Run-to-failure maintenance is sometimes called “crisis maintenance” or “hysterical maintenance” for good reason. This has been the dominant form of maintenance for a long time, and its costs are relatively high because of unplanned downtime, damaged machinery, and overtime expenditure.
In this mode, management and the maintenance department are controlled by the vagaries of their machines, and the actual status of the overall plant machinery is only vaguely known. This makes it nearly impossible to plan for maintenance needs, and what is worse, impossible to predict the state of overall system readiness.
Run-to-failure should be a very small part in a modern program, but there are some instances where it does make sense. An example is a plant, which employs a great number of similar machines that are not expensive to replace or to repair. When one breaks down, others are scheduled to take up the slack and production is not affected very much.
SymphonyAI Industrial provides products, software & services for Predictive Maintenance including vibration analysis instruments, wireless vibration monitoring, asset performance management and process health and optimization.