Last week, I said we were going to finish up the current series on installed spares.  As the politicians say today, "I misspoke."  In our straightforward language, that means I lied--I am no politician.

I got to thinking about some of the practices I have seen over the years which keep bringing me back to this topic.

Over ten years ago, I was in an old mill in the upper Midwest here in the US.  When I say old, I mean, old--open gearing on the dryers, lineshaft, slow speeds.

Yet this mill had something that was outstanding for its time--it had a monitoring module on every motor in the place.  These all fed into a central program.  The maintenance manager, and designees, would get an alarm on their desktop if a motor was performing out of its parameters (vibration, amp loading, temperature, etc.). Today, I am sure you could get those alarms on your phone.  

From a screen one could pull up any motor and see its entire history in meticulous detail.  

This is the kind of modern software that can eliminate those installed spares we have been talking about so much.  The payback on such software has to be near instantaneous in a mill without it--how many hours of downtime from 500 HP motors would it take to pay for it?

The lesson here is this.  With today's technology, the solution to a problem (an installed spare) may just reside in another area of expertise (software, for instance).  We have to unclog our brains and think of the unconventional if we are going to make progress.

For more, see Bryan Creagan's comments below.