A maintenance worker standing outside in a white hard hat conducting conducting condition-based maintenance on a virtual screen.

What is Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM)?

Condition-based maintenance, or CBM, is a maintenance strategy in which work is performed based on asset condition. Maintenance and reliability teams use condition data like vibration, temperature, or flow rate to gain insight into asset health and optimize maintenance frequency. Performing maintenance based on condition empowers teams to move beyond risky reactive maintenance and the arbitrary schedules of preventive maintenance into data-driven, condition-based maintenance management.

To achieve condition-based maintenance, teams often utilize computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software. A modern, cloud-based CMMS can tap into asset data sources like vibration sensors and PLC or SCADA systems, connecting maintenance to reliability engineering data and production monitoring data. CMMS integrations can be used to provide alarms and automated work orders that can trigger when faults or failures are likely.

Maintenance and reliability are evolving in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and smart factories. Strategies like condition-based maintenance and technologies like CMMS software are leading the way.

Types of Data for Condition-Based Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance strategies can utilize a variety of different condition monitoring data, and sometimes a combination of several types. Here are some of the most common condition-based monitoring methods:

  • Temperature: Rising temperatures can often be a sign of an impending failure.
  • Vibration: Excess vibrations can indicate loose bolts, bearing wear, shaft misalignment, and more.
  • Oil analysis: Oil analysis can identify contaminants, viscosity inconsistencies, or particles indicating excessive wear in the system.
  • Thermal/infrared: This specialized equipment can detect excess moisture and unusual heat patterns.
  • Ultrasonic: Ultrasonic sensors can detect and interpret sounds caused by poor lubrication and signs of wear.
  • Electrical: Power monitoring can identify changes in power consumption or load, providing insight into asset health.

This data comes from sensors installed on assets, specialized equipment, or other testing methods.

What is Condition-Based Monitoring?

Condition monitoring, sometimes called condition-based monitoring, is a predictive maintenance (PdM) strategy that involves continuous monitoring of assets and often real-time data. Condition-based monitoring is essential for establishing condition-based maintenance: you need access to asset data in order to know when and how often to perform maintenance on equipment. Condition-based monitoring, condition monitoring, and production monitoring are terms often used in the same context.

The data used for condition-based maintenance comes from sensors on equipment or from other specialized tools. If these sensors are connected to a CMMS, the data can be uploaded to the cloud and be easily accessible in real time, allowing immediate response to changes in the condition of the assets being monitored. 

Why Perform Condition-Based Maintenance?

A condition-based maintenance strategy is implemented to save time, reduce maintenance costs, and optimize maintenance schedules to prevent failures and maximize uptime.

Advantages of Condition-Based Maintenance

Ultimately, these factors drive production and improve operations throughout the plant.

Condition-based maintenance helps prevent failures and shutdowns in facilities.

There are also disadvantages to condition-based maintenance. However, most of them are challenges that a CMMS or enterprise asset management (EAM) software can mitigate.

Disadvantages

  • Establishing an ideal asset monitoring system can be challenging and expensive
  • Condition-based maintenance requires training and expertise
  • Getting asset data to maintenance teams effectively can be difficult without CMMS software

How Does Condition-Based Maintenance Work? An Example

Say a maintenance manager wants to implement condition-based maintenance on a specific motor that often overheats.

To achieve condition-based maintenance, the manager needs access to gather temperature data from the motor regularly so that they know when it overheats. And to streamline the process, the maintenance manager needs the data source to integrate with their CMMS.

eMaint CMMS can integrate a broad range of data from SCADA systems. The manager uses eMaint’s SCADA and PLC integration to capture temperature measurements from the motor, configuring when and how often measurements should be recorded.

Once the connection is established and data is flowing in, the manager sets up automated condition-based work orders to trigger when the motor’s temperature moves out of its normal range of zero to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Then maintenance on the motor is optimized. The manager sets up alarms and automated work orders to signal when the asset should be examined. Work is performed at just the right time to prevent failures without introducing the risks, costs, and labor of over-maintenance.

Goals and Benefits of Condition-Based Maintenance

The goal of CBM maintenance is to improve the condition of assets by identifying and addressing failures before they occur. Based on the specific industry challenges companies face, many organizations may have more specific goals when they implement condition-based maintenance, such as improving uptime, reducing overhead, or extending asset lifespan.

The benefits of implementing condition-based maintenance can reach across the entire operation and benefit the organization in several ways: 

  1. Help identify upcoming failures: Pinpointing failures right before they happen gives the maintenance team time to react and prevent unnecessary shutdown.
  2. Reduce costs: Instead of maintaining assets on a preventive maintenance schedule, assets are maintained only when they need to be. This can save money on labor and parts and reduce the number of spares needed to be kept in inventory.
  3. Minimize downtime: Since maintenance teams are aware of impending failures, they can schedule maintenance during planned downtime instead of rushing to complete a repair during an unplanned shutdown as the result of a failure.
  4. Improved employee safety: Sudden asset failure can cause a cascade of problems, some of which can be dangerous to employees. Condition-based maintenance catches early warnings of issues before failure, drastically reducing the chances of unexpected failures and improving employee safety. 
  5. Improved reliability: Asset reliability is important for almost every key performance indicator, and almost every KPI can improve with condition-based maintenance.
  6. Improved productivity: When assets run more reliably, productivity can remain on schedule or even improve.
  7. Improved asset performance: Condition-based maintenance ensures assets are always operating at their optimal levels, ensuring top-tier performance and asset health.

No matter their original goals, businesses that implement a condition-based maintenance program can realize all of these benefits with time.

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Four Key Steps for Implementing Condition-Based Maintenance

Maintenance teams gain invaluable insights from condition-based maintenance and connected data, systems, and teams. But sometimes, the rush to adopt and implement causes facilities to disregard critical steps, like ensuring your maintenance program has mastered the fundamentals of reliability-centered maintenance. Here are four steps you should take to ensure that your CBM maintenance plan starts off on the right foot:

1. Do Your Condition-Based Maintenance Homework

Confirm that your preventive maintenance, P-F Curve, and reliability-centered maintenance fundamentals are solid. Sometimes organizations adopt condition-based maintenance technology without adapting their people to system changes or reviewing processes. Reliability experts agree that the chief barrier to adopting condition-based maintenance is the lack of understanding of reliability-centered maintenance fundamentals. Defining your organization’s maintenance and reliability status is also essential. Your maintenance and reliability teams should ask themselves some fundamental questions:

  • What are they doing? 
  • Why are they doing it?
  • How are they getting it done? 

Fully defining your organization’s status ensures a good start to your CBM journey.

2. Include Personnel Affected by the Shift to Condition-Based Maintenance

Once you confirm technicians have the necessary skills, involve them and other key personnel in a shared asset criticality analysis. By inviting their input, they become active participants. Specifically, technicians will have an opportunity to:

  • Use their reliability-centered maintenance fundamentals effectively
  • Contribute to condition-based maintenance implementation and success
  • Help identify, mitigate, or eliminate failure modes

Technicians and other key personnel have valuable insight and knowledge they can share to benefit the entire team. Their insight can help ensure the CBM maintenance implementation process goes even more smoothly.

3. Make a Proper Asset Criticality Assessment

Accurately identifying assets as critical, semi-critical, and non-critical can decrease unnecessary route-based maintenance. Additionally, the analysis helps determine which assets might benefit from new predictive maintenance technology like wireless vibration sensors, which allow for condition monitoring from a distance when paired with software. 

After completing an asset criticality assessment, it’s not uncommon to realize that some equipment considered critical is not. Often, the assets getting the most attention are simply the ones that break down the most, rather than the most important. It’s important to continue assessing asset criticality over time and make changes to your initial criticality analysis when needed. A correct analysis will ensure your resources are used in the most efficient way and ensure your organization receives even more benefit from condition-based maintenance.

4. Follow Up with Additional Condition Monitoring Tools

You should follow up on your asset criticality assessment by performing a failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA). This way, your most critical assets benefit from your maintenance reliability programs. The reliability-centered maintenance process helps you decide whether your current preventive maintenance strategy meets capacity needs and verifies equipment is captured correctly and represented.

Condition-Based Maintenance Workflow

Developing a condition-based maintenance workflow is important for outlining the steps to implementing and maintaining a CBM maintenance program. It provides a structured approach to selecting which assets to start with and provides guidance on how to use condition monitoring to improve asset reliability. 

This example workflow shows what a CBM maintenance program can look like using Fluke sensors and eMaint CMMS combined with condition monitoring:

  1. Perform asset criticality analysis to choose which assets are most critical to your organization.
  2. Install sensors on these assets, selecting the best sensors for the asset type.
  3. Use information from the sensors to gather baseline data and understand what the asset looks like during normal operation.
  4. Set parameters for alarms to notify when asset operation is outside of baseline.
  5. Automatically collect sensor data, which is constantly fed into cloud-based software.
  6. Use the software to automatically analyze results and identify anomalies.
    • Software sends email alerts or mobile notifications when anomalies are detected.
    • Alerts include prescribed solutions, urgency, and severity.
    • Software can automate orders for parts or integrate with storeroom data to see what parts are already on hand for repairs.
  7. The software creates work orders for maintenance to fix anomalies.
  8. The corrected asset continues feeding data into sensors for analysis.

Condition-Based Maintenance vs. Predictive Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance and predictive maintenance are similar maintenance strategies, both focusing on the goal of optimizing when and how often maintenance is performed in order to strengthen reliability and prevent downtime. However, they differ in that CBM refers specifically to using insights from condition data, whereas predictive maintenance may imply some level of predicting faults or failures with more advanced analysis.

For example: eMaint CMMS integrates with SCADA systems and PLCs, enabling maintenance based on condition of assets. But eMaint also connects to Fluke IIoT wireless vibration sensors like the Fluke 3563, which pair with eMaint condition monitoring software and offer advanced vibration analysis — an easy-to-use toolset for predicting failures.

Rather than looking at condition-based vs. predictive maintenance as though they are conflicting strategies, consider thinking of them as complementary. Equip your maintenance program with data from every source available: IIoT sensors, SCADA systems, ERPs, workers using a mobile CMMS app like Fluke Mobile, and beyond.

Choosing a Condition-Based Maintenance Software

Choosing the right condition-based maintenance software is vital to ensuring that your team can reap the full benefits of CBM maintenance. Keep in mind the following tips:

  1. Determine what you’re looking for. A best-in-class CMMS or EAM software will take care of everything you need, streamlining the management of work orders, assets, and spare parts, along with IIoT sensor or SCADA integration.
  2. Make sure your software integrates with your asset data so your maintenance team can gain asset condition insights.
  3. Explore what other integrations the software offers — IIoT sensors? ERPs? A CMMS smartphone app?

eMaint is part of a connected reliability framework that combines all of the above hardware and software in a cloud-based ecosystem that streamlines advanced strategies like CBM maintenance.

Leaders in maintenance and reliability are championing connected reliability as the game-changer for the future of maintenance, and a CMMS like eMaint gives you the tools to implement the change. To learn more about what a CMMS can do for your CBM strategy, speak to an eMaint specialist or try a free demo.