Most facilities have multiple Condition Monitoring technologies like vibration analysis, oil analysis, thermography, etc. However, most plants do not use these CM technologies to jointly identify, confirm and report equipment issues. Do not underestimate the value of using the results generated from these technologies together.

Have you ever had a Maintenance Manager or other manager in your facility not truly understand a CM technology and discount the results?  Management may make comments like “that magical black box cannot identify this type of problem or cannot give an accurate sense of severity“.  The Analyst or Reliability Engineer knows the truth and the value of the CM technology. Consider presenting the results from multiple CM technologies together in the same report. For example, what if you went to your management with information from both oil analysis and vibration analysis? You could demonstrate that what one CM technology had identified the second technology had confirmed. This increases the credibility of the CM technologies and your reliability efforts. It becomes much more difficult for management to discount a technology when the findings have been confirmed by another CM technology.