Condition-Based Maintenance

For high-value or high-consequence-of-failure assets, acting on genuine condition rather than a generic calendar interval avoids both unnecessary intervention (replacing something that's fine) and missed intervention (a fixed interval that's too long for this specific asset's actual duty cycle).

• Condition monitoring (vibration, thermal, oil analysis, electrical signature).
• Threshold definition and review.
• Triggered intervention against defined thresholds.

• Concentrated on high-value, high-consequence assets — major HVAC plant, lifts, critical electrical infrastructure — rather than applied uniformly, since monitoring infrastructure has a real cost that only pays off where consequence of failure justifies it.

• Condition-monitoring specialistRequired

  Mandatory for threshold design and interpretation.

• Maintenance techniciansRequired

  Execute triggered work.

• FM asset managerSituational

  Oversees strategy and investment.

• Sensor/monitoring data.
• Asset criticality and failure-mode data.
• Historical condition trends.

1. 01Identify assets where condition-based strategy genuinely earns its monitoring cost — not a default applied everywhere.
2. 02Install and maintain monitoring infrastructure (vibration sensors, thermal imaging cycles, oil analysis sampling).
3. 03Define explicit action thresholds before monitoring begins, not retrospectively.
4. 04Trigger and execute intervention when thresholds are crossed.
5. 05Review and refine thresholds against actual failure data over time.

• Condition trend data.
• Triggered work orders.
• Threshold-review records.

• Condition data collected and visualised without any defined action threshold attached — this is precisely that failure mode occurring at the asset level.

• Percentage of monitored assets with defined action thresholds

  Low percentages indicate monitoring without management.

• Time from threshold breach to intervention

  Shows response discipline.

• Avoided-failure count where estimable

  Direct evidence of value.

• For critical infrastructure, an unactioned threshold breach can itself become a liability issue if it's later shown the organisation had the data and didn't act on it.

Condition-based maintenance itself is not statutorily mandated, but where applied to statutory assets it must supplement, not replace, the legal minimum inspection regime.

• Single service

  Monitoring technology often vendor-supplied/leased.

• Bundled

  Intervention work typically sourced through the same contract as the underlying asset's general maintenance.

• Vibration analysis.
• Thermal imaging.
• Oil analysis.
• IoT sensor networks, increasingly feeding predictive-maintenance modelling layers.

• Condition-monitoring interpretation.
• Threshold design.
• Statistical trend analysis.

• Installing monitoring technology without defining what action a given reading should trigger.
• Conflating condition-based with predictive maintenance.