Winning the race!A convincing CM strategy wins a lucrative service contract

Introduction

We where contacted by the customer almost 2years ago, and asked to have a look at theircondition monitoring program. This company hasbeen performing Condition Monitoring for morethan 10 years, and they have outsourced the serviceto a local company. During these years they havehad variable success, but they have avoided someserious breakdowns on critical machines and there-fore they want to continue with Condition Moni-toring, but they thought it’s about time to evaluatethe whole Condition Monitoring program. TheCondition Monitoring program for vibration is forapprox. 1900 measurement points.

About the customer

The customer has a policy that they don’t want tobe a reference for any sub-contractors and wants tostay anonymous. The customer is the largest landbased plant in Norway, and they are in some sort ofmining industry. The machines that are included inthe Condition Monitoring program are mainly largeelectric motors, gears, compressors, centrifuges,and some pumps.

Description of the maintenance activitiesdone before purchasing PRÜFTECHNIKproducts

As mentioned they have performed vibration mea-surements for more than 10 years on approx. 1900measurement points, with instruments from CSI.There has been a local company performing mostof the measurements on a monthly basis, anddoing all analysis and reporting.

When we sat down with the customer and analy-sed the Condition Monitoring program, we sawthat they could have better results by includingmore measurement tasks. Most of the measure-ments where only overall velocity and FFT velocityreadings. Only for a few points they had usedenvelope/demodulation signal, and on slow speed(40 – 80 RPM) machines they had bad experience.We explained them how envelope signal works andour experience with it, and we got their interest.

CM application note

By Tommy GlesnesHead of department Condition MonitoringKarsten Moholt AS

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3.20

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Now we told them about the differentoptions for our Condition Monitoringservices

1. Karsten Moholt AS perform all readings, analysisand reporting on a monthly basis.

2. Customer perform all readings and send them byeMail to Karsten Moholt AS, for analysis andreporting. We gave a lot of focus on the VIB-CODE system (which they really liked), andshowed them how easy it could be done. Alsothe benefit for having their own people doingthe measurements, not only the economicalpart, but that the people that know the ma-chines will also be standing at the machine onceper month to look, feel, listen, smell, etc. whileperforming the measurements.

NOW WE GOT THE SERVICE CONTRACT!

The service contract

• The customer decided that they would not usethe VIBCODE system, even though this was animportant issue in the beginning, but the instal-lation job would be too expensive.

• We (Karsten Moholt AS) went to the plant andset up the whole configuration for all 1900measurement points, and performed the firstmeasuring route.

• We also had a three day training course for theVIBSCANNER, OMNITREND and vibration analy-sis.

• We took the whole database back to our officeand analysed all the measurements. We reportedaround 10 new bearing failures, and a lot ofunbalance and a few misalignment problems.

• The customer will now perform the measure-ments themselves on a monthly basis with theVIBSCANNER and send them to us for analysisand reporting.

• After three measurement routes we will adjust allalarm limits according to the machines and notaccording to ISO standards.

Productive maintenance technology

PRÜFTECHNIKCondition Monitoring85737 Ismaning, Germanywww.pruftechnik.comTel: +49 (0)89/ 99616-0Fax: +49 (0)89/ 99616-200eMail: info@pruftechnik.com

Condition Monitoring application note:A convincing CM strategy wins a lucrative service contract

• In the service contract we have also an importantpoint for the customer witch says that we will atall time try to make the Condition Monitoringprogram easier and more cost effective. Ourfocus here will be to have really reliable alarmsettings, and also the function for adaptive tasks.In the future the customer will only forwardmeasurements with alarms.

• We have now also had several balancing jobs forthe customer.

Conclusion

We got the service contract in December 2005, andstarted the project in January 2006, so we don’thave any measurable result for improvement. Butonly the reported bearing defects after the firstmeasurement route will give back the money forthe investment of the VIBSCANNER.

Our point here is that we got the service contractbecause of our Condition Monitoring philosophy,and the products from PRÜFTECHNIK. Especiallythe OMNITREND software and all possibilities withit, was very important, but also the VIBCODEsystem, even though - in the end they didn’t go forit.

The next step for this customer will probably be toinvest in the balancing module for the VIBSCAN-NER, and do the balancing jobs themselves. Wealso hope that in the future we will install someonline systems for the most critical machines, butthey first want to get the Condition Monitoringprogram running, for the portable measurements.

Tommy GlesnesHead of departmentCondition MonitoringKarsten Moholt AS

13.0

3.20

06