Why Prescriptive Maintenance Should Be on Your Radar in 2023
It’s time for predictive maintenance to evolve. For years now we’ve been singing the praises of IoT powered predictive maintenance and its ability to detect faults in their nascent stages and prevent productivity destroying and financially costly shutdowns.
However, we are now increasingly seeing advanced field service providers take the concept to the next level and leverage the latest data analytics capabilities to add an extra layer of precautionary service to their predictive maintenance offering.
This evolution is known as prescriptive maintenance and it’s something every field service provider worth their salt should be considering as we move through 2023. Those who fail to adapt may find themselves being left behind by their more forward-thinking and innovative competitors.
What is Prescriptive Maintenance
Like its predecessor, prescriptive maintenance uses IoT sensors to collect conditional and operational data from assets and detect when faults are developing so they can be addressed in good order before they develop into more serious issues.
However, prescriptive maintenance takes the practice a stage further by using mathematical models to build recommendation trees which can help field service providers take action which will make the development of faults less likely to occur in the future. Prescriptive maintenance recommends actions and then calculates the potential outcomes which should result from those actions, allowing for a cycle of calculation and anticipation which feeds back into itself to improve asset lifecycle management.
For example, let’s say an asset has a varying bearing temperature. Predictive maintenance alone will inform you the likelihood of a failure given the temperature profile being used and can detect that failure when it begins to develop. Prescriptive maintenance practices will create recommendation profiles such as how reducing the speed of the bearings by a set amount will increase the time between potential failures.
So, whereas predictive maintenance which, despite its name, is still ultimately a reactive process, prescriptive maintenance helps prevent further issues before they are even conceived. Prescriptive maintenance does for your managed assets what partaking in regular cardio does for your chances of developing heart problems.
"While predictive maintenance is probably the best-known approach, there are other powerful ways to enhance a business’s maintenance-service organization and create value from analytics-based technologies,” says McKinsey. "A comprehensive look at all uses of IoT data and advanced analytics for maintenance purposes is therefore a crucial step in determining which technology – or combination of technologies – to employ.”
A Prescriptive Maintenance Framework
Researchers at the Swedish Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently published a paper for The 10th Aerospace Technology Congress where they suggest a framework for implementing and operating prescriptive maintenance.
The Smart Prescriptive Maintenance Framework (SPMF), though imagined specifically for the maintenance of aircraft, can be deployed by field service providers to enable prescriptive maintenance for any assets they are responsible for the management of.
The SPMF is built on three domains of interest which are universal for all field service operations – reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety. These factors cover the operating environment in which the asset is operated, the maintenance environment which performs tasks necessary for the service and repair of the asset, and its intended reliability characteristics. Time, cost, and health and safety concerns are treated as constraints which impact all the other domains.
Each of these domains contains essential information which will feed back into the algorithm to create a group of maintenance actions which will, according to the theory, reduce the likelihood of faults ever occurring – describing the inputs and outputs required at each phase and their expected outcome.
"This work proposes the Smart Prescriptive Maintenance Framework (SPMF) as a structure to implement an AI, context-aware, adaptive algorithm to support a fleet of commercial jets,” write the authors of the paper. "The framework includes efficiency checks against operator requirements such as the fleet availability and the direct maintenance cost, and depends on specific operational, engineering and economic data to be assertive […] The SPMF concepts apply to all industries where a complex system has to be supported.”
Final Thoughts
Prescriptive maintenance is the next logical step from the innovations made possible by predictive technology. Through use of a framework such as the SPMF detailed above and by leveraging the latest advances in data analytics technology field service providers can ensure the assets they’re responsible for are able to remain in the greatest operational condition for the maximum amount of time.
We are going to see increasing numbers of field service providers applying these principles in 2023, so it would be a clever idea to get ahead of the pack now or risk lagging behind in the future.
Prescriptive maintenance is sure to be part of the conversation at Field Service Palm Springs 2023, being held in April at the JW Marriott Desert Springs, Palm Springs, CA.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.