Maintworld Issue3 2016

CONDITION MONITORING
FOTO: STEVE POTTS
then stretching out to 90 days or even less frequently depending
upon the available time to perform measurements. Unfortunately,
this is a recipe for disaster. It can be a disaster because
machines will still fail on your watch, and/or the warnings you
provide will be too short and as a result the maintenance and
operation departments will lose faith in your service.
The answer is to perform a proper criticality analysis to
determine where you can justify the use of vibration analysis
and the overlap of other technologies. You also need to understand
failure modes in order to ensure that a) vibration analysis
should be applied at all, and b) that the settings used are correct,
and c) that the measurement interval matches the lead time to
failure (LTTR), also known as the P-F interval. You do not need
to perform a thorough reliability centred maintenance (RCM)
analysis to make these decisions; a more streamlined approach
can be taken. But you do need to perform some sort of analysis
to ensure your program will deliver maximum value.
Five: Teach Others about VA,
CBM and Reliability
There are so many companies around the world with skilled
vibration analysts working with people who just don’t get it.
This is tremendously frustrating for those analysts, and it is
a waste of a terrific opportunity to reduce maintenance costs
and downtime. It is essential that everyone in the organization
understands the basic capability of vibration analysis (and
the other condition monitoring tools) and the principal of
condition-based maintenance and the principal of reliability
improvement; eliminating the root causes of failure.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for industry.
Everyone should understand these principals, from senior
management down to operators and craftspeople – and that
certainly includes people in maintenance and operations. And
that leads to sixteen.
Six: Sell (and Re-sell) your Program
to Senior Management
Some of the best vibration analysts in the world have come to
work only to find that the company has shut down the condition-monitoring
department because they did not appreciate
the value of the service. I can tell you so many stories. Maybe
you have been through this already. It is simply not enough to
be a skilled vibration analyst.
When the vibration program began it was probably common
for equipment to fail. These failures had everyone’s
attention, including the senior plant management and the
senior executive of the business. Thanks to vibration analysis,
catastrophic failure becomes less common - even nonexistent.
What a great job you’ve done! But what happens when someone
up above decides they need to save some money. Do they
think they need you anymore? Who needs vibration analysis if
you don’t have machines breaking down all the time?
So you need to be proactive. You need to understand how
your service adds value to the business – how your service is
aligned with the goals of the business. And you need to frequently
communicate the importance of your service. Document
the “saves” you have made. Document the costs you have
avoided and the costs you have reduced. Measure your current
state and the progress that has been made since the program
began. Demonstrate how the vibration program has improved
safety, reduced the number of environmental incidents, reduced
maintenance costs, and how your activities reduced
downtime, thus, enabling operations to achieve their targets.
Or you could ignore this suggestion and instead work on
your resume? Just kidding. Sort of…
Final Words
Now, it should be stated that any criticisms made above are not
directed to you personally. These are just general observations
of common problems that the author has observed over the
past 30 years. Hopefully one or two of these suggestions will
help you in your program. And even if all of these suggestions
apply to you, it does not mean you have not been providing
an excellent service to your employer or customer. They are
simply intended to reveal opportunities for providing greater
efficiency and an improved service.
22 maintworld 3/2016