Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • Way of the Quality Warrior
    • Critical Talks
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • RCM Blitz®
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinars
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Reliability Analysis Methods online course
    • Measurement System Assessment
    • SPC-Process Capability Course
    • Design of Experiments
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Quality during Design Journey
    • Reliability Engineering Statistics
    • Quality Engineering Statistics
    • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
    • Process Capability Analysis course
    • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
    • Return on Investment online course
    • CRE Preparation Online Course
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home

by Arun Gowtham Leave a Comment

Only at Scheduled On-Condition Tasks

Only at Scheduled On-Condition Tasks

The falling cost of sensors for Industrial Equipment & the popularity of AI-based solutions means that Organizational teams are defaulting to using this strategy on all their Equipment, regardless of its criticality or other effectiveness. This is a strategic error.

As any Maintenance & Reliability practitioner would know, there are types of Maintenance Strategies:

  1. Reactive
  2. Preventive (PM)
  3. Condition-based(CBM), or Predictive (PdM).

If none of the maintenance strategies mitigate the risk of failure then a re-design is necessary. Each asset operating in its application context would require a specific type of strategy to maximize Availability, reduce failure Risk, and Cost. The decision-making process to choose the appropriate strategy is given in the most cited literature in the maintenance community: Reliability-centered Maintenance (RCM).

Reliability-centered Maintenance Decision Tree

According to this report, the decision tree looks likes below and the user answers the question in sequence to determine the correct strategy. While this is a time-consuming process to evaluate each asset, RCM Analysis is necessary and pays dividends generously during operations.

So, where does the latest tool, IoT Sensor & Analytics, fit into the RCM Decision tree?
It fits at the Scheduled On-Condition task step!

It works only at this step because the asset’s criticality requires to have a low failure risk and the feasibility of monitoring the asset continuously to detect a failure is effective. At all other conditions, the asset might not be expensive enough to monitor or critical enough to spend resources, or hazardous enough to keep inspecting often.

You can safely avoid installing the fancy new IoT sensors on these assets and focus on the critical few. Narrowing the focus of the IoT-driven Predictive Maintenance (PdM) will increase its effectiveness, generating more ROI for your investment.

As I say often at Owtrun: IoT Infrastructure, Analytics, and ML Algorithms are just tools in the Reliability toolkit. Not all tools will fit at all locations and not one tool will solve all problems. Choose them & Use them wisely.

If you’d like to know how to analyze assets, implement ML-based Predictive Maintenance, or develop a strategy for your organization, I can help you. Check out www.owtrun.com for more. 

Filed Under: AI & Predictive Maintenance, Articles, on Maintenance Reliability

About Arun Gowtham

Arun Gowtham is the Founder/Lead Reliability Engineer at Owtrun. He works on accelerating the adoption of digital tools to support Reliability Engineers. Writes about all things Reliability, AI/ML, and Project Management.

« Safe Work Practice Procedure
What is FINESSE? (and how it empowers effective communication) »

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

AI & Predictive Maintenance logo Photo of Arun GowthamArticles by Arun Gowtham
in the AI & Predictive Maintenance article series

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Posts

  • test
  • test
  • test
  • Your Most Important Business Equation
  • Your Suppliers Can Be a Risk to Your Project

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy