A revolution is taking place in the field of maintenance, repair, and service: with the feedback that IoT technologies enable from the machine back to the upstream processes, not only is valuable information being fed back into the upstream processes. Completely new services and business models are becoming possible. On the way to the new service world, there are many intermediate destinations and advantages - if you know where you want to go.
Every machine is equipped with dozens of sensors, and the data flows seamlessly into a data lake where artificial intelligence fishes for anomalies and triggers alarms long before the failure actually happens. The service technician finds the right spare parts on site along with detailed descriptions of how to replace the parts. Meanwhile, the digital model of the machine has been updated and the machine is immediately fitted with modifications during maintenance that bring the machine up to date.
Many visions sound like this or similar when it comes to maintenance, repair, and digitalization. But realizing such a complete vision requires a lot of preparatory work and upheaval throughout the company. Significant improvements can be implemented, and the benefits of digitalization can be reaped with much less effort. Once the foundation has been laid, further steps can be implemented according to need and resources.
The individual stages of digital maintenance range from simple Reactive Maintenance, through Preventive Maintenance, Condition Based Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance, to Reliability Based Maintenance and Financially Optimized Maintenance. The latter makes a strategic contribution to corporate value creation. With each evolutionary stage, the effort required for implementation increases on the one hand, but on the other hand the advantages and opportunities offered by the maintenance strategy also increase. Currently, the higher levels are only very rarely found in practice, and many companies also only implement parts of the maintenance strategies described - the digital transformation in maintenance and service is a long process.
In the upcoming weeks, we will present the individual stages of the maintenance pyramid in separate blog posts in our series "Smart Information: Data makes maintenance intelligent". We will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the individual maintenance strategies and show ways to implement them.
In the next blog post, you will learn more about the first stage - Reactive Maintenance.
