Plain and simple: there’s a lot that goes into a preventative maintenance program for hydraulic systems. While it’s a discipline that’s very basic and uncomplicated when you boil it down, there are many tests that need to be performed and plenty of steps where something can be done incorrectly, so it’s critical to the health of your machine that all are done regularly and properly. In order to do this, it’s important that both the system and hydraulic fluid are taken care of, as your fluid and systems are completely interdependent.

Something that worked well for us is if you make a visual change in the project one thing is we talk about planning and scheduling in a reliability of projects. We talk about preventive maintenance and reliability projects. What could easily happen is that you start documenting inspection routes and somebody sits in a corner documenting inspection routes right? We tried to work on our planning and scheduling…it may not be very visual on the floor. So, sometimes it could be a good idea just to make sure it’s okay…let’s pick our top five or top 10 piece of equipment and let’s fix them up.

One common way of controlling the state-of-health of a piece of equipment is to monitor its vibration signature. High quality data is required, so using high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to acquire and digitize the analog vibration signal is a key enabler to the arena of predictive maintenance.