How Predictive Analytics Can Reduce Facility Maintenance Costs by 40%

As a facility team leader, you live and breathe conversations about the productivity and profitability of your equipment and building systems. Maintenance and labor costs factor heavily into those discussions as you and your team weigh the benefits to your bottom line of reactive maintenance plans and preventative maintenance plans. However, if a predictive maintenance plan is not yet part of the conversation, it should be, as it can save your company up to 40% over reactive maintenance or 10% over preventative maintenance.

Predictive maintenance requires actively monitoring your equipment and systems, and analyzing key data points to gain deeper insights into your operational activities and identify where, when, and why your systems may experience failure.

What are Predictive Analytics? 

Real-time monitoring has been a part of fire and building systems for several decades now. When this technology first emerged, it was game-changing because for the first time, facility managers were alerted to any problems immediately. However, predictive analytics takes real-time monitoring a step further.

Today, we have access to three times the data points we had a mere decade ago. Although this requires more robust CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems), advances in technology and machine learning mean that we can identify potential problems better than immediately—we know about them before they happen. As a result, facility managers can remedy the situation and perform necessary repairs and/or replacements, before problems snowball into costly disruptions to production, expensive overtime repair labor, or even catastrophic failures.

Why Predictive Maintenance? 

Most facilities utilize some combination of reactive and preventative maintenance strategies. Some preventative maintenance is essential to ensure jobsites and workplaces meet basic safety standards and regulations. Manufacturers for each system or piece of equipment likely recommend inspections and tune-ups at regular intervals. To understand how predictive maintenance offers significant improvement and costs savings for your facility, we must first explore all three strategies – reactive, preventative, and predictive.

Reactive Maintenance 

Reactive maintenance primarily relies on running to failure. It involves waiting until something breaks, or simply following a minimal standard maintenance schedule and hoping that nothing goes wrong. This approach means lower costs up front, but ultimately leads to kicking the can down the road and paying for it later with unpredictable downtimes, more costly repairs, and shorter system life.

Preventative Maintenance 

Preventative maintenance takes this a step further by reducing unscheduled downtimes, improving productivity by ensuring equipment operates at peak conditions, and reducing the costs of overtime maintenance, waste, and energy consumption. Where preventative maintenance falls short is that it doesn’t account for aging systems or wear and tear, so you may be over-maintaining your equipment. 10-30% more cost effective than reactive maintenance, it requires a higher investment in training and skills, but saves you significantly in the long run.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance takes preventative maintenance to a new level by utilizing technology to give you a real-time overview of your systems and equipment, help you optimize your maintenance time and labor, improves reliability, and once again, helping you identify potential problems that may not be caught before your next scheduled preventative maintenance. Predictive maintenance augments your existing maintenance strategy and is over 10% more cost effective than preventative maintenance alone.