Five common mistakes in IIOT monitoring installations - Part Five: Lack of Ongoing Engagement

You had a great plan, total buy in and moved forward with installing the new system. Alert thresholds have been tweaked to reduce nuisance notifications, Great job. Your work is done, right? Actually, it's just begun.

Although today's sensors, even the least expensive ones, are very reliable, they do fail or stop reporting at times. Gateway power may get interrupted. You also must consider what happens when a piece of equipment fails and it's sent out for repair. Some sensors are easily removed and transferred to the spare component but it will still be necessary to notate in your application that a change was made. You may also need to adjust threshold values if the spare has different characteristics than the component being replaced (different manufacturer, age of spare, etc.)

During a demonstration of a system installed for a year at a manufacturing plant, a graphic dashboard showed impressive vibration data analysis. It also showed sensors offline and a few active alerts. The alerts were explained away as some settings issues. Some of the offline sensors were on motors that had been pulled for repair. A couple others were dead sensors. This was installed at a plant that was used for demonstrating the system. The point is, even the best installations need ongoing attention.

If you have concerns about whether your system will become a burden to maintain over time, consider a full service solution. This eliminates many of the issues that cause these projects to fail. You will still need ongoing system engagement but the installation and management of the system will be handled by others. Some even offer guarantees that no failure will go undetected.

Significant advantages and cost savings can be achieved by installing continuous condition monitoring IIOT sensors. These include eliminating most unexpected failures and the costly down time, reducing repair costs, making machines more energy efficient and safer. If the engagement wears off within a short time, what was and could still be a very valuable tool will start a slow decline.