What can a condition monitoring system do for you?

Ask anyone who has ever held a position in which he or she had to make critical decisions: What is the value of an informed decision that has been made proactively? They will tell you that there is simply no number that can reflect the worth of such a decision. It is priceless!

That is precisely what a condition monitoring system does for decision-makers where the context involves technology and machines. It simply helps them make informed decisions about their production assets, proactively.

The technological evolution is predicated upon proactive thinking by great innovators who have thought ahead, imagined the world of the future for us, and acted accordingly. As we live and breathe in the fourth industrial revolution, surrounded by cloud platforms, massively accurate sensors, integrated assets, machine learning, and powerful analytics, it is about time to look at modern and advanced ways to monitor your complex production processes and assets; ways that capitalize on all the gifts of technological evolution.

That condition monitoring is the way, should not come as a surprise. Here’s Markets and Markets to tell you something about it:

“The global machine condition monitoring market size is estimated to be USD 2.6 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 3.9 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 7.0%. The growth of this market is expected to be driven by the advent of secure cloud platforms used in condition monitoring, increasing disposition toward predictive maintenance, and high demand from emerging applications”

It is not just another buzzword. But you might be wondering what it can really do for you. Yes, it sounds beautiful that it can help in making decisions proactively but there has to be, at least, a bit more nuance to it.

Well, there certainly is! We will start from a macro-view and zoom in as you read on. Just a note of caution before we proceed: Here, we will be discussing the overall impact that is delivered by a well-built condition monitoring system, put in place by the right technology partner. If you are interested in condition monitoring techniques that are used to monitor your production processes and assets, we suggest you head over here.

We will start with every production facility’s worst nightmare!

Reducing unplanned downtime

Downtime is a four-letter word, more commonly uttered than you would like to think! Unplanned downtime is an expletive that can almost start a war!

A failure or compromise in a production system causes unplanned downtimes, which can cause a ripple effect across the entire value-addition stream. Notice that we are not talking about just the production system or the facility here but the entire value addition stream! That is because we know how conveniently a number of critical factors are ignored whenever we talk about unplanned downtimes and can be easily avoided if a condition monitoring system is in place. Starting from the center of the ripple and progressing to the outer reaches, here are just to name a few:

• Breakage and damage in the machine itself
• Damage to the machines in the production network
• Threat to staff and facility safety
• Costs associated with the need to manage spares
• Costs associated with overtime/additional remuneration for staff for working on system restoration
• Supply chain bottlenecks due to production delays
• Opportunity losses due to delayed time-to-market (Imagine customer churn!)
• Damage to reputation and possible questions about quality of products

We will stop naming them now. You get the idea. Here are some interesting statistics from researchers about how damaging unplanned downtimes can be. By listening to your machines conversing with each other and having visibility into their processes through a condition monitoring system, you can reduce downtime by up to 80 percent.

Boosting Return on Investment

We never tire of hearing about ROI. Very simply, it all comes down to your expenditure on the production assets vs how much production you can get out of the assets. By having a condition monitoring system in place, you will get the maximum out of your production assets by knowing well in advance about repairs, replacements, and upgrades. It gives you the power to intervene, plan, and schedule your corrective action well before a defect turns into a full-blown failure. Implemented with the right technology partner, a condition monitoring system can help you reduce maintenance costs by up to 10 percent.

Making maintenance personnel better at their jobs

A well-built condition monitoring system’s dashboards with powerful analytics should give maintenance personnel all the visibility that matters. Instead of wasting time on figuring out which part of the asset is in need of care, the condition monitoring system will point to the users, instantly, the parts that require their attention. This makes them do their jobs faster, better, and with a lot of conveniences than ever before. Getting a condition monitoring system in place will help your maintenance personnel to speed their maintenance planning time by up to 50 percent.

Longer asset lifecycles

Equipped with all the visibility that matters, maintenance becomes far less invasive than before. Moreover, by knowing in advance about component failures, you can prevent damage to connected components. This enables you to maintain longer asset life cycles, which mean reduced capital expenditures requirements while keeping operational costs at a minimum.

Personnel and Facility Safety

Nobody likes uncertainties. While we cannot eliminate them, we can reduce the chances of unwanted scenarios by being proactive. A condition monitoring system is one of the most significant components in devising a strategy for zero-incident facilities. It helps you stay informed about the state of your assets and raises alarms well before critical failures happen; keeping your personnel, facilities, and ultimately, your reputation, safe.

Improving equipment uptime and availability

Condition Monitoring System enables 24/7 monitoring of assets, thereby transforming your production processes by interpreting the vigilance over your processes into advanced analytics. Staying informed about asset health ensures increased equipment uptime and availability by up to 20 percent.  

We have outlined some of the most high-impact benefits that a condition monitoring system can deliver. However, and we cannot stress it enough, it has to be done with the right technology partner. We have prepared some guidelines for you that can help you in deciding about a condition monitoring system implementation partner. We hope you make a great decision!

If you are interested in seeing a state-of-the-art condition monitoring system in action that has been developed by leading industry experts, fill in the details below and one of our experts will be with you shortly to help you out!