The first question – Who? – is easy to answer. Machinery and component manufacturers

and component developers would direct this kind of business model at their existing

customer base and new customers. Typically these customers would be industrial

manufacturing companies, in other words users of machines, systems, and components.

What exactly is offered to the customer? Predictive maintenance enables the machine

manufacturer to determine at an early stage when maintenance should be performed at the

customer site in response to an imminent machine malfunction. That enables machine

manufacturers to offer their customers new services, such as guaranteed machine

availabilities, while simultaneously reducing their own resource consumption. As well as

assigning fewer employees to preventative maintenance tasks, the machine manufacturer

also benefits from the fact that they only have to replace spare parts when there is a high

likelihood of imminent problems. At the same time, users benefit from minimized downtime

and a correspondingly higher production output.

The answer to the next question – How? – is that the current machine condition is recorded

using sensor technology and automatically checked for patterns. This allows possible

malfunctions to be detected at an early stage and machine failure to be averted.