Everybody’s talking about it, most want it and yet no one shares the same understanding: Predictive maintenance is a proactive, forward-looking maintenance strategy employed at just the right time to reduce costly downtime. With its approach, predictive maintenance goes one step further than condition monitoring. The goal of condition monitoring is to oversee the state of a machine or system — that is, its current state. Predictive maintenance uses AI methods to calculate, interpret and forecast the machine or system’s future behavior on the basis of its historical and current condition — an intelligent early-warning system that’s always looking ahead.