Last year you told us that, despite planned and actual investments in predictive maintenance, you were not all that happy with the results of these.
What a difference a year can make – more PdM technologies than ever are being deployed, often in targeted and complementary fashion, and your levels of satisfaction are on the way up. Even the challenges to success have shifted away from how to define expected benefits and more to whether you have enough people (and the right people) to execute effectively.
Who gets to see your PdM data?
One of the more interesting trends uncovered by the PdM survey over the past several years is the general unwillingness of respondents to share their data with experts outside of their organization. The 2017 survey is no exception – you’ve told us yet again that if you can avoid sharing data with OEMs or other third parties, then you will.
When it comes specifically to the ability to use remote monitoring technologies to share data back with OEMs, the share of respondents who said they were doing this now dropped from 31.9% in 2016 to 18.6% this year; and the number of respondents with no plans to do so jumped from 38.5% to 60.2%. These data aligned with a separate question which asked whether respondents were using embedded remote monitoring devices as part of their PdM program. Just shy of 40% of respondents said yes, which suggests that users are leveraging embedded devices to monitor the plants they are being asked to manage remotely, and that they are not always sharing these data with OEMs.
Figure 9 provides additional nuance to this issue of PdM data-sharing, with respondents able to drill down into the types of teams they share their data with as well as the frequency of sharing. In general, in-house maintenance and reliability teams have quite frequent access to the data, with most respondents sharing it weekly (44%–48%) and/or quarterly (27%–33%).
The greatest reluctance on data-sharing is saved for third parties: a whopping 76.1% of respondents say they have no plans to share PdM data with third-party remote monitoring service providers, and 69.0% say they have no plans to share PdM data with OEMs. The sweet spot, such as it is, seems to be monthly data sharing, with 12.4% of respondents sharing with OEMs and 19.4% sharing with other contracted third-parties (similar to the rate of monthly data-sharing with operations teams). It’s unclear whether the resourcing or program execution challenges identified in this year’s PdM survey will eventually soften the overall resistance to sharing PdM data outside the organization.
