How to Master Trend Analysis and Preventive Maintenance Optimization

Trend Analysis and Preventive Maintenance (PM) optimization require starting simple and utilizing available resources.

Maintenance isn’t just about fixing things when they break. It's about using data to predict problems and improve performance before issues arise. That’s where trend analysis and preventive maintenance (PM) optimization come into play. At the same time, effective trend analysis is akin to a blissful state that most organizations never achieve. The key is to start simple and lean on your criticality analysis. Here's why.

What Is Trend Analysis?

Trend analysis is the process of collecting and studying data over time to see how things change. It helps you identify good and bad patterns and decide what to do next. When done right, they help reduce downtime, cut costs, and make your systems safer and more reliable.

In many ways, trend analysis is a simple concept. If a machine breaks down every three months, trend analysis may indicate that it consistently fails after 1,000 hours of use. That's a clue. You can use that info to schedule service before it breaks.

Trend analysis isn’t just for the maintenance team. Trend analysis is a valuable contribution that planners, reliability engineers, business analysts, and even database-savvy team members can make.

Start Simple and Be Practical

When starting with trend analysis, it’s tempting to go big. Software vendors will oversell their diagnostic tools. Reliability engineers may even oversell the number of analysts needed at the beginning of the effort.

The key is to start simple. Find one or two people on your current staff with good data analytics skills. Begin by examining easy-to-measure factors, such as cost per repair, work orders per month, or failures per asset. Pick failures or issues that really matter to frontline staff. You just need someone who can spot patterns, ask the right questions, and provide data that supports practical intuition.

Measures have unintended consequences, so be careful. For example, it’s common for me to find organizations that reward being under a lean maintenance budget, yet equipment performance is always lagging. Ensure that your goals align with your values.

Use Systems Thinking

The best insights often come from combining data across multiple systems, such as work orders, inventory, compliance, and customer service. That's where systems thinking and system integration help. A single trend in one system may not be significant, but trends across multiple systems often reveal the full story.

One practical example comes from Georgia. There, a client used three vendors to rebuild pumps. Overall, the infant mortality was low for all rebuilt pumps that were brought back into service. However, further examination revealed that more than 50% of the pumps that broke after being rebuilt came from a single vendor.

What Can Trend Analysis Improve?

Trend analysis isn’t just about stopping breakdowns. It can lead to a wide range of improvements, including:

• Better quality parts

• Stress reduction on equipment (de-rating)

• Acceptance testing

• Improved training and standard operating procedures (SOPs)

• User-friendly software interfaces

• Error detection and alarms

• Redundancy and backups

• Critical spare parts management

• Fast isolation and containment during failures

All of these reduce risk and save time and money.

Tips for PM Optimization

Preventive maintenance (PM) optimization is about doing the right work at the right time. Here are a few key tips from my experience:

1. Look for Gaps

Start by reviewing your current PM activities. Are some assets over-maintained? Are others neglected? Check documentation and performance data. Consider whether Predictive Maintenance (PdM) tools like vibration analysis or thermal imaging might help.

2. Focus on Critical Assets

You can’t afford downtime for your most important equipment. Invest in good practices like condition monitoring, failure analysis, and detailed PM plans.

The Solomon-Oldach Asset Prioritization (SOAP) method yields proven results and reduces costs by 70 percent compared to traditional approaches.

 

3. Consider Run-to-Failure for Low-Risk Assets

Not everything needs the same level of care. For less critical assets, it may make more sense to run them until they fail and then replace them. Run-to-failure is a cost-effective approach if the risk is low. Remember, it only makes sense if you are intentional in this approach.

4. Balance Budget and Risk

Optimization is about what you can afford with the resources you have. Ask: "How optimized can we afford to be?" The answer will help you strike a balance between cost, risk, and performance.

Successful Trend Analysis and PM Optimization

Trend analysis and PM optimization are not just buzzwords. They’re powerful tools to make your operation more efficient, reliable, and effective. Utilize the resources you have and prioritize the aspects that matter most to frontline staff. Whether you’re a planner, technician, or analyst, everyone can play a role in this effort. Start simple, but don't stop there.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Visit our Asset Management page for more information related to reliability, risk management, resilience, and other asset management services.

Why Disaster Recovery Lessons from Hurricane Helene Matter in Capital Project Development

Hurricane Helene's aftermath presents a clear case study of why capital projects can stall before money, permits, and regulatory clarity are aligned.

Hurricane Helene's wreckage in western North Carolina has exposed the friction points that arise whenever large-scale recovery moves from emergency response into sustained program development. Environmental permitting related to air, water, and solid waste is where policy, public health, and bureaucratic timing collide. Hurricane Helene's aftermath presents a clear case study of why recovery can stall before money, permits, and regulatory clarity are aligned. The project development and delivery lessons learned should not be forgotten.

Water: The 401 / 404 Dance

The Clean Water Act Section 404 (dredge-and-fill) is implemented by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), while Section 401 gives states the authority to certify that federally permitted activities will comply with state water quality standards.

After Helene, the USACE issued "quick guidance" outlining exemptions and Nationwide Permits to expedite repairs. However, many restoration activities still require coordination with North Carolina’s 401 & Buffer Permitting Branch — a process that can be slow when hundreds of road, culvert, and stream repairs compete for attention.

The federal-state dance matters because USACE cannot lawfully finalize some 404 approvals without a 401 certification or an explicit waiver. Timelines stretch when state reviews are lengthened by public notice, threatened endangered-species reviews, or changed project designs.

A practical consequence is that local governments and contractors can be left holding partially completed work or using temporary fixes that later require retroactive permitting or costly rework. Retroactive permitting and rework inflate program costs and complicate fund eligibility.

Air: Debris Burning, Incinerators, and Monitoring Gaps

Air permitting becomes a flashpoint after wind and flood damage create mountains of vegetative and construction debris. North Carolina’s Division of Air Quality issued Helene-specific guidance allowing certain managed burning (including air-curtain incinerators under strict conditions) and encouraging chipping and landfilling to reduce smoke and fine-particle exposure.

Operational constraints, such as limited numbers of permitted incinerators, local opposition to open burning, and variable monitoring capacity for particulate matter, mean that debris disposal often requires local permits, temporary regulatory relief, and rapid coordination with state and EPA officials to avoid public health impacts.

The EPA and state guidance on disaster debris and post-storm burning has been relied upon. Still, patchwork implementation leaves air quality uneven across counties.

Solid Waste and Temporary Facilities

Landfills and temporary debris sites can be overwhelmed quickly. Solid waste permitting for temporary cells, hazardous material segregation, and leachate management requires fast authorizations. When solid waste permitting lags, local governments face issues such as illegal dumping, longer haul times, and increased costs.

Streamlining, such as pre-approved temporary site criteria or rapid environmental reviews, reduces program delays. Advance planning is required, and local and state agencies were not prepared for an environmental event like Hurricane Helene.

Why Disaster Status and Timelines Diverge Across Agencies

FEMA’s disaster declarations and cost-share policies operate under the Stafford Act and the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a “no-year” account managed specifically for presidentially declared disasters. FEMA also applies time-limited policy flexibility. For example, temporary 100% cost-share periods) that can expire after specific windows unless extended.

Other federal agencies (HUD, USDA, EPA) have different statutory authorities, funding sources, and eligibility triggers. That means these programs may phase their programs on different schedules or require different certifications to unlock funds. That mismatch means a jurisdiction can still be in an active FEMA recovery posture while encountering different timelines and paperwork for an EPA water permit or a HUD housing grant.

North Carolina’s practice of extending certain state disaster declarations is a pragmatic response. However, state recovery programs are typically expanded by an additional six months at a time. These six-month extensions are insufficient to accommodate permitting and design processes that typically take five years or more, and their unpredictability creates costly uncertainty for designers and owners.

The better solution is for disaster declarations to last as long as federal funding from agencies like FEMA is available. Fee waivers, expedited permitting, and temporary burning rules are more effective when viewed realistically in relation to how recovery projects are implemented and funded.

Lessons Learned One Year After Hurricane Helene

The Hurricane Helene recovery highlights that environmental permitting and federally provided funding must be treated as a core component of capital program development. Pre-agreed emergency permitting templates (401/404 coordination protocols, pre-approved temporary debris-site standards, and air-curtain incinerator deployment plans), paired with cross-agency funding timeline alignment, dramatically reduce waste, rework, and public-health risk. Helene's recovery highlights the cost of not having those systems in place. The recovery from the next major event can be greatly enhanced by the leverage created when state and federal partners align both rules and resources.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Visit our Program Development page for more information on business cases, third-party assessments, phasing projects, and related services.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE fishbone diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method^©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.

Only Two September Hurricane Seasons Have Been This Slow. What's Next?

September is "prime time" for hurricanes. What does that mean for October?

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season has been unusually slow in September. In fact, September is typically the most active month of the hurricane season. So, what does history teach us? What can we expect for October and early November, given that September has been quiet?

Why September Matters

September is usually the peak for hurricane activity. Warm ocean waters, lower wind shear, and a steady train of African easterly waves give storms everything they need to thrive. Think of September as "prime time" for hurricanes. So when that month is slow, it feels like something is off.

In 2025, the reasons are clear: layers of dry, dusty air from the Sahara have blanketed much of the tropical Atlantic, wind shear has been stronger than normal, and the atmosphere itself has been pretty stable. Even with moderately warm sea-surface temperatures — the fuel for hurricanes — storms have struggled to organize. It's like trying to light a campfire with damp wood: the fuel is there, but the conditions just won't cooperate.

History Has a Few Lessons

This year isn't the first time we've seen a quiet September. The 1994 season, for example, barely produced anything in September or October. Then, almost out of nowhere, two hurricanes popped up in November.

Back in 1914, the Atlantic had one of the quietest seasons on record, with essentially no hurricanes after mid-September.

These examples remind us of a couple of things. A quiet September doesn't always mean a quiet year. However, there have only been two hurricane seasons in the past 125 years that have been as quiet as this one.

What to Watch in October

There are a few possibilities:

A Late-Season Burst

The atmosphere can shift quickly. If the dry air lifts, the wind shear relaxes, and the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO, a term tropical storm-friendly conditions) swings into a favorable phase, storm development can ramp up in a hurry.

Sea temperatures in 2025 in the Main Development Region (MDR) have been cooler than in 2023 and 2024 (Source: University of Maine)

Storms Taking a Different Path

October storms often form closer to home in the Caribbean or the western Atlantic rather than far out in the Atlantic Ocean near Africa. That can mean less time to watch them spin across the ocean and more concern for the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Southeast U.S.

It Stays Quiet

The same factors that shut things down in September carry into October. Strong shear, dry air, or a stubborn atmospheric pattern can persist, limiting activity. That's what happened in seasons like 1914, where the lights basically went out early.

Looking Ahead in 2025

Forecasts suggest that October and November 2025 could still bring activity. There’s talk of a possible shift toward La Niña conditions later this year, which typically favors more Atlantic storms. If that happens, the quiet we saw in September may give way to a busier late season.

While you enjoy the lull, keep your hurricane kit stocked and keep a close eye on the forecast. October has a way of reminding us that the season isn't done until it's done.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE fishbone diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method^©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.