Where did all the people go?

Gord Freiter at Matrikon sent me a new whitepaper. Written by Michael Currie, asset management director at Matrikon, this paper takes a very important and novel different look at the problem of condition monitoring. Quoting from the paper, entitled Where did all the people go: Not so long ago the main reason companies monitored equipment condition was to reduce direct maintenance expenses....Today, lost production is the primary reason companies engage in Condition Monitoring and Condition-Based Maintenance. Lost production has become problematic in an economy at full capacity. Its cause is not obvious - one might reasonably think that plants running full out are more prone to failures, and to some extent they are, but the real culprit increasing downtime risk is the diminished human resources available to execute repairs and provide maintenance engineering follow up. Where once interruptions associated with scheduled repairs was merely troubling, now hyper-extended downtime due to lack of maintenance personnel is cause for genuine concern. I hadn't considered that factor, but now that Currie points it out, it becomes a d'oh! no brainer. You can read the paper, and judge for yourself at: Where did all the people go?