From Monthly PMs to Continuous Coverage: One Plant’s Story

Most plants run maintenance on a calendar. A technician checks the asset, logs it as healthy and moves on. But a monthly PM only shows how that asset looked on the day someone checked it. A fault that starts the next morning can grow for weeks before anyone sees it, and more than half of the breakdowns hit before the next scheduled visit. 

Continuous monitoring closes that gap. Sensors stay on the equipment between inspections and flag a developing fault early enough to plan the repair. It makes sense on paper. Before you commit to a pilot, though, the fair question is: has anyone actually done this?

This is the story of a plant that did. Same starting point as most of the teams we talk to: a disciplined PM program, good people, and failures that kept showing up anyway.

Why weren't monthly PMs enough?

A calendar can’t see what happens between visits. The PMs were done on schedule and done well, but each one only confirmed that an asset was healthy on that day. A fault that started afterward had up to a month to develop. On the plant’s most critical equipment, one missed fault meant days of lost production.

That was the situation at Tate & Lyle, a global leader in nature-based ingredients. At its San Diego facility, fermentation sits at the heart of production. The maintenance program looked like what most plants would call solid: preventive maintenance every month, with manual inspections in between.

It still wasn't catching the most important failures. Critical equipment broke down without warning. Early signs were missed. Reactive repairs ate budget. Inspections took real time from the team but didn't give them the precision to call a fault before it turned into a failure.

The biggest exposure was the fermenter agitators. One agitator failure could stop production for three to four days, more than 72 hours on a single asset. Getting it running again meant bringing in cranes and replacing a gearbox by hand.

Looking back, Senior Reliability Engineer Gautam Sane named the pattern plainly:

"We realized many of our delays were caused by avoidable failures."

That's the gap periodic routes leave unwatched. A monthly PM tells you an asset was healthy on the day someone checked it. It can't tell you what happens on day 2, day 12 or day 29. Across 60,898 corrective work orders at 20 North American plants, 48% of breakdowns happened 2 to 30 days after a clean inspection.

The San Diego team ran a sound program. A monthly schedule simply has blind spots, and the most costly failures were developing in them.

What did the plant change?

The team kept its inspections and added continuous monitoring to cover the weeks between them.

Tate & Lyle put Tractian Condition Monitoring on more than 280 critical assets. Sensors track vibration and temperature continuously, and AI-powered diagnostics turn those readings into specific findings the team can act on.

Three things shifted:

1. From calendar to condition. Maintenance was scheduled by what the asset needed, not by the date. PMs that weren't adding value were cut.
2. From guesswork to evidence. Over 3.7 million data samples produced 400+ insights, each tied to a specific asset and condition.
3. From surprise to planning. Developing faults showed up early enough to schedule the fix, instead of reacting to the breakdown.

The dryer bearing is the clearest example. The system flagged a major unbalance before it became a failure, and the team stepped in on their own terms. That catch is part of the 84 hours of downtime avoided.

"Now we know what's happening before problems grow." — Gautam Sane, Senior Reliability Engineer, Tate & Lyle

What did continuous coverage deliver?

Within months, the results added up to $446.9K in total savings.

The numbers matter, but so does how they're split. Production uptime is reported on its own line, separate from the total. That's the same discipline we recommend for building a downtime business case: keep each bucket separate so finance can check every line.

The team also felt the change day to day: less reliance on manual PMs and guesswork, and a maintenance plan they could predict instead of react to.

"Tractian has really improved our asset availability." — Gautam Sane, Senior Reliability Engineer, Tate & Lyle

What does this mean for your pilot?

If your plant runs monthly PMs and still gets surprised, you're where this plant started. Here's how to borrow their path.

1. Start where one failure costs days, not hours. For Tate & Lyle, that was the fermenter agitators. Find your equivalent: the asset where a single breakdown means cranes, long lead times or a stopped line.
2. Name the failure modes you want to catch. Unbalance, bearing wear, misalignment, lubrication. If you can name it, you can judge whether the system caught it.
3. Report production value on its own line, as San Diego did. Of the $446.9K in total savings, $380K came from production uptime and is reported as its own figure. Break out your results the same way from day one, so finance can see where the value came from.
4. Let condition decide which PMs stay. Continuous data shows which calendar tasks are protecting the asset and which ones are just routine.
5. Write down what success looks like before you start. Use the pilot requirements and 90-day plan to agree on what you'll measure.

One plant's results aren't a promise for yours. Your assets, failure history and cost per hour will shape the number. What this story shows is that the gap between inspections is real, it's measurable, and a team running a disciplined PM program has already closed it.

What could continuous coverage look like at your plant?

The San Diego team didn't need a bigger crew or a longer PM checklist. They needed to see what was happening between inspections, so the next agitator or dryer bearing problem showed up as a work order, not a phone call about a stopped line.

That's the shift from monthly PMs to continuous coverage. And it's already working in plants like yours.

Book a demo to see how continuous monitoring would work on your critical assets.

Want the model behind the numbers first? The Verdantix study breaks down ROI, break-even and what 60 maintenance and reliability leaders said about turning alerts into action.

Read the full Tate & Lyle case study.