Predictive Maintenance

IBM had a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal on Monday - - "We Used To Schedule Repairs: Now We Predict Them."

The language in the ad paints a picture of old challenges and new opportunities.  Interesting words - -

• Ever-shrinking budgets
• Constant streamlining governments
• Cleaning up after problems
• Unnecessary downtime
• Need for change
• Help prevent
• Fixing what will break next.  First.
• Managing its infrastructure proactively
• Pinpoint
• Track the lifecycle
• Replacing intuition with analytics
• . . . the simplest and most efficient way to fix a problem is to make sure the problem never happens in the first place

Directly from the ad:

"Today, the businesses and organizations that understand the need for change - along with the leaders bold enough to act on it - are using predictive maintenance models to anticipate not only when a problem will occur, but where and how.  With sensors and analytics that scan for problems thousands of times a second, these models can help predict which part will fail, where a pipe will burst or even what storm will be most likely to blow a branch down on a power line.  Which means that instead of fixing things whether or not they need it, they can predict a problem and help prevent it from becoming an even bigger on."