Predictive maintenance tells you that something is going to fail. Prescriptive maintenance tells you what to do about it. That distinction sounds subtle, but in practice it's the difference between a maintenance team that gets alerts they don't know how to act on, and one that receives specific, actionable guidance that prevents failures with minimal disruption.
The terms "condition-based monitoring" (CBM) and "predictive maintenance" (PdM) get thrown around interchangeably in the IIoT world, and that confusion costs manufacturers real money. They're related — PdM is essentially the evolution of CBM — but they're not the same thing, and understanding the difference changes how you implement your maintenance strategy.
You know the pattern. A critical machine goes down at 2 AM. The maintenance team scrambles. Someone drives to a parts supplier that opens at 7. Production is offline for 14 hours. The plant manager asks why nobody saw it coming. You mutter something about the vibration sounding "a little off" last week. Nobody writes it down. Three months later, it happens again.
Building a predictive maintenance program breaks this cycle — permanently. Here's how to do it from scratch, without a PhD in data science, without a seven-figure budget, and without spending 18 months on a pilot that never scales.