July 8, 2025 What’s the Story on Failed Condition Monitoring Pilots?

Condition monitoring pilots doesn’t need better tech—it needs a better story.

by Jeremy Drury, Chief Commercial Officer at UpTime Solutions

Condition monitoring pilots are supposed to show the power of early fault detection. Imagine how much more efficient your operations would be if you could spot problems in your plant’s equipment before they cause maintenance issues or downtime.

But there’s a problem. Many of these pilots stall, stranding reliability and maintenance teams in a state of pilot purgatory, with an unclear sense of what went wrong or what to do differently next time. Often, the technology gets blamed: the sensors didn’t do what the condition monitoring company said they would.

But what if the problem isn’t with the sensors — what if it’s with the condition monitoring story? While bad tech can let companies down, pilots most often get stuck because there’s a lack of clarity on why a facility needs condition monitoring in the first place. What are the goals behind a condition monitoring pilot? What should a pilot help achieve? How can a pilot scale up to protect equipment health? Answers to these questions will allow reliability and maintenance teams to tell a clear story on exactly what they want from condition monitoring. Having a strong condition monitoring story is the best defense reliability and maintenance teams can have against pilot purgatory.

To help reliability and maintenance teams tell a better condition monitoring story, let’s first discuss four places where the story usually breaks down.

1. No major narrative to support pilot’s existence

The first story problem is overarching. Pilots often get stuck because companies don’t have a clear sense of why they’re doing them in the first place — the ‘why’ either isn’t there, or is too limited. Condition monitoring isn’t a panacea to your plant’s maintenance problems, but it’s also not only a way to reduce frustration with a finicky piece of equipment.

Before signing up for a pilot, reliability and maintenance teams should arrive at a clear vision of why they’re doing it—they need a storyboard for what they hope the pilot will do. Are you trying to drive a higher volume of production? Or create a measurable increase in efficiency? For pilots to succeed, the terms of success should be tightly defined.

With a weak or uncertain story about what pilot success looks like, the most likely destination is purgatory.

2. Sensors enter too early in the story

Keeping assets and equipment working properly requires significant expertise, and even the best condition monitoring doesn’t waive that requirement—it complements it.

Sensors pull data from your assets. But that data only becomes a compelling story once it’s interpreted, and strong interpretation requires the deep experience and expertise of your maintenance staff. Equipment health is extremely nuanced, involving dozens if not hundreds of constantly interacting variables. You need knowledge to parse them out, and make the data meaningful.

Imagine trying to read a lung x-ray if you’re not a trained technician. Maybe roughly, you see a dark patch in the x-ray that doesn’t look right. But how do you know what the patch is? And how do you know what to do about it? You need trained professionals to answer those questions. The same principle applies to condition monitoring. Sensors on their own, no matter how technologically advanced they may be, should never replace the expertise of a maintenance pro.

In their efforts to get a condition monitoring program off the ground, executives may make the mistake of introducing sensors too early into their condition monitoring story. If you don’t already have a solid base of maintenance expertise at your plant, all sensors can offer is raw data and a disappointing pilot. But, with professionals who can meaningfully interpret and respond to data, condition monitoring programs can be an incredibly powerful force multiplier.

 3. A story gap between executives and the plant floor

Pilots also fail when there’s a major disconnect between how executives and engineers see the condition monitoring story.

The disconnect between the boardroom and the plant floor is somewhat natural. Executives and engineers have different responsibilities. The former care about big-picture realities and decisions, and set the overall strategic vision of a company. As a result, they aren’t as intimately acquainted with the granular, day-to-day realities of the plant. Engineers and even plant managers, on the other hand, are constantly working at the level of granular nuance — and are less concerned with the larger story of the company’s functioning.

For a condition monitoring story to be complete and compelling, it needs to comprise both these perspectives: the big picture plot points along with the finer details that make the story realistic. Executives are brilliant decision makers — but when they’re disconnected from the everyday realities of operations, they’re more vulnerable to seduction from technology marketing teams that sell them dreams of full automation and no unplanned downtime. And this problem cuts both ways. Maintenance engineers can be so concerned with a broken single machine that they lack the ability to see how and why a pilot could scale. Their vision is constricted to annoying pieces of equipment, rather than a larger vision of how condition monitoring could create exponential efficiency across the plant, or even several plants.

Neither of these ways of telling the condition monitoring story are incorrect—they’re simply incomplete. But if they’re not integrated, it’s likely that a pilot project will fail.

4. The story needs a co-author

At this point, you may be asking yourself an important question: where is the condition monitoring company in all this? Shouldn’t they be helping their customer fix all these story problems? Resoundingly: yes. Deciding whether to work with a particular company should be shaped by how and whether it helps solve these problems.

If you’re met with flashy marketing about how sensors will solve everything, and there isn’t a detailed narrative on how a pilot can scale, the best advice is to run the other way. Good condition monitoring depends on a strong feedback loop that gets going even before the pilot gets off the ground.

As tempting as it may be, it’s a mistake to activate a pilot after a single ‘magic meeting’. You need to build a strong pattern of communication with your condition monitoring provider to ensure ongoing collaboration. With this feedback loop in place, the solution can quickly scale to suit your needs.

Better stories = better pilots

Condition monitoring usually doesn’t fail because of flawed technology. It fails because the story around it is weak and underdeveloped. Too often, pilots are treated like self-contained experiments rather than the opening chapter of a strategic transformation. But asset health is less like a one-act play and more like a complex novel— spanning people, processes, and technology.

To escape pilot purgatory, reliability and maintenance teams need to write a better story. This story needs to understand why condition monitoring is important, introduce it at the right time in an organization’s development, and bridge executive vision with operational nuance. If not equipped with strong stories, it’s just too easy to have lost the plot.

About the Author
Jeremy Drury is the Chief Commercial Officer of UpTime Solutions. He is focused on connecting prediction to production with the industrial internet of things. As a veteran of the manufacturing industry, Jeremy has spearheaded product development initiatives and go-to-market strategies in more than 80 countries. His multi-disciplinary leadership offers unique perspectives on implementing strategies for the change-ready and the change-adverse. Jeremy has a passion for communicating, teaching and connecting complicated concepts into digestible stories that provide simple, take-home applications.

Read more from the author:

The No-Nonsense Buyer’s Guide to IoT | Reliable Plant, 2024

Navigating the IoT Ecosystem | Reliable Plant, 2023

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