The extent to which condition monitoring should be used to make an upgrade worthwhile depends on what a company wants to do with the real-time data acquisition. Full electronic control of machines and systems up to building technology is costly and should, in theory, only pay off for industrial giants. Nevertheless, small and medium-sized companies should not have to go without condition monitoring. Instead, they should implement it within a data-driven framework that suits them so they can remain competitive and future-oriented. To evaluate which machines or assets require monitoring, they are divided into different classes. Depending on the purpose, downtimes and effects, repair effort, availability of spare parts, general condition and safety aspects, we prioritise them by their importance to the production process and determine the control intensity. We can then come up with an individual, cost-effective maintenance strategy.
- Critical components: Machines that are indispensable to the production process should be constantly and proactively monitored
- Essential components: Non-critical machines that are important but without which the production process can still operate, can be condition-monitored
- Standard components: For machines and components that are commonly used and can be easily replaced or repaired, scheduled manual maintenance is sufficient
In the future, remote from-source services will play an increasingly important role. With systems becoming more and more complex, specific troubleshooting knowledge also increases. With special applications, manufacturers can directly evaluate the errors detected by the monitoring system and, if necessary, solve them remotely and automatically. This further reduces the monitoring effort but requires remote access by third parties to sensitive data. To protect from unauthorised access, additional IT security measures are a must.
Whether the implementation is actually worthwhile for a company in individual cases depends above all on the security levels.