By Jeff Walkup, VP Sales & Marketing
If you run a plant, lead operations, or manage maintenance and reliability teams, you already know the score: the only “good” day is a quiet day.
In reality, what senior leadership cares about is:
- Reducing unplanned downtime and schedule hits
- Cost control and avoiding surprise maintenance spend
- Human safety and environmental risk
- Predictable maintenance windows
- Extended asset life and replacement timing
While what managers and technicians need most are:
- Early warnings (not late alarms)
- Clear, actionable recommendations
- A way to prioritize work when everything is urgent
- Proof to justify pulling a machine, extending an interval, or changing the plan
The needs of these two groups should align in order to make operational decisions that affect plant profitability and machine uptime.
Where oil analysis earns its keep
Oil analysis is not a report card or some disposable report. It is an early warning system, when you run it with discipline. It helps you:
- Catch problems early (wear, contamination, additive depletion) before heat, noise, or vibration shows up
- Make better drain and changeout decisions vs. calendar PM
- Spot dirt ingress, coolant leaks, and water issues before they damage components
- Prioritize by trend and rate-of-change, not a single sample
- Reduce firefighting because you see issues forming while you still have options
Oil Analysis to Action Guide
To support alignment, we’ve created the Oil Analysis to Action Guide. This guide can help you turn oil analysis reports into decisions reliability, operations, and maintenance can align on.
Seven Key Topics
- Aligning on What Matters: Determining your goals, defining success and setting up ownership.
- Sampling Discipline: what will be your sampling cadence, how will you maintain consistency, and ensuring samples are documented properly.
- Workflow Steps: Developing the workflow your plant will follow to manage your oil analysis program. The steps include Sampling >> Trending >> Deciding >>Executing >> Verifying.
- Review Process: Creating a process where exceptions, trends and rules outlined and followed with set review timeframes.
- Decision Matrix: Develop a decision matrix based on key signals, what they mean, and how to respond according to your equipment and plant environment.
- Action Protocol: Outline what will be done within 72 hours of an abnormal result
- Scoreboard: Create a scoreboard based on the key metrics that define success for your organization with a defined reporting frequency.
Get the Guide
If you’d like a copy of the Oil Analysis to Action Guide to connect oil analysis reports to decisions operations and maintenance can align on, request it here and include “Send me the Oil Analysis Action Guide” in the comments section.