Defective bearings lead to unplanned downtime and, as a result, maintenance costs increase. There are also many manual activities, which are associated with high resource use. Because monitoring often only occurs every 6 weeks during downtime, there are monitoring gaps. Also, the maintenance cycle is unsatisfactory because there are frequent preventive bearing replacements only for the purpose of risk reduction due to consequential damage in case of failure.
Alternative surveillance solutions are often uneconomic, require a high level of cabling and integration, or require the labor needed for data interpretation.