Condition Monitoring – Is It Necessary?

Gearbox with airbag, AI-generated

If you own a car and drive accident-free for years, the airbag was a waste of money. You paid for it but never used it. That’s one way to look at it, but that’s not how we see it. Because aside from legal requirements, the airbag offers us an incredible amount of safety in the event that we do experience an accident. It doesn’t matter whether we caused it or someone else did. And yet an airbag isn’t even capable of preventing accidents. It only reduces the consequences of an accident for the occupants.

Condition monitoring works in much the same way. Damage processes occur with or without condition monitoring. But the financial impact is not as drastic with condition monitoring because we detect damage earlier, because we can plan for downtime, because we can organize spare parts and installation capacity in the long term, and above all because we prevent consequential damage.

It certainly doesn’t make sense to monitor everything that rotates. Drives that can be replaced quickly and whose short-term failure doesn’t really jeopardize a company’s existence are unlikely to be monitored. In contrast, drives whose failure could lead to massive financial losses or even partial plant closures are clearly worth monitoring.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question, “Condition Monitoring—Is It Necessary?” Every production operator must make this decision for themselves. And often, it is not solely the maintenance manager’s decision, but rather a matter of company policy regarding how much reliability one is willing to invest in.

GfM offers customized solutions and services for this purpose as needed:

• Online condition monitoring systems are particularly well-suited for critical drives with high availability requirements or long spare-part lead times.
• Mobile systems offer a cost-effective way to regularly monitor even large machine fleets—for example, on a weekly or monthly basis.
• With our machine diagnostics service, we perform the measurements directly at your site and then provide you with a comprehensive analysis.

From selection and project planning to installation and ongoing support, GfM’s experts stand by their customers as experienced partners.