Twenty-five terms, defined the way practitioners use them — not the way vendors abuse them.
The automated identification of equipment behavior that deviates from its learned normal pattern.
A discipline and software category focused on maximizing asset reliability, availability, and performance across their lifecycle.
The structured parent-child organization of assets, from site down to individual components, that gives maintenance data its context.
The full span of an asset's existence — planning, acquisition, commissioning, operation, maintenance, and disposal — managed as a continuum.
The dominant open communication protocol for building automation systems such as HVAC, lighting, and access control.
Software that manages maintenance operations: work orders, preventive maintenance, assets, spare parts, and labor.
A maintenance strategy where work is triggered by the actual measured condition of equipment rather than by elapsed time.
The continuous or periodic measurement of equipment health indicators such as vibration, temperature, and energy draw.
A live digital representation of a physical asset or system, kept current with real operating data.
The management of an organization's physical assets across their whole lifecycle, spanning maintenance, financials, and capital planning.
A structured method for identifying how an asset can fail, what each failure causes, and which failure modes deserve priority.
An edge device that collects data from sensors and industrial equipment and relays it securely to a cloud or on-premise platform.
A simple, decades-old serial and TCP protocol that remains the most widely spoken data language of industrial equipment.
A lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol that has become the default transport for IoT telemetry.
The average operating time between failures of a repairable asset — the standard headline measure of reliability.
The average time from failure to restored operation — the standard measure of maintainability and response.
The composite metric — availability × performance × quality — expressing what fraction of planned production time actually produced good output at rated speed.
The modern, secure, platform-independent standard for exchanging industrial automation data between machines and software.
The percentage of scheduled preventive maintenance tasks completed on time — the basic health indicator of a maintenance program.
The use of condition data and models to forecast equipment failures before they occur, so work can be planned instead of suffered.
The stage beyond prediction: systems that not only forecast a failure but recommend or initiate the specific corrective action.
Maintenance performed on a fixed schedule — by calendar or usage — to reduce the likelihood of failure.
A structured methodology for selecting the right maintenance strategy for each asset based on its functions, failure modes, and consequences.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition — the systems that monitor and control industrial processes in real time across plants and distributed infrastructure.
The fundamental record of maintenance work: what needs doing, on which asset, by whom, with what parts, at what cost, and with what outcome.