Smarter maintenance, fewer breakdowns

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MOVUS is an Australian technology company specialising in industrial prescriptive AI solutions with an outcome driven approach. These solutions help asset-intensive operators with early fault diagnosis, reduce maintenance costs, and extend equipment life through real-time, data-driven insights.

The company recently picked up the Mining Beacon Breakthrough Innovation Award at IMARC. 

We caught up with Sanjeev Kumar, Head of Business, and Malcolm Schulstad, COO, to unpack their breakthrough approach and the implications for mining, maintenance, safety and sustainability.

Sanjeev Kumar: With the strategic relationship with Infinite Uptime, MOVUS is able to bring more advanced sensing technologies and the PlantOS platform to its customers.

Traditionally, most companies have operated on reactive or scheduled maintenance cycles. Most vendors either sold a lot of sensors or sold a dashboard capable of integrating OEM sensors without much intelligence behind it. The end result is poor adoption and a waste of money.

MOVUS adds the brains and brings an end-to-end intuitive solution. With IoT capable of capturing real-time data, widespread network availability, machine learning and AI, we can now analyse huge volumes of data instantly. Our hardware captures multiple data types, so you don’t need as many devices, reducing hardware costs by around 40%.

PlantOS is the industrial AI layer that sits on top, continuously learning from the data and providing deep insights. Together, these systems shift maintenance from a reactive or scheduled process to prescriptive, where you can anticipate issues before they happen with pinpointed recommendations and plan around them with confidence.

Sanjeev Kumar: Prescriptive is where AI actually tells you what action to take. Traditionally, a technician sees a machine heating or vibrating, opens the whole machine and hunts for the problem. Prescriptive AI acts like a human, identifying and pinpointing the problem — for example, a bearing issue, a structural looseness problem, or a loose bolt. It gives the exact recommendation. So, this further enhances predictive — you don’t just know something is wrong, you know exactly what to do. One of our customers shifted from traditional to a prescriptive approach and found the number of unplanned breakdown instances was reduced by 90% and improved maintenance planning accuracy by 20%.

Malcolm Schulstad: One of the biggest hurdles is trust. Many predictive systems raise too many false alarms, so teams stop paying attention. We’ve worked hard to overcome that. With PlantOS, every alert is validated by users in the field. This real-world feedback has helped us achieve around 93% diagnostic accuracy. In the last 4 months, of the issues recorded, on 99.9% of the machines advance notification of a problem was given.

We’ve also made integration simple and transparent. Unlike others, we don’t charge extra for data access or APIs. Customers can connect PlantOS to their existing systems freely, without hidden costs or complexity.

When teams can actually see the true condition of their asset in real time, they gain the trust and confidence to remove unnecessary scheduled maintenance, shifting the focus of their time to where it’s really needed. That’s when prescriptive maintenance truly becomes part of everyday operations, not an extra task on the side.

Sanjeev Kumar: The results speak for themselves. One of our customers with a ball mill experienced more than 180 hours of downtime and around 30 breakdowns over two years. After implementing our solution, those breakdowns dropped from 30 to just 3 in just 18 months. This was a 90% reduction in unplanned failures. Downtime also fell from 180 hours to only 27, and most of that was simply due to waiting on spare parts.

Across our wider deployments, now covering over 3000 blowers, 5000 pumps, 190 ball mills, 140 conveyors and 150 crushers, we consistently see over 90% fewer breakdowns and over 20% improvement in planning accuracy.

Malcolm Schulstad: That reliability has a ripple effect across operations. When you know the exact condition of your equipment, you don’t need to stockpile spare parts “just in case.” You can order what’s needed, when it’s needed. That optimises your supply chain, reduces waste, and minimises air freight and manufacturing overhead, all of which have real environmental benefits.

And from a people perspective, it reduces pressure on maintenance teams. Less firefighting, fewer surprises, and more time to plan properly. It makes their jobs safer, less stressful and far more rewarding.

Malcolm Schulstad: When machines run efficiently, they naturally use less energy. One of our customers saw around a 2% reduction in energy consumption just from maintaining equipment better with no hardware changes, no process overhaul - just better insights and timing.

By extending the life of assets, you also reduce the need to manufacture and transport new components, which saves on materials, logistics, and emissions. That’s a major sustainability win for heavy industry.

We’re also building on this with FitPower, which is our current monitoring solution that fuses vibration and power data. It helps teams identify the most energy-efficient time to perform maintenance, so you’re not only fixing issues early, but also optimising energy use in the process.

Sanjeev Kumar: We’re heading toward a future where plants operate semi-autonomously, with far less human exposure to risk, especially in challenging or remote mining environments.

In the past, teams had to travel long distances or face tough weather conditions just to inspect equipment in person. Soon, all process data will feed into a single intelligent platform that can tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it safely.

Maintenance used to be seen as a tough, hands-on job. In the future, it’ll be recognised as one of the smartest jobs on site powered by remote diagnostics, prescriptive insights, and targeted fixes that take minutes, not hours.

That shift isn’t about replacing people. It’s about giving them the tools to work smarter, stay safer, and make a bigger impact with their expertise.

Discover how MOVUS is helping heavy industry move from reactive to prescriptive maintenance. Visit www.movus.com.au or contact the team at info@movus.com.au to book an Asset Health Consultation and explore how your site can benefit.