Making the ROI case for predictive maintenance is easy. Downtime is incredibly costly, with estimates ranging from thousands of dollars every minute in oil and gas and heavy industry to a whopping $22,000 per minute in automotive manufacturing. Organizations using predictive maintenance have 18.5 percent less unplanned downtime and 87.3 percent fewer defects than companies that rely on preventative maintenance, according to one survey of US manufacturers.

With the cost of downtime already so high and only increasing, even small improvements lead to big returns. More and more organizations are investing in condition monitoring programs to detect signs of equipment issues before they escalate to failure. These indicators can include:

  • Temperature changes
  • Acoustic anomalies
  • Atypical vibrations
  • Pressure drops or increases
  • Changes in energy or power consumption
  • Electrical faults
  • Low levels of oil and other lubricants

By tracking asset performance over time, reliability teams can analyze these signals for changes and anomalies, have technicians investigate, and make informed decisions about when and where to make repairs—minimizing the risk of unplanned downtime and keeping parts in production longer.

The Cost of Monitoring

The benefits speak for themselves, but what kind of investment is required for predictive maintenance? There are three main approaches for capturing the necessary data. Traditionally, most companies have relied on manual inspections conducted by technicians. With the rise of Industry 4.0, IoT-enabled fixed sensors have become more common to monitor specific mission critical assets. Finally, in recent years, facilities have been turning to robotics to automate inspection rounds.

Although the costs of all of these approaches vary, they tend to fall into consistent buckets. There are costs associated with:

  • The sensor hardware needed to capture the data; each type of data you want to monitor typically requires a specialized sensor, and particularly for fixed sensing, a single asset may need coverage from multiple sensors
  • Connectivity and communications infrastructure to transfer data from sensors
  • Software to aggregate and analyze inspection data, as well as automate the distribution of alerts or follow up tasks
  •  Associated cybersecurity infrastructure

There are also costs associated with the labor to deploy this technology. While handheld sensors are the most expensive in terms of FTE resources to conduct inspections, all these methods will have some labor cost associated with implementing and maintaining the sensors and associated infrastructure, as well as interpreting and analyzing the outputs in order to take meaningful action.

The ROI of Mobile Robots

Industrial inspection robots like Spot are one of the most cost effective options for scaling predictive maintenance—reducing both barriers to entry and ongoing costs associated with IoT data capture to help customers achieve ROI quickly.

Unlike with fixed sensing, inspection robots allow you to deploy one set of sensors equipped on a robot across multiple locations within a facility, without installing power and connectivity infrastructure for potentially thousands for fixed sensors. Similarly, having a single partner for a complete sensing solution helps simplify integration, deployment, and security compliance—all factors that can add time and cost to a project.

Additionally, automating inspection rounds enables you to inspect multiple factors on multiple assets in multiple places in a single inspection route. A typical inspection mission for Spot can include hundreds of inspection points. One robot can run multiple missions a day, covering the same route or inspecting other areas or equipment—capturing potentially thousands of data points every day. Spot unlocks the depth and breadth of data needed for predictive maintenance, while still freeing up people for higher value work.

In infographic showing a donut chart of the ROI calculation for Spot in industrial inspection, breaking down an annual value of $252k

As Spot has been deployed at hundreds of facilities all over the world, inspecting millions of industrial assets, the value of an industrial inspection robot is increasingly clear. Spot helps save upwards of 200 thousand dollars every year. By detecting early warning signs of equipment failure, Spot averts costly downtime and enables cost savings to repair versus replace equipment, drives significant energy savings by detecting leaks in compressed air systems, and gives time back to overstretched maintenance teams. On average, customers are achieving ROI in just over a year—and sometimes significantly faster.

If you want to learn more about the ROI of Spot and other IOT technologies, download our whitepaper.