Over the weekend, while many of you were sleeping and some of you were shooting off bottle rockets, a world record fell. The largest burger in the world, a 777-lb monstrosity, was served to Alameda Country Fair goers and Guinness World Records officials in California. The previous record holder, a puny 590-pounder created in Canada, saw its reign come to an end.

I was musing with an old industry friend the other day about condition monitoring. He and I both have strong roots in condition monitoring dating back to about 1990. During those early days, we were enamored by the sex appeal of high-end condition monitoring techniques and technologies. We loved the bells and whistles.

The majority of posts you read on condition monitoring are all about detecting the onset of failure. Using condition monitioring in this way could also be described as the traditional approach to CBM.

The principles are pretty straightforward.

1st - Define the failure mode you are looking for and work out what signs it exhibits that it is starting to fail. (Be careful not to confuse cause and symptom, of course.)

2nd - Determine the time between detection and functional failure.

During the holiday period I spent a lot of time thinking about efficiency. We moved, myself and my family, from the Middle East to Australia where we now live in New South Wales. (Wonderful place, visit me sometime.)

In times like these it can be easy to try too hard, or reach too far. Reliability-centered maintenance, Weibull analysis, Crow Amsaa, etc., are all very valid excercises, and they all deliver phenomenal value - but before thinking about initiatives like these, are there other things you could be doing?