WHITE PAPER

THE FUTURE OF MAINTENANCE:

REVOLUTIONIZING INDUSTRIAL OPERATIONS
WITH THE INTERNET OF THINGS
 WHITE PAPER

Abstract Preventive Versus Predictive Maintenance

During the first two industrial revolutions, organizations
often fixed or replaced assets when they broke. The
invention of the assembly line was a double-edged
sword that provided unmatched production efficiency
but could come to an abrupt stop at signs of a problem.
Mechanics would assess the failure, detect it’s root cause
and estimate the time and cost to repair along with
parts required. This process was a lengthy one and asset
downtime was often long and expensive. To remedy this,
organizations built expensive asset redundancy into their
operations with large inventories of expensive to order
(and store) parts and maintained specialist mechanics to
ensure the business suffered no downtime.
The third industrialization wave came with digital
technology and automation introducing new levels
of efficiency. But it also introduced problems of its
own (e.g. data integrity, service and maintenance
complexity, increased expenses, breaches, etc.). The
current era of Industry 4.0, or fourth wave of digital
transformation, is addressing these issues. Advances
in data connectivity and technology are transforming
maintenance services and security. Technology trends
like the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, Big Data and
Analytics, Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning,
Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality are
converging to enable new maintenance strategies
which improve availability, reduce costs, increase
safety and ultimately eliminate unplanned downtime.
Preventive maintenance occurs when work is
scheduled in advance based on estimated service
intervals, designed to preempt failures caused
by known wear and tear. For example, consider
how we change the oil in our cars. After some
recommended period of time or distance, we bring
our cars to the mechanic. We prevent unplanned
downtime like highway breakdowns by complying
with recommended services. Most of us are willing
to absorb the costs of early or over-maintenance,
as the upside is worth the risk. But if the car is
our business, we may try and extend that service
interval a bit—every additional day or mile we drive
is potential cost reduction and profit. The question
then becomes, is it worth it? If a breakdown occurs,
more expensive parts may need to be replaced and
expensive labor could be necessary. It could take a
long time to troubleshoot and repair before we can
get back on the road.
In the industrial world, the cost associated with
downtime is more severe. Unplanned downtime can
cost organizations millions of dollars per day. In the
auto industry, production downtime is reported to
cost $22,000 per minute. Unplanned maintenance can
cost 12-15 percent more than planned maintenance
and the additional urgency required to get operations
back online can add further to cost and risk.

Proactive, Strategic Operations

Machine
Learning
Predictive
Maintenance

Condition-based
Maintenance

Preventative Maintenance

Reactive Maintenance

The Future of Maintenance: Revolutionizing Industries with the Internet of Things 2


As a result, forward-leaning organizations are
increasingly adopting predictive maintenance
strategies. Predictive maintenance takes into
account estimated service intervals while taking
advantage of data-driven insights based on the
measurement of operating conditions. In our car
example, this could be measurement of oil viscosity
or engine speed. Additionally, these analytics could
be bolstered with data from external factors such
as outside air temperature or geo-location. By using
statistical thresholding or modeling and forecasting
to calculate when repairs are required, organizations
who adopt predictive maintenance strategies are
able to better manage parts and labor costs along
with asset availability.
Challenges in Implementing Predictive
Maintenance Strategies
While it can seem difficult and expensive to get
started with predictive maintenance, the challenges
are well understood and organizations can learn from
existing best practices.
Data Velocity, Variety and Variability – It is challenging
to discern real business value from large volumes of
data across IT, OT and IoT assets. Data is often isolated
in informational and operational silos with little
opportunity for users to correlate or collaborate across
teams and domains. The analytics required to perform
effective predictive maintenance requires convergence
and some democratization of data.
The Role of Domain Expertise in Managing
Operations – Managing industrial operations is a
balance between art and science. It takes years
of hands-on experience to be able to detect
anomalies in asset behavior and prioritize the
alarms and alerts that matter. To support predictive
maintenance, organizations either incorporate
their own expertise into the analytics technology,
adopt technologies preprogrammed with analytics
to support predictive maintenance, or adopt
intelligent and adaptive approaches using machine
learning and artificial intelligence.
The Future of Maintenance: Revolutionizing Industries with the Internet of Things
WHITE PAPER
Lack of Real-time and Predictive Insights – The ability
to diagnose issues without affecting production
is critical to optimize operations and minimize
unplanned downtime. In most industrial environments,
it is challenging to combine and correlate
information across systems (e.g SCADA, sensors,
applications, infrastructure, IT) that utilize disparate
communications protocols and a wide range of data
formats. Organizations may also have solutions from
multiple technology vendors rolled out on a site by
site or project by project basis. All of these factors
result in data silos and swivel-chair integrations. The
ability to leverage data across these silos in real-time
is imperative to accurately predict future conditions.
Obstacles to Modernization – Operations Technology
(OT) teams often struggle to catch up with their
IT counterparts in their technology stack. Despite
the factory floor’s interest in taking advantage of
transformative technology trends, modernization is
often accompanied by potential risk that impacts
security, compliance, human safety and availability
SLA’s. For example, integrating OT systems with IT
environments could expose both to new security
threats. Finally, a strong resistance to change may
be prevalent in personnel who are highly trained
and entrenched in operating procedures. Digitally
transforming industrial operations benefit from
pilot projects outside the production environment,
analytics best practices, and training programs that
emphasize value to the plant operator and positive
business outcomes.
Reengineering Technology and the Future
of Maintenance
Most organizations today are competing in markets
that are being disrupted by technology, and industrial
organizations are no strangers to the wave of digital
transformation. Forward thinking organizations are
looking beyond the one-off implementations and
are taking a holistic approach—identifying the use
cases and business value across the enterprise and
the emerging technologies that can help address
them. Here are the technologies that are transforming
industrial operations.
3

The Internet of Things
The commercialization of IoT is rapidly decreasing costs
and opening up the opportunity to not only create, but
correlate new data streams with existing industrial data.
By retrofitting machine-assets with inexpensive sensors,
then correlating sensor data with traditional Industrial
Control Systems (ICS) systems, operators are able to
monitor the conditions of assets in real-time, shifting
their maintenance strategy from reactive to proactive.
Cloud Computing
By aggregating data from multiple deployed assets or
factory locations in the cloud, organizations are able
to compare performance and to use conditions from
multiple assets to better predict when maintenance is
required. Cloud service providers also enable highly
secure, reliable and elastic analytics and reporting
resources that may be too expensive or difficult to
manage on-premises.
Big Data
Big Data comes in many different shapes and forms
and for most, it is challenging to discern real business
value from large data volumes of data across IT,
OT and IoT systems. Data is often isolated across
islands of information with no shared understanding.
Emerging ‘Big Data’ technologies are simplifying
the process of correlating and combining data from
alarm management systems, for example, with real
signals coming from equipment, providing a holistic
view across multiple sources. This new wave of big
data for industrial operations enables engineers
to troubleshoot issues in a fraction of a second,
and moves the organization closer to predictive
maintenance and zero unplanned downtime.
“By 2020, 60% of manufactures will relay on digital
platforms which will support as much as 30% of their
overall revenue.” – IDC, “Top 10 Predictions for Global
Manufacturing in 2018”
Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics
New statistical methods and algorithms allow
engineers and statisticians to use large volumes of
historical and real-time information to calculate and
predict outcomes in ways impossible or impractical
The Future of Maintenance: Revolutionizing Industries with the Internet of Things
WHITE PAPER
for humans alone. Data science and machine learning
(ML) are opening new opportunities to provide
objective investigation of asset data in order to
detect novel conditions, make previously-unknown
connections between assets and data sources and
forecast future performance with astounding accuracy.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction-
it’s real. Manufacturers can use AI to move beyond
predicting maintenance needs and into forecasting
trends and future business requirements. Beyond
accurately predicting the time, location and reason
for future failure, AI holds the promise of being able
to recommend the most effective mitigation of future
failures and provides the foundation for autonomous
maintenance and repair.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) has the most impact on the
way maintenance technicians and operators interact
with assets in the field. In the past, operators were
required to bring static information like technical
and procedure documentation to the job site. Mobile
technology gives the mechanic real-time access to
the same information, but the hands-on interaction is
prone to human error. AR solutions give mechanics
hands-off maintenance related information such
as sensor data, audio and video. This real-time
information provides a new dimension into problem
detection, changing maintenance strategies on-the-fly.
Predictive Maintenance Done Right–
Recursion Pharma’s Success Story
Salt Lake City-based Recursion Pharmaceuticals
set a goal: discover new treatments for 100 genetic
diseases by 2025 using an innovative combination
of biology, automation and machine learning. In
order to achieve their mission, Recursion needs to
look at thousands of cell cultures with the help of
powerful lab equipment, generating terabytes of data
daily. Given the importance of the lab equipment
in the company’s operations, mitigating equipment
downtime is a high priority, which brings predictive
maintenance capabilities into focus.
4
 WHITE PAPER

“The scale and speed with which we work now would Conclusion
be impossible to do manually. As far as capturing While some organizations are not yet in the position
the data and what we do with it, it just wouldn’t be to adopt a predictive maintenance strategy, the
possible”. benefits and return on investment are clear. Impact is
– Ben Miller, Director of HTS Operations, Recursion independent of industry. Manufacturing, Energy and
Pharmaceuticals Utilities, Transportation and Healthcare companies
are transforming their maintenance operations
By leveraging Splunk Enterprise for Predictive
with technology, and companies who do not adopt
Maintenance, the team at Recursion can monitor
predictive maintenance strategies are quickly falling
and diagnose equipment issues in real time,
behind and losing competitive advantage. It’s no
catching anomalies in automated operations before
longer just a matter of lowering maintenance costs in
they become major challenges that could impact
the factory—predictive maintenance is also increasing
unscheduled downtime.
life safety, supporting the mission of the business and
With an intuitive solution for predictive maintenance, closing the gap between the factory floor and the
Recursion was able to accelerate their time to value executive suite.
as well. “I was getting value out of Splunk Enterprise
within about three days,” says Ben Miller, Director of
High-Throughput Science operations (HTS). The team
can now spend their time on discovering treatments
for life threatening genetic-diseases, and achieving
their ambitious goals instead of worrying about the
health of their equipment.

Want to learn how Splunk can help you with Predictive Maintenance and IoT? Click here.

Learn more: www.splunk.com/asksales www.splunk.com

© 2018 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved. Splunk, Splunk>, Listen to Your Data, The Engine for Machine Data, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Light
and SPL are trademarks and registered trademarks of Splunk Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names,
product names, or trademarks belong to their respective owners. WP-Splunk-IoT-Future-of-Maintenance-101