In our earlier blogs I explained why motors fail and how condition monitoring can help preserve the health of motors and motor-driven equipment. By continuously tracking the health of your motors, condition monitoring enables you to maximize your capital investments in your motor-driven systems. Here are six ways in which monitoring the condition of your motor assets empowers you to minimize your motor-related expenses:
- Preserve the health and extend the life of your assets. By detecting and notifying you when situations stress your motors, condition monitoring alerts enable you to proactively correct issues before they irreparably damage your rotating equipment.
- Reduce your energy expenses. Since motor efficiency declines with motor health, using condition monitoring to preserve the health of your motors also lowers your energy costs.
- Extend your maintenance staff’s reach. Having your motors alert you when they need maintenance reduces your maintenance expenses and extends your maintenance staff’s reach — focusing on motors when they need maintenance and other tasks when they don’t.
- Optimize your maintenance processes. By intervening only when your asset needs maintenance, condition monitoring enables you to eliminate unnecessary and ineffective preventive maintenance practices while still achieving high availability and reliability performance.
- Make smarter asset management decisions. By combining sensor data, historical trends, and maintenance records to assess the current health of your motors, condition monitoring helps you to identify which motors need replacing — and which don’t. Avoiding the premature replacement of a healthy motor extends your capital investment while maintaining high availability and reliability metrics. Additionally, providing operations, maintenance, and engineering with visibility on how your equipment is performing helps these teams make collaborative, well-informed asset management decisions.
- Avoid unplanned outages, minimize downtime, work safer, & reduce defects. Condition monitoring’s asset health information enables you to make proactive, risk- and economic-based asset management decisions about the type and timing of maintenance to perform on your motor or motor-driven equipment. By making these decisions proactively — instead of in the heat of the moment after the asset fails — you can order supplies, stage equipment, and schedule the outage at a time that works best for you. Eliminating catastrophic failures and prepping people and supplies in advance reduces the time it takes you to complete maintenance tasks — by half, according to T.A. Cook[1] — getting you back up and running sooner. Studies also show that planned, condition-based maintenance is safer (i.e., results in fewer injuries) and results in up to 70% fewer defects.[2]
With all these benefits, why would you pay 2x to 5x more for reactive maintenance[3] than condition-based maintenance?
Des Moines Water Works Case Study Results
By enabling maintenance staff to identify and correct motor-stressing early, Des Moines Water Works’ mean time between failure (MTBF) for monitored pumps has increased 37% since implementing Motors@Work. Read the case study to learn more.
Our next blog will detail the relationship between condition monitoring, condition-based maintenance, and the long-heralded predictive maintenance. To learn more about how condition monitoring can decrease your motor operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses by up to 25%,[4] download our white paper.
[1] T.A. Cook, Maintenance Efficiency Report (August 2013)
[2] R. Moore, “A reliable plant is a safe plant is a cost-effective plant,” IMPACT Newsletter / Life Cycle Engineering (July 2016)
[3] R. Moore, “A reliable plant is a safe plant is a cost-effective plant,” IMPACT Newsletter / Life Cycle Engineering (July 2016)