www.machinerylubrication.com | March - April 2022 | 29
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About the
Author
Wes Cash is the Vice
President of Services for
Noria Corporation. He
serves as a senior technical
consultant for Lubrication
Program Development
projects and as a senior
instructor for Noria's Oil
Analysis I and Machinery
Lubrication I and II
training courses. He holds
a Machinery Lubrication
Engineer (MLE) Machine
Lubrication Technician
(MLT) Level II certification
and a Machine Lubricant
Analyst (MLA) Level III
certification through the
International Council for
Machinery Lubrication
(ICML). Contact Wes at
wcash@noria.com.
While there are many more metrics that could be measured and tied to
specific condition monitoring activities, starting with the few key metrics will help
narrow the focus of the program to exactly what we are trying to achieve.
Effectiveness of corrective actions taken for equipment —
Finding problems early is the ultimate goal of condition monitoring, but we
need to look beyond finding the issues and work to determine how well we
are correcting the problems. This can be done based upon how long the
equipment stays in an "alarm" state and, even better, can be crossed with
the specific action taken to remediate the problem. Not only will this metric
answer the question of "are we addressing the problems," but it also serves
as the beginning of a decision matrix that should be developed for each
type of alarm that is triggered when the equipment develops issues. The
matrix can be reviewed and makes the troubleshooting and correcting of
the problem much simpler as opposed to just guessing at what may fix the
issue. Obviously, good documentation is key to this one as the information
recorded in the decision matrix will serve as the foundation for equipment
corrective action in the future.
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