Equipment Monitoring: Discovering Problems BEFORE They Occur
Are you a fleet or equipment owner experiencing unpredicted downtime that is costing you valuable time and money? Or are you here to find out solutions regarding the monitoring or management of your fleet in hopes to fix potential future problems?
Monitoring your equipment and the health of its engines is essential to the success of your entire fleet. In this article, we will go over the background of digital equipment monitoring, maintenance platforms, and how fixing vehicle problems BEFORE the warning light pops up can be very beneficial to you and your company.
Let’s start with the history.
The Background of Condition Monitoring
Before we can talk about how condition monitoring came to be, we should define the term and find out exactly what it is this practice does for a business. According to Reliable Plant, “Condition monitoring is defined as the measuring of specific equipment parameters, such as vibrations in a machine, its temperature or the condition of its oil, taking note of any significant changes that could be indicative of an impending failure.”
Equipment condition monitoring dates back several decades and has come a long way through different periods of the industrial and heavy-duty world. Before the use of high-speed technology, downtime was not the focus as tools and equipment was a lot less complex with easier repairing.
However, as technology improved, machines and vehicles also became more intricate – which also made the repairing more intricate and expensive. This gave monitoring a machine’s health more priority as a fleet owner, requiring something more than just putting an ear to the vehicle and listening to the sound of the engine.
This brings us to the current age of technology – in which digitalization has taken over the heavy-duty industry as well as this topic of ‘condition monitoring’. The push for digitalizing products and services in the heavy-duty industry came from businesses relying almost completely on equipment for functionality and operation. However, with the ability to see equipment logistics from devices put on fleet vehicles straight to your fingertips, downtime is easier to reduce than ever before.
In Relation to Trucking
One of the largest users of equipment monitoring services are those in the over-the-road (OTR) industry. In said industry, trucks are loaded with something called an after-treatment system, which basically reduces the emissions of the diesel engines used (and for you non-OTR readers, most trucking fleet operators feel as if it’s one of the most useless parts of a truck). According to Chris Disantis of Aim NationalLease, “Fleets that count on a light or wait for a failure to occur to work on the system are setting themselves up for an expensive repair and encouraged motor carriers to pay more attention to the warning signs that often surface before a dash light.”
Chris is exactly right, as most vehicles nowadays are so relied upon that fixing and maintaining equipment before a warning light appears is very beneficial to its uptime. Since this after-treatment system is designed to alert through lights, unfortunately, it becomes obsolete.
This brings us to the use of external solutions – specifically telematics solutions. Nowadays, almost every major fleet business has turned to the use of digital technology to monitor and maintain their vehicles under one advanced system.
Let’s go over what Senzit can do under this ‘condition monitoring’ idea, predicting maintenance before it causes expensive repairs.
Senzit – Predictive Condition Monitoring
Senzit is classified as a predictive maintenance solution, focusing its efforts on the health of a vehicle’s air filters and dust load percentage. Along with this, the platform gives way for other crucial analytics for fleet owners such as engine hours, location services and trip history, a modular design for future CAN bus implementation, and more.
The great thing about Senzit is that it doesn’t rely on a warning light to tell equipment owners that their vehicle is on the verge of breaking down. Senzit users have their equipment health available for view straight from their smartphones or computers with Senzit’s dashboard overview.
Convenience is one of the many blessings of recent technological efforts of the past two decades, allowing individuals to move off the stacks of documents necessary for fleet management. Today is no better day to start moving towards this age of digitalization.
Condition Monitoring Then and Now
No longer does condition monitoring rely on equipment and fleet owners to actually go into each vehicle and waste their valuable time and money to repair major system damages. Being proactive and preventative is super beneficial to each company investing in telematics solutions, keeping equipment up and running during all working hours.
As technology gets more and more intricate through the years, the more these digital solutions are necessary. With proper training and investment, managing fleets with little to no unpredicted downtime is getting easier, as well.
Embrace this new age of condition monitoring and cutting unnecessary costs by contacting a Senzit equipment monitoring expert here.