You are taking vibration data on all of your critical assets and also all essential assets. Yet, you still feel overwhelmed and some assets are stretched beyond their data collection interval. You feel on edge and lurking out there is an incipient fault mode percolating and fermenting towards a breakdown. This is a common feeling for some programs. Companies go through the criticality assessment, assets are identified for a predictive technology, intervals are scheduled at the component level and there is an expectation to get the data and perform the analysis. Sound familiar?

Back to the Title of the tip, PDCA, which stands for "Plan Do Check Act", and is also known as the Deming Cycle or the Shewhart Cycle among other names. Anyone who has sat in on my training classes or my webinars knows that I am big fan of Deming and his techniques for improving business processes. In this case, the PDCA Wheel is a great way to improve data collection intervals. When I am tasked to take large amounts of data on many assets, I always look at the data to see if my intervals are correct after several cycles of analysis. If my data is seemingly in a steady state, I evaluate my route interval on that asset and assess whether I can stretch the timing of data collection. If you look at the data collection process as a business process or activity, as you should, hard fast rules should not apply. This activity or task should be evaluated regularly as to its effectiveness. The PDCA process simply means that you plan the work, do the work, check for success, and act accordingly to improve. If there is not improvement identified but the process is still not successful, re-evaluate the whole process.

Commtest is a World-leading partner in designing and delivering machinery health information systems to enhance business performance.

Tip provided by Rod Acklin, General Manager, Commtest, Inc.