FROM THE EDITOR

Mega Trends in Condition Monitoring

After more than two decades of development, many aspects of reliability have begun to converge into a tightly integrated discipline. Why is this happening now? In highly capitalized businesses, gains in productivity resulting from investments in ERP, Supply Chain Management and other powerful productivity systems are beginning to flatten out. We might call this phase the human capital optimization cycle. Businesses are now working on achieving increased profits by focusing on capital equipment optimization. Large software systems vendors like SAP and IBM are offering sophisticated systems to manage capital equipment, while equipment vendors including Emerson and GE are designing enterprise-wide tools to provide condition-based monitoring. The goal is to be able to "drill down" into diverse systems to find opportunities for increased utilization of assets.

Organizations including MIMOSA are working to create standards that will enable managers to drill down through diverse and often proprietary systems, including PdM modalities and extract the data needed to compile information into simple-to-understand metrics that can be tracked. This convergence is ongoing and powerful competitive incentives are fueling this paradigm shift in managing capital assets.