Understand Your Goals with New Maintenance Technology

Alan Friedman, Cat IV, CRL, CMRP, Author; Founder/CEO of Zenco Vibration Experts

Posted 5/9/2024

It’s common for people to think that the next new maintenance technology will solve all of their problems. Just recently, someone complained to me that they were looking for another provider for remote monitoring services using wireless vibration sensors. When I asked what the problem was, the person said it was because the wireless sensors kept falling off the machine. I noted that this was not an issue with the remote services provider but rather with sensor mounting. Any new sensors would also need to be mounted on the machine.

The reply was a blank stare. We tend to look for solutions without properly defining the problems we are trying to solve. The solutions often come in the form of quick fixes, new products (new pills!), something we can buy. And when the new fix doesn’t solve the problem we jump to the next new shiny object and hope that it will fulfill our undefined needs.

Defining Goals

Why are you buying those sensors? Why are you buying that new maintenance technology? What are you hoping to achieve? How will you measure success (or failure) both in technical terms and in terms of a return on investment? Although these questions are straightforward and obvious, my experience in the field suggests that many people cannot answer them adequately. They have some vague idea that a tool or technology will somehow solve their problems but they are not clear on what these problems are.

When it comes to vibration monitoring, one of the goals is to help planners plan better. If you know well in advance that a machine is developing problems, you can order the spare parts and schedule the repair in a way that makes best use of available labor and maximizes uptime. These benefits can be measured, quantified, and calculated in dollar terms. What I see in the field (still, after 30 years) is people using vibration in a reactive mode. Which is to say they identify a problem at a late stage and then they do the repair a few days later.

This does prevent catastrophic failure – which is a valid goal to have – but it does not achieve the other, more economically salient goals of being able to plan better.

How We Make Decisions

I would say that if a tool is good, it will change how you make decisions. It will change your processes and procedures and it will change the culture. A good tool enables you to do things differently. What I often see in the field is that we adopt new tools but we do not change our processes and procedures to make the best use of these tools. We do not use them to improve our operations.

Why is this? Because we are not clear about our goals and because we inherently don’t like change. A common scenario is that an operator tells a maintenance person that there’s a problem with one of the machines. The maintenance guy grabs a vibration data collector, confirms the suspicions and a repair is done a few days later. We just used a high-tech tool to tell us something we already knew. How is it supposed to work? The vibe guy is supposed to detect the impending defect months before the operator notices it and the repair should be scheduled well in advance. Click here to find out why you should be come a certified vibration analyst.

Understand Your Goals with New Maintenance Technology — **To have a successful program, all 10 components must be in place.** Image courtesy Zenco.

What are your Goals with New Maintenance Technology?

Maybe you are in the market for some new maintenance technology. Perhaps you are considering installing wireless sensors on more of your assets. What are your goals? How will you measure success? How will you calculate the return on your investment?

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Website: www.ZencoVibrations.com

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My Book: Audit It Improve It

Alan Friedman

Alan, aka the Vibe Guru, has over 30 years of vibration analysis experience, He has trained 1000’s of students around the world up to Category IV. One of the things that makes Alan a great teacher is his ability to teach people where they are at. Whether you are a math challenged millwright, an engineer or a PhD, Alan will challenge you without overwhelming you. If you are interested in condition monitoring you can also check out his book: Audit It. Improve It! Getting the Most from your Vibration Monitoring Program or hire him for an on-site program audit.

OEE: Overall Equipment Effectiveness

Oh "Overall Equipment Effectiveness", I've heard about that before! Unfortunately, in many facilities, that's all OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is to the personnel. Something they heard of, talked about or read about. Many maintenance departments today still do not effectively utilize the OEE tool even though it's widely used among the world class companies.

"Lean" on your Maintenance Materials

A custom blueprint for streamlining internal processes, Lean has helped to increase production at many plants. Except, all too often, these plants don’t enjoy the maximum return on their investment. This is because managers often limit their Lean implementations to production-related processes. Such applications provide only a fraction of the benefit Lean is designed to offer and often deprive plants of achieving the true potential for growth and development.

Are People Your Most Valuable Resource?

Do You Listen When Your Equipment Speaks to You?

Can You Really Justify Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)?

Reliability Centered Maintenance is a step-by-step instructional tool for how to analyze a system's failure modes and define how to prevent or find those failures early. RCM become a very detailed study of things we already know, you will often hear the justification "it's to make sure we don't miss anything." If you are considering implementing a reliability centered maintenance program, you. should be aware of the problems you may run into.

The Achilles Heel of Modern Electronics

Digital measurement technology certainly has taken the test industry forward, mostly with giant strides. The exact opposite may be true, however, when it is applied to testing for aging-related failure modes such as intermittency or no fault found (NFF). Digital abstraction devices, perfect for parametric testing, rarely synchronize to real-time, randomly occurring, anomalous, or intermittent age-related failure events. This shortcoming is especially acute when large numbers of circuit nodes require testing.

Keep Maintenance Simple: Use Senses and Sensibility

What is Vibration?

In its simplest form, vibration can be considered to be the oscillation or repetitive motion of an object around an equilibrium position. The equilibrium position is the position the object will attain when the force acting on it is zero. This type of vibration is called "whole body motion", meaning that all parts of the body are moving together in the same direction at any point in time.

Web Based Vibration Analysis Programs

A number of changes are occurring in the Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) market and in the realm of communications, Internet and database technologies that are resulting in the adoption of Internet based monitoring programs. The following paper will describe the technologies involved as well as the current market climate that is driving this change. This paper will focus on vibration analysis in particular, however, the forces involved are just as applicable to other CBM technologies and Maintenance planning packages.

Vibration & Ultrasound Technologies: A Possible Integrated Inspection Tool?

The purpose of this paper is to introduce condition monitoring and reliability engineers to the principles of using ultrasound for the assessment of machine condition. Ultrasound can be a complimentary technology to vibration, thermography and lubrication monitoring. It must be emphasized that it is rarely successful as a stand alone technology for effective machine condition assessment and subsequent required maintenance planning. This paper concentrates on the use of airborne ultrasound as a complementary technique particularly for machinery that may be inaccessible due to guards or hazardous locations.

Vibration Pen, Shock Pulse Measurement (SPM), & Vibration Analysis - What's the Difference?

There are three major types of tools for finding bearing defects using vibration techniques. Which of the tools should you chose for inspections of bearings? The best solution is often a combination of two or three of the tools, but it depends very much on how much rotating equipment you have in your plant, the criticality of that equipment, the speed of your rotating equipment, and how perceptive your organization is to training. A short description of the three techniques follows.

Vibration Analysis Reveals Poor Motor Mounting Structure

At the installation of a new 150 gal/min centrifugal pump driven by a 125 HP motor, high vibration levels were found immediately upon first start. After several days of alignment checks, pump teardowns, bearing inspections, motor uncoupled runs and vendor technical support, no solution was found. The plant maintenance manager asked the company's vibration analyst to take readings to troubleshoot the problem. After measuring extremely high vibration levels, resonance was suspected and was found at the motor support structure due to inadequate mounting design for the new installation.

Vibration Standards and Damage Factors for Machinery

The present study is aimed at establishing the vibration standards for precision machine tools. The machine tools are first segregated and then their vibration data are analyzed for determining the normal vibration level and damage factors (DF). After refining and fixing the vibration standards obtained, they can be used to assess the machinery health.

Understand Your Goals with New Maintenance Technology