It’s not always clear how to start a pilot for condition-based maintenance, especially when you’re new to condition monitoring. A pilot gives you a way to evaluate a new maintenance approach before committing to a full-scale rollout. But even a promising pilot can stall without clear ownership, defined goals, and a plan for putting the data to work.
Once the pilot is underway, it’s easy to focus on buying and installing hardware and assume the software will handle the rest. What actually determines success is whether the pilot has a defined scope, a timeline, stakeholder alignment, and a clear decision at the end. For a 90-day pilot, that means selecting the right assets, establishing baseline data, tuning thresholds, and more.
In this article, we’ll walk through how to choose assets for your pilot and determine whether you’re ready to scale.
Table of Contents
- Why Start With a Condition-Based Maintenance Pilot?
- How To Choose Assets for Your Pilot: Start With the Right Equipment
- How Long Does a Condition Monitoring Pilot Take?
- Put Your Pilot Into Action With UpTime Solutions
Why Start With a Condition-Based Maintenance Pilot?
Monitoring every asset in a plant on day one sounds efficient. But in practice, it multiplies the number of things that can go wrong before you’ve proven the approach works. A focused pilot limits capital exposure, gives you a controlled space to test asset selection and threshold logic, and produces the data you need to make a scaling decision with confidence instead of guesswork.
The financial case is straightforward: before committing to a plant-wide condition-based maintenance program, you need to understand whether the potential benefits justify the investment. Research on smart maintenance has explored how companies can evaluate different condition-based maintenance options to determine which provide the best performance-to-cost ratio. A focused pilot gives you a practical way to gather that information on a smaller group of assets, while tracking factors such as avoided emergency repairs, reduced downtime, and maintenance costs.
Time-based preventive maintenance can also leave gaps because not every failure follows a predictable schedule. A pilot lets you see, on a small set of assets, how condition monitoring can help identify developing problems outside of scheduled maintenance intervals before you commit to expanding the program.
If you’re weighing whether a pilot makes sense for your facility, UpTime Solutions can help scope which assets and timeline fit your situation before you commit to anything larger.
How To Choose Assets for Your Pilot: Start With the Right Equipment
The success of a pilot depends heavily on choosing the right assets to monitor. If you choose poorly, you could spend three months collecting data that doesn’t tell you what you need to know.
To narrow down your list, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) gives you a repeatable way to rank candidates. It evaluates potential failure risks using factors such as severity, occurrence, and detectability.
- Severity – The cost or safety impact if the asset fails, including production loss and repair expense
- Occurrence – How often the asset or similar assets have failed historically
- Detectability – How easily the failure mode can be identified with current inspection methods
Taken together, these factors help you identify the assets where a failure would have the greatest impact and where existing inspection methods may not catch a developing problem early. These are strong candidates for a condition monitoring pilot.
From there, a simple scoring card can help your maintenance team rank the remaining candidates without a multi-week study. You should:
- Weight criticality by direct production impact, including replacement cost, production dependency, and repair lead time.
- Factor in repair lead time; assets with long part lead times may deserve monitoring priority even at moderate severity.
- Keep the pilot list limited enough that cost and complexity stay manageable through the full 90 days.
How Long Does a Condition Monitoring Pilot Take?
A focused condition monitoring pilot can be structured around 90 days, giving your team enough time to select assets, install sensors, establish baseline data, tune alerts, and gather the information needed for a scaling decision. Real-world field testing of a wireless condition monitoring system has used a two-month testing period to collect data and identify abnormal operating conditions for further inspection.
The timeline matters because a pilot needs enough time to generate useful operating data without becoming an open-ended project. A shorter timeline may leave you with too little baseline information to evaluate normal asset behavior. A much longer timeline can make it harder to maintain stakeholder attention and momentum.
A 90-day timeline provides a practical balance between collecting meaningful data and maintaining momentum.
The 90-Day Condition-Based Maintenance Pilot Playbook
A condition-based maintenance pilot needs enough time to establish a reliable baseline, refine alert thresholds, and show whether the program is delivering measurable value. At the same time, a defined 90-day window keeps the project focused and gives stakeholders a clear point for evaluating the results.
Breaking those 90 days into three phases gives maintenance, operations, and finance teams a shared timeline for what should happen and when.
Weeks 1–2: Asset Selection and Stakeholder Alignment
Before installation begins, finalize the asset list and brief maintenance, operations, and finance teams on what the pilot will involve. A plant that skips this step can end up with technicians treating new alerts as an unexplained interruption and not understanding that it’s a tool to support their work.
- Confirm the asset list against your FMEA scores; don’t let it drift once installation is scheduled.
- Assign a single pilot owner who is accountable for the full 90 days, not just the technical rollout.
- Put success metrics in writing before installation starts, so there’s no argument later about whether the pilot worked.
Weeks 3–4: Sensor Installation and Baseline Data
This is where clean data collection starts, and it depends heavily on getting installation right the first time. Where multiple condition indicators are useful, a multi-parameter sensor can simplify installation and give your team a more complete view of asset condition.
At UpTime Solutions, our condition monitoring for industrial assets can capture all three data types from one install, which cuts installation time and gives you one clean baseline instead of three disconnected ones.
- Choose the sensor configuration that matches the asset and failure modes you’re monitoring.
- Verify mounting quality and sensor placement on rotating equipment; a loosely mounted sensor can introduce noise that makes the data harder to interpret.
- Allow enough normal operating data to establish a useful baseline before refining alert thresholds.
Weeks 5–12: Threshold Tuning and ROI Proof
With baseline data in hand, this phase is about refining thresholds, reducing unnecessary alerts, and building the case for what comes next. As you collect more data, focus on identifying which alerts require attention and whether acting on them creates measurable value.
- Track avoided emergency repairs against total sensor, software, and labor costs.
- Review alert volume regularly and adjust thresholds instead of letting false alarms pile up unaddressed.
- Prepare the go/no-go data package by week 12, including cost tracking, alert history, and documented maintenance outcomes.
If you’re ready to put a pilot into practice, the team at UpTime Solutions can help you identify the right assets, install sensors, and monitor data throughout the pilot.
Put Your Pilot Into Action With UpTime Solutions
At UpTime Solutions, we combine wireless sensors, software, and expert support to help industrial teams identify developing equipment problems and address them before they lead to unplanned downtime. We support your facility throughout the process, from sensor installation and software configuration to employee training and ongoing condition monitoring.
Our Pilot Program provides a practical way to test condition-based maintenance on a focused group of assets. It includes:
- 60 Mist LX sensors
- Expert installation
- A 60-day monitoring window
- Straightforward costs
- A 1-on-1 consultation that includes an on-site visit
We can also help you identify the right assets to monitor and turn condition data into actionable maintenance decisions.
If you’re ready to move from playbook to practice, try a condition monitoring solution from UpTime. We can help you understand how to start a pilot for condition-based maintenance, assess your first 10–20 assets, and determine whether our Pilot Program is the right fit for your facility. A focused pilot can give you the information you need to make a confident decision about scaling condition-based maintenance across your operation.