Implementing Augury Solution vs In-house Vibration Routes

Scott Chaney

What are the advantages and disadvantages of having an internal program and technicians executing vibration monitoring routes? How do they stack up to implementing the Augury solution for machine health?

Shay Shitrit

Hi @Scott Chaney,

Great question.

I would say that the short highlighted differences will be scalability and accuracy.

Main Advantage of having an internal program and technicians is probably customizability and flexibility. You can determine the assets to monitor and change that any time.

However, using internal personnel and equipment for vibration monitoring can also have drawbacks, such as a lack of expertise, time-consuming manual processes, limited resources, and potentially inaccurate data.

Augury solution provides access to a team of experts with specialized training in vibration analysis and machine health diagnosis, as well as state-of-the-art equipment and software tools to ensure accurate and reliable data. The solution is also designed to automate all aspects of the vibration monitoring process, reducing the time and effort required for analysis. Furthermore, Augury's solution can be easily scaled to accommodate the needs of organizations of any size, making it a versatile solution for a variety of industries.

I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Terry LeDoux

I agree with Scott but add the following:

In House: agree on flexibility. Cost and time only occur when I am adding or maintaining specific equipment in the given route. Often the need to add more routes or equipment exceed the time available for technicians to maintain. If there is specific equipment that is not problematic, we can reduce the frequency or remove it from the route. Technician time can be redirected to other areas. The cost of labor is still the same as it is unlikely we would reduce the number of technicians. Customization is also true, you can apply different models or techniques. This is highly dependent the expertise/experience of the in-house technicians.

Augury: Our strategy within Nestle Purina Pet Care was "Always on - Always predictive" for both production and machine health. There was large variation from site to site regarding our in-house predictive programs and was very dependent upon the ability to recruit and retain qualified Predictive Technicians. Variations in programs and results existed between sites with good programs and good technicians. Ability to share data due to the differences in programs was limited. Needless to say our biggest issue was always recruiting and retaining technicians specifically in remote areas. Augury greatly alleviated this issue for Nestle Purina Petcare.

We ended with a hybrid model where both exist. Smaller in-house teams manage not only the use of Augury on-line sensor placement but also maintain the flexibility to manage routes of less critical equipment where we may not be able to justify Augury Sensors. Our experience was that over time we better understood where Augury Sensors for non-critical equipment added value and covered our cost. In addition we were able to reduce the number of Predictive Technicians and/or share their time with other sites where it is difficult to recruit and retain talent. Lastly the consistency of data and program between sites becomes more standardized. This brings immense value to our Engineering and design teams. Overall an absolute win-win for Nestle Purina.

Scott Reed

I'll add to Terry's already excellent response…

In most of our operations, it's very important to identify when one of our critical assets or pieces of equipment requires attention. There is no better monitoring to support this than continuous monitoring. This is the simplicity of the machine health category as continuous monitoring is at it's very heart condition based monitoring. There should be no question as to the when with this level deployed. Now for the who - utilizing Augury brings outside expertise (to compliment what's in-house) along with the learnings and experience they provide from the aggregate of their business enterprise. With them, there are no competing priorities or agendas - just fact based insights beyond traditional asset monitoring. Being able to benchmark asset performance from this plurality of outside customers also provides a level of value beyond that of the culture, knowledge, expertise and expectations of the single entity - just knowing what can be achievable is the ultimate motivator as others have traveled the road.

Finally, I want to also address the what/why. Just as condition based monitoring is the basis for machine health, event based detection is the basis for process health. Would it also not be of value to understand the what/why? Deploying a process health solution can provide a digital thread of associated variables and attributes (man, machine, methods, materials, measures, environment) that can identify associated triggers, causes and secondary/tertiary affects, including uncommon variable interactions which could precipitate critical failures. I'm going to show my age here, but I'll quote Eddie Chiles of the Western Company (sort of) - “If you don't have an oil well process health solution, get one!” He had some great political quotes as well!

Scott Chaney

Thanks for the comments guys. @Terry LeDoux I think you made a great point about the skillsets and ultimately I see the challenging labor market being a primary reason to pursue a solution like Augury over an in-house solution.

Steve Sabin

For those reading here, I am new to the community and mostly write about (and research) industry topics related to condition monitoring technologies as well as the various commercial delivery models such as in-house versus "as a Service". I was employed by different providers of technology (notably Bently Nevada, Metrix, and Bruel & Kjaer) for more than 35 years, so have a reasonably good understanding of not only the technology, but the industry as a whole. I have a few questions:

1. A benefit that is often cited for going online and outsourcing to a full-stack service provider such as Augury is that the in-house personnel formerly gathering and analyzing data with a portable, route-based device are now free to do other, higher-value tasks. In your experience, does that actually materialize or is it more of a well-intentioned aspiration that never actually occurs? And if it does truly materialize, what have you redeployed those people to do? Can they make the transition to something other than collecting/analyzing, does it require different skills, and does job satisfaction increase as a result?
   
2. How big of a problem is recruiting and retaining in-house talent? I clearly understand that asking someone to run a program at a mine that is 200 km from civilization is more difficult that asking someone to live in a Houston suburb and work at a plant in the Ship Channel. But I am hearing with increasing regularity that finding good people and keeping them is a challenge - and that the quality of an in-house program is heavily dependent on the quality of the analyst and level of real-world, dirty-fingernails experience - not just the ability to pass a CAT-II or CAT-III exam.
   
3. Does the on-site data collector infrastructure and analyst ever truly go away or does it just get deployed on only a smaller number of identified, high-priority problems where perhaps additional data is needed to augment what the online system can collect via its IIoT sensors?
   
4. Is anyone augmenting their IIoT sensor data with operational data such as from a historian like PI? Does this tend to give even better results in terms of cause-effect and isolation of root cause? Is this something you do yourself or is it something available to Augury as part of their service and able to be used by their embedded AI as well as analysts?
   (years ago, a customer quipped "pumps don't die - they're killed" and it has stuck with me ever since. The implication was that the process conditions often prematurely hammered the asset to death - such as cavitating a pump - rather than it just dying of expected old age such as the L10 life of a bearing)
   
   

Adam Kilgore

Great response to a great topic. As a plant that has both an internal system and Augury and both are used as part of our everyday operating way, I have seen pros and cons on both sides of the spectrum.

Internal: in addition to the flexibility and customization, you can also have internal data tied to our equipment and once a data point has reached a set point, the machine can shutdown or give the operator a fault to address. With Augury recording data hourly (in most cases), there is a larger data stream internally. We have the opportunity to live stream the data remotely.

Augury: Customer Service, proven technology, expert Vibration Analyst, and scalability. Don't need to say more about Augury because it speaks well for itself!

For those that don't have Augury or internal machine health monitoring, I would suggest to start Augury on critical A equipment on a critical line (high capacity or low OEE%). I would use internal machine health monitoring on critical B equipment of that same line. Both can be scaled depending on the successes of each. The most important aspect is to start monitoring your machine health! Don't continue wasting time doing PMs on healthy machines!

Jorge Murillo

The crux here is "expertise." Cultivating a well-rounded vibration analyst requires time. Augmenting this process with Augury's blend of AI and vibration analysis renders it a potent asset for crucial equipment.

@Scott Chaney @Shay Shitrit

Steve Sabin

What I'm reading here so far is that it is not 100% / 0% in terms of the Augury-to-in-house PDC ratio. It is peaceful coexistence. ;-)

Scott Reed

@Steve Sabin, my two cents to your questions above:

#1 - labor re-allocation: I can speak to my building materials manufacturing experience and that while those other important tasks are still out there, you never really pull the skilled craft away 100%. Truth is the majority of those more important tasks are typically not compulsory to the business but rather someone's misplaced agenda. There are many ways to measure labor and labor effectiveness but to justify adoption of a technology on labor savings in my opinon is misguided. When properly justified and successfully adopted, it should become apparent within the deployment metrics and other production and reliability based KPI's that improvements are being realized. What's been typical in my world is the application of these resources now begin to take on a more compliance roll - improving standards of opreability, establishing conduct of operations and setting the culture to maintain the external conditions from with the machines and the factory can thrive.

#2 - In-house talent: I think every industry and every region of the country has their story to tell. Manufacturing has typically been located in the very rural areas of the country. What used to be very safe from a turnover perspective has now also become a revolving door. I see more use of maintenance and millwright contract workers now which can also be a double-edged sword. Manufacturing operations need to have and maintain some level of internal expertise that not only understands the nature of the equipment and processes but also the nature of the business and the customers. So, I think reliable and integratable SAAS systems will continue to grow to augment the changing labor dynamics.

#3 - I have seen those in-house analytical roles successfully add other analytical needs across the Plan, Source, Make & Deliver domains. Couple a Process/Production Health AI/ML solution and now there are worlds of insights available to explore that fits within the skillsets of these folks.

#4 - In many of my posts I have not been shy about espousing the value and benefit of Process Health and why it should be exploited with any other condition based monitoring solutions that are deployed. I could go on and on about this but will leave this to my other posts.

Thanks for posting this and the opportunity for responding!

Steve Sabin

Further to this topic, a common lament I hear from customers hesitant to adopt an Augury solution goes something like this:

"I don't want to have two different software applications to learn - one for my portably collected data (with which I'm ultra-proficient and familiar) and one that delivers the data from my online wireless sensors. If I'm going to be keeping my data collector - which is non-negotiable - I want an integrated analysis, trending, and navigation environment. Don't tell me I have to learn two different apps with different analysis tools, different navigation, different menus, etc."

Or words to that effect.

How have you as users dealt with this in your own organizations and does it cause serious, moderate, or only minor pain? I.e., is it truly a show-stopper? What is the work-around (if any) or do you just suck it up and live with two platforms?

I don't know of any vendor that has truly surmounted this yet in terms of a one-size-fits-all SW environment that is the same whether on a desktop or in the cloud or on a smartphone, but some seem to be a bit better than others - or even if you need to use two packages (one desktop and one browser-based and hosted), they are at least similar in terms of functionality and navigation.

One the other hand, when you have a hosted app and a desktop app, they are often different enough to send you past the tipping point. For example, running PPT on my desktop versus on my iPad or in the cloud is just different enough to be maddening and non-intuitive, so I sometimes wonder if all the hype regarding an "integrated platform" tends to overpromise and underdeliver. PowerPoint on my iOS devices and in the cloud is not the same as on my desktop - even though they are ostensibly the same app.