Following up on our post on how data fuels greatness in maintenance, let’s dive into how you can begin combining your data with the power of AI to accelerate your maintenance maturity journey from preventive to predictive maintenance.  

Understanding the maintenance maturity journey

While every journey will differ in timeline and complexity, here’s how a typical maintenance maturity journey progresses:

1. Reactive: You’re starting to record data (typically break-fix operations)​

2. Preventive: Now you’re planning maintenance based on time and usage  

3. Condition-based: With sensors connected to your assets, you can collect and use equipment condition to plan maintenance activities ​ 

4. Predictive: Now modern AI algorithms can identify trends and anomalies without specifying conditions or thresholds​ (using the data you started recording in the reactive and preventive stages) 

5. Prescriptive: At this point, you’ve got an almost fully automated maintenance process. Clear action plans are automatically defined based on asset conditions and historical maintenance data. Also, specific work orders are created automatically with tasks and assignments. 

No matter where you are in this journey, you already have the tools at your fingertips to begin using data and evolve your strategy. Let’s look at three levels of data usage. 

Level 1: Data in your CMMS

Everything starts with having lots of high quality data within your CMMS–otherwise predictive tools like Fiix Foresight AI can’t do their job. These data sets include:

• Work order histories (both scheduled and reactive)

• Asset records

• Parts tracked

• Costs

All the data fundamental to your maintenance operations is stored here, shared among your team to empower and unite them as one.

Level 2: Analytics

Once you have your steady stream of high quality data, you can use analytics to find opportunities for marginal gains, decide priorities, and predict the impact that changes will have on your business. You’re now more focused on process improvement and should be sitting in the preventive or condition-based maintenance stage of your journey. (You can learn more about the Fiix analytics tool here!) 

Level 3: Fiix Foresight AI

Over time, more and more information will be picked up by AI tools that automatically analyze your data to surface trends and anomalies on work orders, parts usage, and asset performance. Think of Fiix Foresight as a data scientist built right into your CMMS, automatically sharing insights to help you run more efficiently.