Condition Monitoring Contractors
Many industrial manufacturing plants have chosen to use condition monitoring and
analysis contractors to provide some or all of the equipment condition monitoring
performed at the plant. While the plant obtains many cost and performance
benefits from using contractors, it incurs the responsibility of managing the performance
and quality of the contractors’ work and integrating the contractors reported problems
and recommendations into the plant’s maintenance management systems.
The Tango™ Reliability Management Web Service helps standardize and integrate condition
monitoring results information from multiple contractors and multiple condition
analysis technologies into a single database for easy and effective communication
to anyone in the plant needing this information.
Contractors have a well-defined scope of supply to the plant; this is to evaluate
the machines on an assigned critical machine list using the monitoring technology
they specialize in and provide their conclusions about the equipment’s suitable
to reliably operate into the future. The interval between monitoring tasks and the
extent of monitoring is defined in a contract between the contractor and the plant.
In most cases, the contractor performs the work required and produces a report or
results, which is emailed to the plant. In most cases, the contractor performs the
work required and produces a report of results, which is emailed to the plant.
Tango™ may be used to define condition assessment tasks for specific monitoring
technologies and plant areas. For example, the monthly vibration analysis for the
utilities area or the quarterly oil analysis may be defined in a Tango™ Condition
Assessment Task. Task results are specified from a menu of states (figure 3). These
states allow the user to define the machine’s state at the time of monitoring. Every
task item must be assessed before the task can be closed, so items missed or down
must have that state assigned to them. History of the component’s health may be
maintained and components which have been missed are maintained in a special list
for "at risk" components, in need of assessment.
Once a Condition Assessment Task is closed, Tango™ includes the task in the completed
task list and an assignment report which produces a record of the results for that
task assignment results can be generated.