In today’s lean manufacturing, RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) is becoming more prevalent. Condition Monitoring is a big part of RCM. However, continuous monitoring is typically only done on “critical” equipment which amounts to approximately 20-25% of the equipment. The other 75-80% might get picked up during vibration rounds, which will then have to be analyzed, usually by someone outside of the company or someone inside the company that is already overloaded. A common theme I hear is, “by the time I get the analysis back, failure has already occurred.”
So what if you don’t have to wait and you don’t have to be a vibration analyst to get an immediate diagnosis? I know this is going to sound like a sales pitch, but in all my years in industrial maintenance, I can’t tell you how many times having a tool like the ONEPROD HAWK would have saved hours of frustration and costly unscheduled downtime.
Here is a real life scenario I recently had the privilege to experience.
Wanting to become more familiar with the HAWK, I called client and asked if they had a piece of equipment that had been a continual source of frustration that I might use the HAWK on to provide a machine diagnostics. Their reply, “as a matter of fact we do”. So I put the HAWK into action and here are the results (click on the link)
Report_WE Combustion Fan_21122015_113732
The fun part was hearing, “these are the same results we received from a vibration analyst. The difference, it took over a week to hear from the analyst, the HAWK provided it in about 3 minutes.”
So what about the other 75-80%? Is it necessary to run them to failure?
You be the judge.
