Condition monitoring equipment protects your machinery by providing early warnings when faults, inconsistencies, or irregularities are detected. By being alerted to an emerging problem, maintenance staff can schedule the appropriate actions to prevent extended, costly periods of downtime. Condition monitoring also identifies health and safety risks to machine operators. Automatic condition monitoring systems are, therefore, among the most valuable systems in the workplace. Keeping them up to date is vital, as outdated systems may not be responsive to your needs or provide the required level of accuracy.
Preventing catastrophic failure of your critical machinery is essential for your business’s survival, so your automated condition monitoring equipment must be up to the task of looking after it. As monitoring technology increases in complexity, older equipment could be easily left behind if not updated and, therefore, might not offer the safeguards that your business needs. With some key components potentially taking weeks or even months to source and replace, can you afford for your condition monitoring equipment to fail to deliver?
As your capacity grows, you’ll need your condition monitoring equipment to cope with the increased demand. Scalability allows your business to monitor a higher number of machines, and reduce the problems caused when critical assets fail. By upgrading your condition monitoring equipment, you can ensure that all vital machines are protected, as well as individual lower-tier components, such as fans, conveyors, and motors, that are often not monitored.
Condition monitoring equipment doesn’t just save money by reducing unplanned downtime; it can also alert staff to potentially dangerous health and safety problems. By providing early warnings of emerging issues, maintenance managers can assess potential risks and take immediate remedial action.
It is also the case that as some monitoring systems start to reach the end of their working life then more failures within the system are increasingly seen with spare parts and electronic cards having to be sent for repair, refurbishment or upgrade and instant replacements are drawn from stock/stores on a more frequent basis. Clearly this is the time to look to upgrade before you get caught short or the old system starts to eat in to your maintenance budget itself.
If a company makes a monitoring system or component of a monitoring system obsolete then the system is said to be unsupportable. This means that if the owner hasn’t taken up any offer that might have been put to them to purchase sufficient spare components (often electronic cards) for their existing monitoring system to gurantee the system as supportable to the end of the machine or plant’s expected life, with the spares are no longer available then they would be forced to upgrade their monitoring system now rather than later as a component failure could render the monitoring system non-operational leaving the machine not protected, and whilst it in most cases it is not wise to run the machine unprotected, sometimes it is policy that you absolutely cannot run the machine unprotected due to a number of reasons including health & safety, insurance or just too larger risk of catastrophic failure that would render the machine/process/plant out of action for an extended period or even permanently out of action. Poor planning in relation to stockholding of spares for older monitoring systems often leads to the customer being forced to upgrade their system prematurely.
At Sensonics, our monitoring specialists are ready to help you choose the best application to ensure that your critical machinery is protected. For more information, give us a call today.
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