FUTURE OF MAINTENANCE
FEATURE
Next generation of maintenance
MRO spoke with maintenance and asset management experts to get their perspective on what they see happening for the next generation of maintenance. BY MARIO CYWINSKI
MRO: What do you see as the biggest advancement in maintenance in the next five years? Ten years?
Hugh Alley: Five years, there will be more retrofittable sensors that will provide diagnostic data about equipment condition that will connect wirelessly. Some equipment 20 MRO / Winter 2023
manufacturers will start taking data security seriously, and more maintenance operations will be looking for secure connectivity; just being connected will no longer be enough. In 10 years - equipment manufacturers and maintenance service organizations will increasingly provide uptime as a service, as they leverage the data they gather. Richard Kunst: Sensors are getting cheaper, faster and have broader capability. Add to that how the bandwidth and speed of data highways has become, and we will see a migration from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance through the early detection of subliminal abnormalities for quicker, cheaper, and easier repairs. It is now very cost effective to build several layers of redundancy within an automated system, repairs can be made without incurring any actual processing downtime. The coolest aspect is that we will be aware of a potential problem before we even physically realize it. Susan Lubell: In the next five years, we will continue to see step changes in the use of predictive maintenance for asset health monitoring. As sensors and condition monitoring becomes cheaper to install and can be placed in more hazardous environments, we will be gathering more asset health data on a real time 24/7/365 basis. This analysis will inform our decisions on run, repair, replace for physical assets, providing the information to decide when to maintain physical assets and what the scope of the repair will be. With the advancements seen in the last few years, 10 years out is too far to predict what new data and information the future technologies will enable.
James Reyes-Picknell: In the short term, competitive pressures are driving a push towards productivity and in all but new plant and equipment, they are struggling with reliability issues.This is causing an uptick in focus on reliability currently.Within the next five years, we will see a reset, going back to basics in both reliability (maintenance tactics) and in work management practices. Processes and systems are in place but are often used poorly and to little effect. The workforce has lost a lot of experience with the retirement of large numbers of people during and shortly after COVID-19. With relatively few baby boomers left, and in most cases, no attempts to capture their knowledge, companies are realizing just how much they depended on them. They are repeating old mistakes and realizing that they are not as systematic in their methods as they may have thought. In the longer term (10 years) we will see a shift towards outsourcing of maintenance in small, medium and some larger industrial operations. Attempts to fix the problems above will not be entirely successful due to an unwillingness to invest enough in maintenance, and the continued drain
Photo: greenbutterfly / Adobe Stock
Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying “change is the only constant in life.” In his time, the issues we are facing today in maintenance were not around. However, all this time later, the saying still holds true, and in turn, those companies who do not adapt to ongoing change, will be left behind. Many of the technologies that we are seeing in the world today, were only seen in science fiction movies years ago. Like the rest of the world, maintenance is constantly changing and evolving. Obviously, the core values remain, but how things are done, continues to change. We are seeing advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), use of data and diagnostics, moves to outsource maintenance, more focus on predictive maintenance, and focus on many other new technologies. MRO reached out to experts come from across the maintenance and asset management sphere, to get a complete look at what the future holds for the world of maintenance. They include Hugh Alley, president, First Line Training Inc.; Richard Kunst, president and CEO, Kunst Solutions; Susan Lubell, principal consultant, Steppe Consulting Inc.; James Reyes-Picknell president and principal consultant, Conscious Asset; and Cliff Williams, author, and asset management expert.
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