I grew up in a household as the youngest of five kids so my parents knew a little bit about managing relationships, money, conflict resolution, problem solving and all sorts of things that they had no formal training on. But, my father always told me to remember one thing - that there is a cost to everything. I never really knew what he meant until as a teen, I started flexing my wings and making "costly" decisions. As a father now with four kids of my own and three of those being teenage boys, this phrase presents itself to me often.

In a Maintenance Program, this phrase also presents itself often, and in particular, it applies to Vibration Analysis. During machine diagnosis, it is best to have good data and sometimes there is a cost to getting that data. Costs can be presented in the way of safety and putting your resource at risk to collect data. This cost can be very high and devastating to an organization. Other costs might be data collection time that a resource spends recording the data. Further costs will be the analysis time spent sifting through data. Obviously, there are also costs associated with hardware and software.

Evaluate Costs up front and understand that there IS always a Cost to Everything! Do your homework and prepare accordingly to account for all costs.

Tip provided by Rod Acklin
Commtest, Inc.