Problems and Challenges facing Condition Monitoring

In the previous subsections, we have demonstrated in detail how condition monitoring appears to be extremely crucial in the operating activities and maintenance tasks in any given industrial context. We have shown as well how monitoring techniques have involved during the past decades to be capable of providing today highly developed methods described in detail on 2.1.7. Therefore, in a large number of organizations, an intensive attention is placed on the utilization of technologies and the amount of economic savings affiliated to the development and implementation of approaches allowing the prevention of unexpected outage or even disastrous failures. However, the concept of condition monitoring still has a long way ahead to achieve high levels of performance and operational excellence. To accomplish so, companies must be capable of overcoming all the challenges facing the establishment of condition monitoring tools and techniques. These various obstacles can be linked to many factors whether technical or managerial. The focus on this subsection will be on general challenges and not associated to a specific technique per se.

2.1.8.1 Technical challenges

One principal technical obstacle in condition monitoring is the extreme difficulty to address the root causes when it comes to failures. In fact, in various cases, even the physical problem has been determined; the emerging actions do not focus directly on the source of the problem.

In other terms, companies should become more proactive in order to identify the true essence of the fault and not just its manifestations and engage consequently the necessary and adequate solutions. Hence, condition monitoring techniques are only beneficial when they are used properly and taken to the next level in terms of searching the root causes and if there are similar cases to the studied failure in other plants. In addition to that, it appears to be

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complicated for endoscopes or condition monitoring tools, mainly the vibration based ones used in large machinery rotating at high speeds, to indicate at short notice any failures such as cracks in bearings or other and that result into catastrophic damages. Therefore, companies under these circumstances, choose the process of dismantling machines at given intervals and check their respective parts to establish any replacement when seen fundamental. They consider indeed this option as the only way to make sure that the machine in question is absolutely safe to operate. Nevertheless, stripping equipment during chief servicing can be time consuming, expensive impacting by that the productivity, the profitability, the imposed schedules and the safety of operators and engineers above all. Another challenge presented is the ability of monitoring tools to gather the relevant data. In fact, the utilized instruments allow the collection of huge amounts of data and long streams of historic information making the responsibility of pinpointing and processing only the needed information more complicated. Besides, the mentioned devices have to maintain high levels of security and availability of data. These tasks are far from being easy especially when we are dealing with huge industrial plants that tend to employ considerable supplies of sensors. Thusly, directing all the gathered data from various sensors into a central hub is another resulting hindrance that must be fitly managed. Typically, it is imperative to discuss the importance of sensors in any given monitoring systems. Consequently, sensors have to be carefully selected to take the necessary proxy measurement of the related mechanisms. Obviously, sensors cannot operate without adequately competent power sources. Accordingly, industrial organizations have the obligation to identify which are the most well suited power sources for their used sensors and what can be the best alternative to ensure that the sensor network is robust to the environment conditions. The most broadly exploited power sources for sensors are batteries. Still, they are commonly very expensive and unable to provide power on the long term chiefly in extreme environments and sometimes may even be thought of as dangerous. Therefore, low bandwidth wireless data transmitters are believed to maximize the life of autonomous sensors. Still, when we talk about lower bandwidth and lower power consumption, we have automatically slower operations and measurements update. This constitutes as follows another challenge for companies using such power resources and who adopt similar concepts in their condition monitoring policies. Moreover, the selection of suitable processing algorithms is an aspect to which firms should accord great attention giving the complexity of the undertaken tasks, the availability of power and the price point of the used sensors. It is completely useless to use highly complicated algorithms for more or less simple operations or for relatively low-priced machinery. Yet, managers and executives must keep in mind that establishing new technologies can be rewarding and problematic at once. Put it differently, novel technological organisms can be complex, overpriced and above all arduous to maintain. As systems get more complex, it becomes more difficult for operators and engineers to identify the key parts and their respective failures. This why, companies must think installing new advanced equipment through prior doing so. (Mark Tuckwell, 2015). A vital feature of the concept of condition monitoring is the analysis of data that should be properly addressed. It is quite common indeed to encounter further difficulties into finding the necessary human competencies for monitoring and assessing the collected information. Subsequently, industrial companies should be capable of choosing enough experienced equipment specialists and

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analysts to undertake the required functions as a great number of disastrous outcomes are caused by mistakes in the analysis phases.

Condition monitoring does not fix equipment and doesn’t solve problems or fix failures either. Condition monitoring only points at the problem before it becomes a failure.

Generally, when the condition of a machine’s or one of its components is issued to be urgent, the job will have to go to the head of the work order pile and be anticipated for maintenance or repair as soon as possible. The imposed problem in here is that usually the maintenance schedules are already busy. Therefore, in order to perform this high priority task, maintenance teams will have to postpone other jobs on the agenda and their planning and preparation efforts will be wasted. This will imply as well the ordering and unplanned parts which might lead the company to pay an extra price for getting a fast last-minute delivery. In other words, condition monitoring in this case sets a trap for us that is executing pressing work to correct failures by suspending failure-preventing activities. In some cases, the company might not acquire the needed internal resources to undertake the said urgent job. It decides then to subcontract it out. This will lead to a significant increase in the costs relevant to the expected tasks as outsourcing an activity is more expensive than doing it in-house. Also, the work becomes more logistically complex due to all the additional preparation and authorization required to bring external experts and operators into site to take on the job .Furthermore, the application of condition monitoring techniques might breed another challenge for the related organization that is the determination of exact points in the timeline where the company should perform replacements of wearing parts. Typically, when there’s a large variability in the wear or deterioration rate and especially when inspection periods are quite long, then CM is expected to offer flawed predictions and a false sense of security in the given numbers.

Additionally, the industrial corporation has to be extremely careful when setting alarms to indicate serious problems that require urgent responses. If this isn’t the case, the company might end up with thousands of alarming points per day which might engender unneeded inspection tasks and huge losses in time and cost. (Francois Gagnon, 2013).

2.1.8.2 Managerial challenges

It has been above mentioned various technical challenges that companies might experience when implementing condition monitoring approaches. Though, they might as well meet managerial issues when doing so. Indeed, management has an enormous responsibility for guarantying that an industrial plant is in line with particular operational, maintenance, performance, safety, financial and competitive goals. Unfortunately, management teams have been known to make multiple mistakes when it comes to installing condition monitoring devices and programs. One the most common errors is bad planning; what is not well planned can never be well implemented. Since planning is an essential phase of any process, the simplest indiscretion in one of the constituents including the funding requirements, the standards or the database implementation or others, can lead to severe drawbacks. One of the biggest problems in putting in place CM is not allocating enough time or resources for training such as increasing the skills, capabilities and knowledge of the workers. Training is a continuous process when executed properly can lead to astonishing advancements including improvement in the work quality, increase of the productivity, limitation of mistakes and the

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enhancement of the creativity and the mental health of employees. Still, training costs are the first to be eliminated when the company’s budgets are narrowed. The real mistake in this situation that most companies make is the fact that they are absolutely willing to invest in the implementation and funding of a new technology or updating an existing one, but choose to no do the same thing when it comes to training workers about the technology’s use and interpretation of the results. Lack of training is without a doubt of the primary causes of CM systems failures. For this reason, it appears fundamental to include training in the funding of any CM mechanism. There are two principal categories of training to take into consideration and that are equally crucial to the success of a CM program; technology training and analytical training. Technology training involves how to utilize the hardware and software that gathers the data to be assessed. Most firms make the error to assume that if personnel have been using a similar CM technology then there’s no need for training them to exploit the new inserted one. This understanding should be absolutely corrected because different methodologies can be applied to the same CM technology, it is therefore imperative for workers to know exactly to use the CM tools and programs in order to get the best possible outcomes. The second type of training that is the analytical training means to learn how to interpret the resulting data that has been collected from CM instruments and sensors. Without this kind of training, little to no value will be drawn out of the used technology because no one would be capable of understanding it or making sense out of it. Managers seem in many cases to find a difficulty is picking the right technology or technologies to establish in CM activities. Most of them rely usually on a single kind of technology or choose to adopt low-tech or low-priced devices that are more likely to generate issues instead of benefits. A suited monitoring program should therefore be based on a variety of adequate technological tools to accurately detect, diagnose and report the machinery condition and failures. A great number of CM programs fail as well for the reason that management won’t permit employees to work full time with the CM technologies. This is primarily due to a wrong thinking that managers hold over the workers which makes them believe that employees are only an extra maintenance resource that can be used to repair or maintain the equipment. To assimilate perfectly how to use the software and hardware of the CM technology is not a task that workers can succeed to learn during a part time job. They must fully engage themselves in this learning process. However, when management sees the opposite and since workers cannot undertake two jobs at the same time, they become obliged to concentrate on their daily duties instead of dealing with the CM programs. This way of reasoning contributes unfortunately to the reactive work that CM technology is supposed to avert.

Spreading awareness about CM systems and tools is a crucial point that various firms seem to overlook. This training isn’t costly nor time consuming but it could be extremely beneficial on the long run mainly to the overall success of a plant’s CM efforts. Indeed, CM experts and reliability engineers generally comprehend the practices and technologies they use on a daily basis. Repair and operations workers and supervisors on the other hand might not always understand these concepts. Furthermore, they might not even be used to observing their colleagues walking around the plant with odd instruments or spending long hours in front of their computers or screens reviewing odd looking information or graphs which can cause distractions. As a consequence, if not everyone involved in the facility is aware of the multiple capabilities and limitations of the employed CM programs, the company will some

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serious issues in communication among workers that won’t be all aligned with the CM principles.

Another managerial issue is directly linked to the established standards. In reality, many organizations do not grasp how essential standards are to the overall condition monitoring organisms. Standards must be identified for the technology selection, including how it is put into use, how outputs are analyzed and reports are produced. Indeed, a lack of crystal clear standards will lead to aimless efforts from all parties involves and disappointing results in response to those efforts. So if an employee is free to act as he/ she wishes, the results might not be in the interest of the firm. The importance of creating standards in the related CM program can also be connected to the fact that similar technologies can be obtained from distinct vendors. Again an absence of the suitable standards to the system in question will introduce different training and implementation needs, integration problems, a shortage of specificity in the demanded abilities, inability to lead constant enhancement and other pejorative effects. As we have explained previously, continuous improvement is a principal objective of any CM program that cannot be achieved if the assessment of data and the reporting of outputs are random and not based on the overall principles and objectives of the company. Some enterprises make the good choice to install the required standards but fail to update them; this is again another managerial error. Standards would be useless if they become obsolete. The organization must establish a process that revises automatically the standards.

We have discussed earlier on the technical challenges of CM, the fact that data can be collected in huge amounts wasting a lot of time and resources. Another challenge is when data isn’t collected enough. Hence, failure to gather enough information will cause to miss the detection of equipment failures that would be eventually unseen. In fact, the machinery defects can be the outcome of the action or inaction of the management in various cases. Put differently, the management will usually rely on misguided reasons to indicate the desired data gathering interval for CM systems. Oftentimes, this interval will be based on a random number or even will depend on the amount of time the management will decide to spare in order to collect the required data. It is obvious that information collection intervals shouldn’t lean on any of these factors. They must be fixed by the failure rate of certain machinery deficiencies that the CM technology can detect. It is therefore important to recall that data collection intervals differ depending on the machine itself, its common failures and their timeframes. It also crucial to transmit the results to both operation and maintenance teams as soon as possible to take the necessary initiatives and corrective actions in order to remedy to the presented failures in the shortest notice.

Most companies believe that only by implementing CM technology and its instruments, their facilities will become instantly proactive and reliable. Although, CM is a key element of a proactive-management process, this is another common misunderstanding of the CM programs. If the organization’s culture endorses repeated inquiries for monitoring of machinery to acquire every last minute of operation or the CM technology’s outputs are just ignored then this signifies that the processes are simply becoming reactive. This is usually due to the fact that management isn’t assuring that the results of CM devices are being followed accurately or the CM workers aren’t accorded enough time to properly monitor the equipment, to analyze the results and report them accordingly. Consequently, employees are

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expected to rush out to check why a certain machine is having a specific reaction (sound, vibration…) and would force by that unscheduled equipment downtime. In this case management has brought a reliable and proactive tool that is CM technologies and made it into a reactive instrument.

Failure to properly apply CM technologies in the industrial plant is another mistake made by management. Not every CM technology can be executed in every single machine. A lot of firms spend huge amounts of financial and human resources and time on implementing devices and programs that do not fit their equipment only because they had given good results for other machines in a different facility. This thinking needs to be changed for good and companies must start to assimilate that certain technologies are only favorable for a specific kind of machinery and the fault conditions they experience. To remedy to this situation, it is indispensable to comprehend how the equipment operates in relation to its surrounding environment and how it responds to certain failure conditions in order to choose the best CM technology that will suit the machinery in question and will allow its accurate monitoring and the identification of its potential deficiencies. (EP Editorial Staff, 2013).

During this section, we have succeeded to determine some of the most common technical challenges and management mistakes when it comes to the implementation of CM programs and devices. This study will allow us on the upcoming parts to underline the ways in which innovation can help companies to overcome these obstacles.