Dive Brief:
- Missed scheduled preventive maintenance can lead to downtime costs of $100,000 or more, according to a Limble survey of 686 U.S. maintenance and operations professionals.
- In addition, 65% of survey respondents said that reactive, as opposed to preventive, maintenance increases risks to technicians.
- These findings can be attributed in part to “limited time for hands-on work, expertise that may never get documented, and inconsistent use of maintenance data as teams work to prevent failures and move beyond reactive maintenance,” Limble said in a news release.
Dive Insight:
The survey comes as manufacturers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence and automation to improve various parts of their operations, including predictive maintenance.
According to the survey, more than half of maintenance teams said they were using or piloting AI tools to help them do their jobs, and 92% agreed that AI needs “good, complete maintenance data” to work properly. However, the survey found that few manufacturers actually follow a data management plan in its entirety, which can result in maintenance issues that could have been prevented.
“Most maintenance teams aren't short on technology. They're short on time and information they can trust," Limble CEO Gary Specter said in a statement. "Adding AI won't automatically solve the problems they face every day. We have to make it easier for the technician to capture what they know and give teams information they can use to act before a failure happens.”
“Teams have to fix how maintenance work gets recorded before AI can do much with it,” Limble said in its State of Maintenance Report, of which the survey was a part. “AI in maintenance runs on the records a team already keeps, making the quality of those records the thing that decides how far it gets.”
Other key survey findings include:
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Although 82% of survey respondents said their organization uses a computerized maintenance management system, only 39% said their entire team uses it regularly, and 71% reported that someone on their team asked for information that their CMMS already contained.
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Sixty one percent of respondents said the way they currently approach maintenance increases the risk of unplanned downtime, higher costs and safety issues. Unplanned work is often done under increased time pressure and on equipment that is too hot to handle safely, Limble said.
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Nearly three quarters said they rely on a “critical facility asset” that only one team member knows how to repair, while 47% said they have lost irreplaceable maintenance knowledge due to staff turnover.
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Forty eight percent of respondents said they use preventive rather than predictive maintenance, although the survey’s “work score” pegged that figure at 68%.
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Staffing shortages were cited as the single biggest obstacle to better maintenance practices, followed by aging equipment, budget constraints and “too much reactive work.”
