If you don’t put a premium on machine maintenance, you’re bound to experience more equipment breakdowns, which could disrupt your production and compromise your bottom line. That is why you need reliable data to help you collect and analyze specific motor signals and identity developing equipment issues and efficiencies to avoid unplanned machine downtime. By Philip Piletic 

Condition monitoring data gives you the information and insights necessary to monitor your equipment’s condition and health, allowing you to fix machinery issues before they become problematic. Read on to learn more about how condition monitoring data can help manufacturers optimize output.

What is condition monitoring?

Condition monitoring generally refers to the systematic process of collecting data to assess your equipment’s functionality, performance, and maintenance needs to plan repair and servicing.

After all, even with comprehensive and thorough routine maintenance systems in place, most machinery will develop damage and deteriorate due to regular use and wear and tear. This makes quality condition monitoring data crucial, giving you reliable information about your equipment’s health and condition, so you can project performance trends and predict asset failures.

Condition monitoring data helps you actively prevent machinery breakdowns and downtime – and even extend your equipment’s service life, allowing you to optimize your maintenance resources, hardware budgets and production efficiency levels.

The benefits of condition monitoring data

Condition monitoring uses several signals to predict three critical things: giving you data on whether your equipment will break, how it will break down, and how much time you have to replace or fix it before it completely fails and stops working.

Equipped with condition monitoring data, you can schedule asset maintenance at the best times to avoid disrupting production, allowing you to optimize your output. Below are several other advantages of condition monitoring data to your manufacturing process.

1. Prevent disastrous equipment failure

One of the best ways to implement preventive maintenance is to catch small variations in your equipment’s performance early on. Even something as small as a change in your machinery’s part or component’s operating vibrations can be a critical sign of future issues.

Condition monitoring data helps you detect small variations such as this early, allowing you to learn patterns and make accurate predictions better of potential equipment problems. For instance, a temperature monitoring system can help you obtain essential condition monitoring data of cold chain equipment such as freezers and refrigerators.

This helps prevent cold chain equipment from breaking down, let’s say, in the middle of transporting temperature-sensitive products, such as vaccines and meat, to keep them in viable conditions and avoid product damages and spoilage.

Condition monitoring data allows you to catch potentially catastrophic equipment disasters, especially on critical process machinery that can lead to expensive repercussions.

It also helps you detect problems before they escalate out of control, allowing you to reduce equipment total failure and instead keep production moving and optimize your output.

2. Boost operational efficiency

Getting a handle on each of your equipment’s components through condition monitoring data will help you improve your machinery’s performance. This, in turn, will boost your productivity and improve your overall manufacturing operational efficiency.

The better you can predict equipment breakdowns and implement preventive maintenance, the more streamlined your production and operations are. You can also minimize waiting resources and save more money. Condition monitoring data also streamlines the equipment maintenance and repair process.

For example, data from condition monitors or assembly line IoT sensors allows maintenance engineers to pinpoint and act on machinery breakage faster, and once this data has been processed over time, machine learning algorithms can start extrapolating it to create useful predictive models.

Various motor signal patterns indicate different developing faults in the machinery the motor drives. With condition monitoring data, maintenance engineers can focus on the correct fault and avoid wasting time checking other parts of the equipment that don’t have issues or are not broken.

This allows maintenance engineers to work more effectively and efficiently to fix your machinery, helping your manufacturing operations get back on track quickly.

3. Reduce unplanned downtimes

Condition monitoring data helps you minimize unplanned downtimes, and in turn, reduce a few cost factors, including:

• The costs incurred due to unplanned production delays.
• Overtime pay to maintenance staff to quickly replace your malfunctioning equipment.
• Potential damages to other connected or related machinery as a result of the equipment breakdown (depending on the machine break’s severity).
• Other additional expenses, including the cost of storing large amounts of spare equipment in case of machinery breakdown. Condition monitoring data prepares you for potential equipment breaks, which means you’re likely to spend extra to keep safety stock for faulty machinery since you can plan and buy them when necessary.

Machinery downtime is costly, making it crucial to get condition monitoring data. Invest in robust monitoring systems and tools that let you gather, organize, analyze, and extract valuable insights from your data.

Manufacturing data dashboards, with visualizations for process monitoring and machine downtime metrics, can help you understand trends, identify the main root causes of equipment breakdown, and analyze information to derive insights from your condition monitoring data.

The right software solution will help you make the most out of your condition monitoring data and optimize production utilization to increase profitability.

4. Conduct intelligent analyses

More equipment condition monitoring data means a more accurate analysis. This gives you better information about your asset’s health and condition, allowing you to make smarter decisions backed by accurate and vital data.

Condition monitoring data will also help you understand your specific pieces of equipment better. After all, not all machinery is made the same, even if designed and manufactured by the same company.

Data from condition monitoring allows you to regularly track your equipment’s performance, helping you understand each of its components better. This lets you make insightful decisions moving forward and even identify your system’s weak points moving forward.

You can understand and determine your asset maintenance needs ahead of time, allowing you to schedule repairs and servicing effectively. This helps you avoid unexpected machinery breakdown and downtime that keep you from achieving optimum productivity and output.

Final thoughts

Condition monitoring data helps you understand your equipment’s health and condition more accurately and efficiently. This allows you to implement non-disruptive maintenance and predict future issues that could seriously hurt your manufacturing process’s productivity and efficiency.

Condition monitoring data can save you thousands of dollars worth in unnecessary maintenance, lost production, and secondary damage. This makes condition monitoring information a critical aspect of equipment operation and maintenance since it can help extend machinery service life and improve your long-term productivity.

Author bio Philip Piletic – My primary focus is a fusion of technology, small business, and marketing. I’m a writer, marketing consultant and guest author at several authority websites. In love with startups, the latest tech trends and helping others get their ideas off the ground.

See more stories here.