Fierce competition is creating intense cost reduction pressures for many of our customers. This is especially true for the oil, gas, and power industries where economic conditions are forcing companies to improve business returns from existing facilities or face the prospect of having to shut them down. Efforts to manage turbomachinery - once the primary focus of machinery protection and management efforts - have given way to intensified programs addressing less critical, rolling element bearing (REB) machinery.

Even a cursory review of most Bently Nevada monitoring platforms - and the System 1 Asset Health Management application itself - reveals the ability to bring in process data. In our hardware platforms, there are typically input channels or module types that can be configured to accept proportional DC voltages or proportional 4-20 mA current signals . In our System 1 software, process data can be imported via a variety of digital protocols, including Modbus, OPC-DA, and beginning with release 21.1, OPC-UA. But since numerous mechanisms exist for getting process data into System 1, a more fundamental question is, "Why is this data type important?"

I engage with hundreds of customers every year and regardless of the industry, when the discussion turns to plantwide monitoring - let alone enterprise-wide monitoring - pumps always manage to steal the spotlight.

The reason is simple: every industry has them - LOTS of them - and virtually every industry spends too much money maintaining them. The attitude towards pumps has historically been that because many or perhaps most are spared, a pump failure wasn't really too consequential in terms of process impact and thus didn't justify permanent monitoring - just a walk-around program instead. Of course, that doesn't account for pumps handling toxic and/or flammable materials and the ensuing havoc when one fails, catches fire, and brings not just its own process loop but the entire plant to a screeching halt. Those applications generally do merit more than monthly rounds with a portable data collector and thus get bona-fide machinery protection. In fact, that's one of the primary use cases for the 2300 series monitors in our portfolio. But those aren't the class of pumps I'm focused on in this article.

Reliability Managers are challenged to ensure safe and cost-efficient operations & maintenance (O&M) on their plantwide industrial assets. This is the niche where a well-positioned specialist as Bently Nevada (BN) offers can supply a broad list of packaged solutions that will place customers closer to their Digital Transformation (DT) via a multiyear roadmap of investment options.