-the-clock monitoring of critically essential performance data, such as the temperature of a commercial freezer for a food manufacturer. Conditions like pressure, humidity, and vibration may indicate potential problems and impending failures. In addition, periodic tests or visual inspections can also trigger condition-based maintenance work orders.

Part of a complete maintenance program, condition-based maintenance works hand-in-hand with other maintenance strategies, including:

• Preventive maintenance that focuses on performing inspections
• Work based on a calendar or usage schedule
• Run-to-failure maintenance that waits for non-critical components to break down before replacing or repairing

UpKeep makes it easy to reinforce your condition-based maintenance practices and maintenance strategies with our:

• All-in-one CMMS and EAM maintenance software
• Edge Internet of Things (IoT) Sensor platform
• Various integrations with applications and KPI sensors 

Learn more about our condition-based maintenance management tool here. 

What Is the Difference Between Condition-Based vs. Preventive Maintenance?

While CBM is performed using real-time data analysis and triggers from KPI sensors and condition monitoring devices, preventive maintenance (PM) is a time-based maintenance practice based on a calendar schedule. 

PM is a scheduled approach to maintenance that involves analyzing historical asset data to create a program with specific set dates for planned equipment maintenance.

For example, a trimonthly oil change may be required for high-performing vehicular assets. This would be considered preventive maintenance. Whereas, CBM might use a monitor that tracks oil viscosity to tell you when the oils should be changed.  

CBM and PM may be used together, among other maintenance strategies, to create the optimal maintenance program for each asset and its various needs.

UpKeep allows businesses to implement, organize, and schedule multiple maintenance strategies on one easy platform. With our CMMS software, you can:

• Manage multi-location, day-to-day maintenance life cycles
• Optimize asset utilization and planned downtime
• Gain insights into real-time performance data
• Employ an ecosystem approach to your maintenance practice
• Bridge the gaps between maintenance, reliability, and operations
• And more

6 Types of Condition-Based Maintenance Systems

Given the variety of assets and equipment used in today’s manufacturing and production world, many types of condition-based maintenance exist. Some of the most common include:

#1: Vibration Monitoring 

By measuring the levels of vibration and frequencies of equipment, maintenance teams can determine the condition and performance of different assets and their components. This information can help technicians spot pre-failure issues such as worn-out bearings, resonance, imbalance, components that have become loose, and damaged shafts.

For example, rotating equipment tends to vibrate more as it ages, potentially affecting its performance, overall lifespan, and operators' safety. Vibration may become louder, more frequent, or faster before complete failure or a dangerous scenario occurs. Thus, vibration analysis can help spot issues before major problems or damage take place.

Reliability Maintenance Solutions advises, “When gathering data, you want to ensure you’re gathering the complete data set. In other words, you need to get a full vibration signature for the vertical, axial, and horizontal axes on the driven equipment and both ends of the motor and ensure that you can resolve any indications of failure from the components within the asset.”

#2: Infrared Thermography

Infrared thermography is a type of condition-based maintenance that uses a thermal imager to measure the amount of heat produced by a component or machine, and then visually displays that data for analysis. 

Ideally, a maintenance team has established baseline temperature levels for all critical assets, which can then be used to compare ongoing measurements. When a machine is overheated, this level will clearly exceed the baseline, alerting the team of potential problems.

Several different types of infrared thermometers can be helpful in various applications:

• Scanning systems: Unlike spot thermometers, infrared scanning systems can monitor larger areas, such as the area over a conveyor belt, for heat changes.
• Imaging cameras: These cameras can deliver a two-dimensional picture for further analysis by checking heat at various points within a larger area.
• Pyrometers: Also known as spot infrared thermometers, pyrometers are handheld radar guns that can check the temperature of a particular item. They work well for hard-to-reach assets such as bearings and belts, electrical room components, fluid-handling systems, or rotating motors. Pyrometers also use a field of view and distance-to-spot ratio.

#3: Ultrasonic Analysis

Instead of using heat, as infrared thermography does, ultrasonic analysis uses sound. These measurement tools can convert high-frequency tones to actionable data. 

For example, an organization may use contact or structure-dependent collection to detect potential problems in bearings, gears, or pumps, which will produce a high-frequency sound before failure. In addition, non-contact or airborne measurements can detect vacuum or pressure leaks within electrical or compressed gas systems.

#4: Oil Monitoring

Oil is often known as the lifeblood of equipment as it courses through critical components of a machine. Analyzing oil can provide insight into the asset’s performance and trigger condition-based maintenance activities. 

When checked regularly, oil can indicate whether an asset performs optimally, if additives are depleted, and whether contaminants are present. By checking oil properties and viscosity, a maintenance team can study which elements may be caused by corrosion or other mechanical degradation.

H3: #5: Electrical Analysis

Machinery tends to pull different amounts of electricity throughout its performance, and conducting a thorough electrical analysis can be another valuable tool in a condition-based maintenance program. 

KPI sensors can check the quality of incoming power by taking the current readings from a motor using ammeters. This alerts maintenance technicians to equipment that is pulling an unusually high amount of electricity.

#6: Pressure Monitoring

Poor pressure within assets that require gas, air, or fluid to move throughout their system means suboptimal performance, while abnormally high pressure can cause employee safety issues. 

Sensors that can monitor pressure around the clock send alerts immediately when pressure ranges are not met, allowing appropriate repairs to be performed before major failure or injury occurs.

When To Use Condition-Based Maintenance

Maintenance programs are diverse, and organizations must select the right balance of different types of maintenance to be most effective. 

Condition-based maintenance has its strengths and is best for applications that require constant or regular monitoring of a factor that can reliably alert technicians to impending failures. These should be critical assets required for optimal production line performance or employee safety. The most common applications are:

Temperature-Sensitive Assets

Temperature is a significant and easily measured indicator of equipment performance. It can be applied in a wide variety of situations. 

For example, ensuring a freezer remains within safe temperature ranges guarantees quality and safety in the food industry, keeping a motor within acceptable temperature ranges prevents overheating, and monitoring building temperatures can keep employees comfortable while conserving energy.

Pressure-Sensitive Applications

Sensors that can take continuous pressure readings are an excellent service to organizations that depend on assets that use pressured air, water, or gas for their operations. 

Pressure drops can detect tiny leaks immediately, and if high-pressure situations can be mitigated as soon as they occur, major damage and employee injury can be prevented.

Oil-Reliant Equipment

The most common assets that benefit from oil analysis condition-based maintenance are vehicles. 

Just as a regular car requires regular oil changes, so do fleet or other transport equipment. Instead of basing these oil changes on time or usage, analyzing the oil viscosity and particles can help better predict the life of the oil and when it requires replacement for optimal performance.

The Benefits of Using a Condition-Based Maintenance System

Implementing a condition-based maintenance component within your overall maintenance program can generate great benefits for your organization. Some key benefits include:

• Increased reliability: With CBM, your assets can essentially “tell” you when they are about to fail, so you’ll experience much higher equipment reliability.
• Decreased downtime: Effective maintenance strategies, like condition-based maintenance, may decrease downtime, which means your operators stay busy during their shifts and your equipment works optimally.
• Higher productivity: Long-term maintenance strategies lead to higher productivity, allowing more quality products to come off your lines, while keeping customers happy and revenue climbing.
• Reduced maintenance costs: Keeping your assets running smoothly is critical, but too much unneeded maintenance can be costly. CBM means you zero in on the problems that need to be fixed immediately, maximizing those maintenance dollars.
• Rapid failure identification: Since potential failures can be triggered by temperature or pressure sensors, you’ll be notified quickly of problems.
• Reduced unplanned failures: Scheduled maintenance tactics allow you to generate work orders for scheduled downtimes instead of shutting down a line for emergency maintenance.
• Improved safety: Since condition-based maintenance can “catch” problems before they become significant, you can minimize breakdowns that threaten your employees' safety.
• Increased asset lifespan: Left unchecked, small problems in equipment can not only cause bigger problems but also result in further damage and larger, more expensive repairs. Condition-based maintenance can mean adding years of life to critical assets.

How To Create the Ultimate Condition-Based Maintenance Strategy in 4 Easy Steps

Now that you understand the basics of condition-based maintenance, it’s time to take the next step and learn how to optimize it for your organization. Incorporating condition-based maintenance into an overall asset operations management (AOM) program will ensure your investment is well-spent with the people, processes, and technology aligned to optimize its benefits.

Step #1: Find Your Baseline

Measuring improvement is impossible if you don’t know where you’re starting. That’s why it’s important to be intimately aware of:

• Your critical assets 
• The things you can measure for optimal performance
• Your failure modes

Once you have that data, you can accurately calibrate your sensors and other analysis efforts to alert you to any potential failures as soon as they occur, allowing you to address them as quickly as possible.

Start by identifying which assets are the strongest candidates for condition-based maintenance. Ideal assets can be monitored effectively by one or more of the previously defined methods and can alert the maintenance team of potential problems with enough time to take cost-effective action.

Begin by establishing the baseline performance or acceptable ranges for the factors that you’ll be monitoring, such as:

• Minimum and maximum temperatures 
• Frequencies 
• Pressures

To set appropriate baselines, you may want to check the manufacturer's recommendations for certain assets or look at historical data for that piece of equipment. Once those are determined, implement the sensors or analysis programs you’ll use for monitoring.

Step #2: Create a P-F Curve

Since the potential failure (P-F) curve, also known as the bathtub curve, was created in the 1970s for United Airlines and the U.S. Department of Defense to help reduce losses and downtime, organizations have been using it to visualize the health of assets over time.

This curve, using an X-Y axis, shows a relationship between equipment deterioration, cost, and prevention. Toward the beginning of the curve, an asset may still be functioning fine but be entering the early stages of breakdown, which may trigger certain behaviors or cues. As time marches on, the chance or severity of failure becomes more significant, and the cues or triggers may become more frequent until the asset stops working altogether. 

The time interval between potential and predicted failure is where your condition-based maintenance must occur in order to be effective. This is the crux of a successful condition-based maintenance program.

UpKeep goes beyond allowing users to schedule work orders for repairs and maintenance. Our comprehensive solution can read data from your KPI sensors to trigger automatic work orders when parameters exceed the normal range. 

Step #3: Implement AOM Technology

Asset Operations Management (AOM) technology pulls together the best maintenance, operations, and reliability data and processes to help organizations make the smartest business decisions with complete visibility across the entire maintenance, asset management, and operations lifecycle. 

By utilizing AOM, companies can use manufacturer guidelines, performance, and historical repair data to decide what maintenance tasks need to be performed and how frequently. Then, an AOM software solution records sensor data, initiates necessary work orders, facilitates repairs, and logs completed work for an accurate asset history.

This information is readily available to the entire organization, allowing for ongoing analysis and asset-based decisions.

When AOM and condition-based maintenance work together, an organization can ensure the correct parts are available on time. Work can then be performed before major problems ensue, but not so frequently that precious resources are wasted.

With its capable maintenance management tool, UpKeep has revolutionized the way organizations manage their assets and maintenance strategies. By combining the power of all available maintenance strategies, we’ve created a maintenance tool that empowers users to use key insights to make informed management decisions. 

Step #4: Build the Right Culture

For AOM technology and condition-based maintenance to be sustainable and successful in the long run, you need to create the right culture and offer ongoing training to staff, technicians, and all employees. 

Technicians who understand their actions and attitudes about the value they individually contribute are important to CBM's success. They will not only be more effective in using the tools but will also seek opportunities to improve the entire process.

Training should be thorough and ongoing, explaining how condition-based monitoring can be implemented. Employees should understand how this concept applies to all critical assets, what they must do to ensure data is logged properly, and how important timely repairs are to preventing complete failure.

UpKeep understands the challenges of implementing a new maintenance management tool. According to market research, 70% of attempted CMMS implementations may fail. 

To combat this, we’ve designed our software to be intuitive, customizable, and easy to use. We also provide 24/7 support and various training programs to help you easily integrate this beneficial tool into your processes. Learn more about our approach to customer success here. 

Optimize Your Condition-Based Maintenance Operations With UpKeep

Condition-based maintenance requires clarity and organization to be effective. 

UpKeep allows you to master and manage your maintenance strategies from one comprehensive place. We’ve even made our solution mobile, so you can monitor your condition-based maintenance insights from anywhere and at any time.

With our software, you can:

• Achieve up to 652% ROI by integrating UpKeep into your workflow.
• Reduce maintenance response and work order completion times.
• Streamline communication with unlimited free requesters.
• Decrease equipment and asset downtime by up to 26%.
• Ensure consistent cost and budget records.
• Elongate your asset and equipment lifetime by up to 11%.
• And more!

Ready to ditch your old way of keeping up with your maintenance operations?

Employ UpKeep’s spectacular CMMS and EAM solution today.