If you believe that reliable operations will result if you just follow your maintenance program, then you might also believe a few falsehoods about reliability and maintenance. First is the falsehood that maintenance is all you need to achieve reliability. Maintenance is about sustaining the asset’s operating conditions, not just fixing it when it breaks. Indeed, you do need to follow your maintenance program but it is not all there is to do, and it had better be the right program.

A well-designed maintenance program should eliminate the need to do condition assessments. These assessments are a form of condition monitoring, so why not include them in your proactive maintenance (PM) program? They are carried out to determine the current condition of an asset, determine if any remedial work is required, make an estimate of how long it will last, and forecast timing for eventually replacing the asset. In civil structures like buildings and bridges, these assessments are often called, “inspections”. When timed regularly they are no different from a condition monitoring task in any PM (proactive maintenance) program. Yet, they will be managed differently. Why that is so, doesn’t really matter, but arguably it just adds another program that must be managed in parallel with your maintenance program.