Conditionbased maintenance (CBM) is a maintenance strategy that monitors the actual condition of the components to decide what maintenance needs to be done.  CBM means maintenance intervention only when components are showing early signs of failure and the corrective actions performed, should put the component life back on track to achieve full life. The reduced maintenance interventions give rise to large potential savings.

The costs related to this strategy are the regular inspection costs and the reliability engineers monitoring the inspection data collected. The quality of the inspection data is critical to the success of the strategy. To this end, providing as much assistance to the inspectors to enable them to validate the quality of the data collected in the field is vitally important. Simple inspection tools with clear instructions are a must.

The inspection dataset collected over time will eventually start to drive the next step in the maintenance maturity journey