Predictive maintenance (PM) is a cost-saving and performance-based strategy that predicts when an equipment failure is likely to occur and performs planned maintenance to prevent the equipment failure. Essentially, predictive maintenance involves direct monitoring of the operating condition, efficiency, heat distribution and other indicators of assets to determine the actual loss of efficiency that would be detrimental to the operations of critical systems in the facility. The goal of predictive maintenance is to decrease the frequency of maintenance, maximize the useful life of assets, and reduce unplanned reactive maintenance that is often performed at a high cost. Consequently, you save equipment maintenance time, cut down the cost of parts and supplies, and reduce production hours lost to maintenance. However, these cost-saving benefits come progressively after your initial spend on, sometimes, expensive condition monitoring techniques–including needing a specialist for data analysis.