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.