White Papers

What Is Equipment Monitoring?

Thousands of businesses have equipment installations such as oilrigs, storage tanks, and refrigeration units in locations worldwide. To provide quality, ensure safety, and create profitability, companies must monitor this equipment and the related processes. Monitoring means deploying a systematic means of checking that proper equipment tolerances and levels are maintained, and that processes are in control. This includes a method of intelligently translating, compiling, and organizing monitoring data into useful information.

Why Remote?

With installations across a country or across the globe, implementing an equipment monitoring system is a complex task. Physical observation by headquarters staff is impossible, and observation by local workers is expensive, repetitive, and time consuming. Additional problems are posed by the need for daily reports and aggregate data from the entire system. When local monitoring is problematic, remote monitoring can offer many advantages. Monitoring remotely simply means that equipment at one location is monitored at another location. For example, a computer located at a company's headquarters in New York City might monitor fluorine compressors located across Europe. This system relieves workers at European plants of the task of continually observing each compressor unit and reporting their findings back to headquarters, resulting in significant time and cost benefits. Additionally, by using a computer to control the monitoring, data are automatically recorded electronically and are ready for analysis.