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  Companies are under plenty of stress to cut back on their manufacturing expenditures, now more than ever. The mixture of low cost competition originating from China, along with the international economic downturn, has compelled these businesses to carefully keep an eye on their expenses and look for possibilities to make themselves more efficient. One important part of their entire production expenses entails the reliability of their production equipment. Abnormal equipment downtime and costly reactive servicing can reduce the margins of any manufacturing organization. Larger businesses committed to maintenance management systems long ago to take control of these expenses. In those days, computerized equipment management was very costly to set up and operate, so just the largest organizations were really able to take advantage of this opportunity. As recently as 10 years in the past, a company might have needed to invest thousands and thousands of dollars to implement a maintenance m