Gonzalo Sanz Segovia | 23/10/2025
Understanding the status of assets translates into fewer claims and a reduction in costs for our customers.
In industry, where MAPFRE Global Risks offers insurance solutions to its clients, critical equipment and machinery are at the operational heart of many production facilities. Their correct functioning is essential when it comes to guaranteeing the continuity of processes, the product quality and safety.
From an insurance perspective, although these assets usually have a very high value (including but not limited to factors such as their technological complexity, specialization, and/or difficulty of replacement), the industrial loss ratio associated with the breakdown of critical machinery is not limited solely to the cost of repair or replacement of the equipment. This type of event entails an economic impact generated by the loss of profits resulting from the unscheduled downtime of these assets, often causing “bottlenecks” and sometimes forcing the entire industrial unit to be brought to a halt. Consequently, the value of compensation associated could even exceed the value of the asset.
These production downtimes could also have a serious reputational impact, contractual penalties, additional operating costs, and other inconveniences for the insured party, which could affect the entire value chain of the plant or the company.
With this in mind, the risk management associated with these assets has become a strategic priority for industrial organizations, as well as an analysis focus for insurance companies.
As a result, the maintenance of critical industrial goods is of particular importance when it comes to ensuring their correct operation and maximizing their availability over time.
There are different types of approaches to carry out maintenance tasks:
• Corrective maintenance mainly consists of asset repair after a fault. It is the most basic type of maintenance, although its reactive nature implies downtime and unforeseen costs.
• Preventive maintenance is about reducing these unexpected faults and is structured around performing interventions, such as inspections or replacements of wearable elements, which are scheduled based on time of use or the moment in the equipment’s useful life. As a result, the fault rate of the assets improves, but as a consequence, unnecessary interventions and/or replacement of wearable elements prematurely could be incurred, which could lead to operational extra-costs. Moreover, such interventions always entail a risk.
• Finally, predictive maintenance, which is more technologically advanced, aims to carry out relevant interventions right at the right time based on the state of the equipment, reducing the amount of downtime to the essential ones and consequently optimizing costs.
What is CBM?
Condition-Based Maintenance or CBM is a predictive maintenance philosophy that focuses on continuous monitoring (online) or periodic monitoring (offline) of key equipment parameters and indicators. The aim of this approach is to plan or carry out interventions only when the asset status indicators show signs of advanced deterioration or risk of failure. As a result, both unforeseen production shutdowns (related to corrective maintenance) and unnecessary interventions (typical of preventive maintenance) are avoided.
To adequately implement this maintenance philosophy, both the previous analysis and the interpretation of the values obtained and their trends are of particular importance, establishing measurement parameters or prealert values and limit values that allow for the development of a monitoring and action strategy. Thus, a reduction in the frequency of the analysis or monitoring, an equipment intervention plan, or an immediate shutdown of the asset may be required to prevent the occurrence of a major incident.
Applications and Benefits
The application of CBM is generally focused on high-value machinery or machinery with a high strategic impact, although given its advantages, it is increasingly common in lower impact assets:
• Nowadays, triaxial sensors for online vibration monitoring are often seen at different points of power generation turbines (or other rotating equipment), which identify possible lubrication failures, damage to bearings, misalignment of the axis, and other symptoms indicating that a catastrophic failure is around the corner.
• In critical motor reducers (such as those responsible for rotating horizontal furnaces in cement industries), oil analysis is carried out to assess the possible wear and tear or degradation of the gears and internal parts.
• Similarly, the oil used in transformers is analyzed to verify its physical-chemical qualities or possible external contaminations that compromise its function, as well as the appearance of certain gases that could indicate the occurrence of failures during its operation.
• The cooling systems of large furnaces, responsible for maintaining an adequate temperature in the refractory material, are equipped with flow sensors and temperature sensors to provide real-time alerts about a possible failure that could lead to a leak of the molten material.
Considering their benefits, applying predictive techniques in almost all industries is now recommended, with the most common being the use of thermal images on electrical equipment, as this can prevent the occurrence of hot spots, which is one of the most common causes of fire in industrial environments.
Definitely, Condition-Based Maintenance involves greater knowledge of asset status and an improvement in their operational availability, which translates into long-term cost optimization for owners. However, in addition to its production and economic implications, the high correlation between this type of maintenance and the reduction of the risk of machinery breakdown makes it a philosophy that is highly valued by insurance companies.
Author of the article:
Arturo Montero is a Risk Engineer at MAPFRE Global Risks.
