of marketing at Axeda Corp., Foxboro, Mass., which provides remote monitoring services. “You can capture their knowledge and turn it into rules. Then you can use that expertise on a global basis.”

Whether it’s on the control dashboard or outsourced to a vendor, predictive maintenance and control monitoring is seeing widespread adoption in the last couple of years. The economic downturn has prompted tough cost-cutting measures, which means the end of the old and costly “fix-it-when-it-breaks” maintenance mentality. Those who produce predictive maintenance tools have overcome resistance to adoption with easy-to-use dashboards or by taking on the chore themselves.

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