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Do You Make These Mistakes In Condition Monitoring?

By John Schultz, Allied Reliability

The first time it happened was back in 1995.  I was about half-way through a presentation to the Chemical Manufacturer’s Association when a guy in the back of the room shouted, “What a load of crap!”

Suddenly, the room got very quiet.

He was reacting to a slide which showed that the best companies in the chemical industry generate 55% of their workflow from Condition Based Monitoring (CBM) activities.

So I stopped and said, “I appreciate your feedback.  Would you care to share your experience?”

He explained that he was doing vibration, infrared thermography, ultrasound, oil analysis, motor testing, and non-destructive testing at his plant, but that CBM was only generating 5% of the workflow, not 55%.  So basically, in his view, I was telling stories to these people.

After thinking for a moment, I asked him how many rotating machine trains he had in his plant.  He said about 1,000.

“How many are on routine vibration monitoring?” I asked.  He said 60.

That’s when it hit me.  “So what I’m hearing is that you are applying the technology to 6% of your asset base and it’s generating 5% of your workflow.  Does it make sense that if you applied the technologies to 60% of your asset base that it could generate 50% of your workflow?”

He just sat there, speechless.  It was like he had never thought of it that way before and had missed the benchmark coverage model discussions about what best practice plants do.

Even though that was more than 10 years ago, I still see the same mistake today:  Expecting big results from CBM by just dabbling in it.

Another common example of dabbling is when companies apply only one or two technologies in their plants.

Let's go back to the central concept behind condition monitoring.

Virtually all equipment gives off early warning signals – such as heat, vibration or sound – before it ultimately fails.  These warning signals, otherwise known as failure modes, can be detected with certain CBM technologies.

But here's the catch.

Industrial equipment has more than one failure mode.  That means you often need multiple CBM technologies – electrical, mechanical and stationary -- to detect them.

Consider the example of a chiller, where you could apply vibration, oil analysis, refrigerant analysis, on-line and off-line motor testing, ultrasonic leak detection and still miss the early signs of a pending failure of the tube bundle.  For that you need eddy current testing also – a stationary technology.

In fact, depending on the material of construction and what it’s pumping, you could literally apply a dozen technologies to a chiller.

So the foundation of a successful CBM program is simple:

Determine all the probable failure modes for your equipment and apply each of the technologies that will detect them.

Why do companies expect magical results from dabbling in CBM?

Because doing more than that means they would have to make a commitment.   And that means risk.  So they would rather experiment first, and then if they see the return on investment, they will expand the program. 

The problem with dabbling is that it simply doesn’t work.  You won’t be able to detect the majority of problems that occur, so the equipment will run to failure anyway.  As a result, everyone gets frustrated with the program, and eventually the conclusion is “CBM doesn’t work here”.

The bottom line is, there is little to no payback from using one or two technologies – or applying CBM to a small amount of your assets – and hoping eventually it will evolve into a successful program.  Sure, by applying any technology to a targeted set of equipment, you can do “feel good” cost avoidance calculations, but you will not impact your bottom line profitability with this approach.

The payback occurs when you integrate the full range of technologies across a high percentage of your asset base. 

That’s the only approach that lets you plan and schedule the majority of your work, get the crafts people out there with the right skills, get the right parts out there at the right time, make precision repairs, and minimize the impact on your Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

Otherwise, you will always have an evolutionary program.  And evolutionary programs never deliver best practice results.  Best practice results must be engineered.