A successful Condition Monitoring Program is essential to any company, as companies spend hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars on maintenance programs every year. Condition Based Maintenance is the cornerstone for an effective maintenance management program in a modern capital intensive plant. Techenomics have recently released a number of potential KPIs that companies can use to measure a successful Condition Monitoring Program.
All companies strive towards maintenance excellence so they can prevent and lower maintenance costs, extend the life of their equipment, lower unscheduled downtime and save company’s money.
An effective Condition Monitoring program identifies poor trade skills and maintenance processes. This will generate actions to improve the systemic problems found in any organisation.
Below is a table outlining many of the steps in implementing and managing a successful Condition Monitoring Program.
- If in a Greenfield site or doing a complete Maintenance Strategy Review then a potential measure is the % of plant items under CBM. This should include all critical items of plant.
- A decision needs to be made if the process should be performed in-house or outsourced. Unless a plant is large enough to justify several people working in this area then normally much of the data collection and analysis is out sourced depending on the method used.
For example vibration data collection and analysis is usually outsourced but Oil Analysis sampling is done in house but the analysis is outsourced.
When it comes to interpreting the results, only the plant owner / maintainer understands the criticality and historical problems, so they normally are the best people to determine what actions needs to be carried out. This is often the
role of a Reliability Engineer. - If an implementation plan is in place, then the % implemented can be measured.
- Collecting Data. The number of samples per month measured or the % of samples taken to schedule should be measured. Sometimes a list of equipment more than 30 days overdue for sampling is created to highlight areas to prioritise.
- There is a large number of ways the data being generated can be analysed. Experience is the best way to determine what critical measures should be focused on. To determine the health of plants, companies can graph the % of plant above alarm, or trend some average measures over time, e.g. ISO cleanliness grades, Iron PPM or PQ. If these are an effective measure of condition of the plant then if results are improving, the plant should be more reliable.
- To show the benefits of a Condition Monitoring Program the wins should be publicised.
- It is easy for a lot of actions to be generated by a Condition Monitoring program especially in the early days. It is important to measure if these actions are being carried out in a timely manner.
- Feedback on Failures is a key to the ongoing improvement of any plant. The root cause of failure is often apparent to the people doing the work on the shop floor and/or the analysis has identified the root cause. It is important that this information is captured, normally in a company’s CMMS. With the appropriate failure information recorded the measure % of jobs closed correctly can be identified.
- If the program is effective then it should be identifying improvement opportunities. Some organisations have implemented Laser Alignment or Oil Cleanliness programs based on data generated by their analysis. Companies should aim to generate a few of these ideas each year.
Techenomics can help any company on their journey towards maintenance excellence, as we have the people with the experience in Oil Analysis that can get the job done.
For a Condition Monitoring proposal contact your local Techenomics branch or Chris Purkiss on email: chris.purkiss@techenomics.com, telephone: 02 40327240
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