Jerry Peerbolte
J. Peerbolte & Associates
Fort Smith, Arkansas

How do most plant maintenance personnel characterize their overall maintenance strategy for the electric motors operating in their facility? EASA posed this question in the 2014 end-user customer research project. The most common response (42%) was “reactive maintenance.” Another 30% described their strategy as “preventive maintenance” defined as “performed primarily following a prescribed pro­gram.” Another 20% characterized theirs as a “predictive maintenance” strategy that is one “performed pursu­ant to a monitored/condition-based criterion.” 

EASAns may assist customers in following any of these strategies. How­ever, some important insights came from a series of follow-up questions that tried to identify future trends in these strategies and any corresponding outsourcing opportunities.  

Looking first at preventive main­tenance programs, we learned that 74% of end-users perform these tasks in-house. However, that ratio has dropped from the 94-95% levels re­ported by end users in EASA’a earlier research projects in 2003 and 2008. The numbers look even better for EASAns when end users were asked about predictive maintenance practices. Here, only 58% of end-user custom­ers reported performing these tasks in-house. And again, that number is down from 74% in-house in 2003 and 67% in 2008.

Again, the trend lines for both preventive and predictive mainte­nance services on electric motors are towards outsourcing some or all of the individual tasks. In fact, we asked specifically about future outsourcing plans – with 17% reporting they plan to shift more preventive maintenance to outside contractors and 26% suggest­ing they plan to shift more predictive maintenance.  

Finally, we asked end users to share their beliefs about the overall return on investment (ROI) for both preventive and predictive mainte­nance.  In both instances, a large majority reported positive ROIs for these types of services.