Condition Monitoring and…what?

He was the designated ‘Chair’ of an upcoming technical session for an industry technical association conference.

The subject is ‘predictive maintenance practices’.

To prepare for this session he, let’s call him Sam, visited one of the company’s manufacturing sites producing pulp for paper.

A mill known for its ‘very good’ predictive maintenance effort within the company.

Being accustomed to hands on participation he traveled with one of the vibration technicians as he made his rounds in his designated area, the bleach plant, noting the process the technician used for collecting data so he could factually report this at the upcoming conference.

While making the rounds of the various selected assets deemed ‘critical’, the technician received a text asking if he would ‘visit’ the first ‘D’ stage thick stock pump to see if there was a vibration problem.

Subsequently we moved his portable equipment to that location, and after setup, he collected the rough data for analysis, later, in the office.

It was obvious there was vibration, you could ‘feel’ it through the floor, and you could ‘hear’ it through the air.

Thick stock pumps are for lack of a better description, ‘sausage stuffers’. They are slow rotating twin rotor positive displacement pumps that literally push pulp stock through restricting piping to the next stage in the process.

As the technician packed up his gear, to return to his office to finish the analysis of the data he had collected, he was asked by Sam whether he was going to do a physical inspection of the pump and motor to determine, perhaps, the cause of the vibration?

“No”, he said, “my job is to collect and analyze data and confirm there is vibration and report my analysis to the operating supervisor. I’m a vibration analyst.

Sam was incredulous. “You are not even going to stop at the supervisor’s office on the way back to your office and inform him that yes there is a vibration and you should have ‘someone’ take look at it?”

“Nope, I follow a prescribed process, nothing more, nothing less”.

Sam told the tech that he would catch up with him at the office and turned to the pump, lifting the covers for the bearing housings, first, one on one end and then, one on the other.

The oil lube reservoir was empty on one, but not the other. Quite obviously the bearing was not receiving any lubrication.

Sam hurried down to the area control room and found the shift supervisor who had made the initial call and let him know that he should send a lube tech to refill the oil reservoir, the bearing was running dry.

Later that day, he called the area operating supervisor to find out if the ‘vibration’ problem had been corrected.

It had. Immediately after the lube tech added oil the pump quieted down and returned to normal.

When Sam chaired the technical session of the technical association conference, he posed one leading question to the audience, mostly maintenance managers and a few engineers and a couple operators.

Are your condition monitoring technicians also a general-purpose troubleshooters or are they confined by outdated, non-adaptive past practices limiting their scope of work?

You should all ask that question, and then think about training.