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. Condition-based maintenance 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 a 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 AI, IIoT, and smart factories, with strategies like condition-based maintenance and technologies like CMMS software leading the way.
Types of Data for Condition-Based Maintenance
Condition-based maintenance strategies can utilize a variety of different types of condition monitoring data, and sometimes a combination of several types. Here are some of the most common condition monitoring methods:
- Temperature
- Vibration
- Oil analysis
- Thermal/Infrared
- Ultrasonic
- Electrical
What is Condition-Based Monitoring?
Condition monitoring, sometimes called condition-based monitoring, is a condition-based and predictive maintenance strategy which 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.
Why Perform Condition-Based Maintenance?
A condition-based maintenance strategy is implemented to save time, reduce maintenance costs, and optimize maintenance schedules so failures are prevented and uptime is maximized.
Advantages of Condition-Based Maintenance
- Reduced labor and maintenance costs
- Prevents failures and shutdowns
- Saves money on spare parts
- Workers are safer
- Strengthens the reliability of equipment
- Boosts maintenance KPIs
- Ultimately, these factors drive production
There are also disadvantages to condition-based maintenance. However, most of them are challenges that a CMMS or enterprise asset management (EAM) software mitigates.
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 a CMMS software
How Does Condition-Based Maintenance Work? An Example
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 when it overheats, they know. 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 the data is flowing, the manager sets up automated condition-based work orders to trigger when the motor’s temperature moves out of its normal range of 0 and 100 °F.
Now maintenance on the motor is optimized – alarms and automated work orders 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.
4 Key Steps for Implementing Condition-Based Maintenance
Maintenance teams gain invaluable insights from condition-based maintenance and connect 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.
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 or reviewing processes. Reliability experts agree that the chief problem 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
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.
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 vs. Predictive Maintenance
Condition-based maintenance (CBM) and predictive maintenance (PdM) 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 condition-based maintenance. 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 and predictive maintenance as conflicting strategies, though, 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 a condition-based maintenance software is challenging. Keep in mind the following tips:
- 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.
- Make sure your software integrates with your asset data so your maintenance team can gain asset condition insights.
- 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.
Leaders in maintenance and reliability are championing connected reliability as the game-changer for the future of maintenance.