What Your Vibration-only Route Doesn’t See
Industrial Gemba spent September verifying 80 more condition-monitoring service houses across Asia-Pacific. Sixty-five of them sell vibration. Thirty sell oil analysis, 36 thermography, 11...
Industrial Gemba spent September verifying 80 more condition-monitoring service houses across Asia-Pacific. Sixty-five of them sell vibration. Thirty sell oil analysis, 36 thermography, 11 ultrasound, 10 motor current signature analysis.
Read that as a demand signal rather than a gap. The market is supplying what plants actually buy, and what plants actually buy is a vibration route. That’s a defensible choice. Vibration is the workhorse for rotating equipment, the analysts are easier to find, and ISO 20816 gives you numbers you can argue with a contractor about.
The problem isn’t the choice. It’s that a single-technique programme has specific blind spots, and most of the plants running one haven’t written them down.
What a Vibration-only Route is Weak At
Rotor bar and winding faults in motors. Casing vibration picks these up late, if at all, which is the whole reason MCSA exists; and 10 of 80 houses will sell it to you.
Slow-speed bearings. Below roughly 100 rpm the energy isn’t there and your route is close to blind.
Lubrication degradation and contamination. Oil analysis sees the cause. Vibration sees the damage afterwards.
Electrical connection faults and insulation breakdown. Thermography territory, and nothing on a vibration-only route will warn you.
The interval itself. This one has nothing to do with technique. A monthly route catches what develops over months. Lubrication loss, sudden imbalance, a bearing that goes from noisy to seized inside a fortnight: those run their course between visits, and the analyst was never the problem. The rule in the textbooks is to inspect at half the P-F interval. Most plants don’t know their P-F intervals, so they inspect on whatever cycle the contract was written for. Where the interval is the binding constraint, adding a sixth technique on the same monthly visit changes nothing, and instrumentation that doesn’t wait for a visit is a different purchase from a route.
None of the five is news to a reliability lead. It’s also almost never written down anywhere a planner or a purchasing manager will read it, which is how plants end up with a route, a clean trend chart, and a failure nobody saw.
The Two Pages
So we wrote it down. What fails most by machine class and by industry, which technique catches each failure mode, and roughly how much warning you get.
It’s for the conversation where someone asks why the monthly route didn’t catch it, and for the one before that, where you’re deciding what to add first and need a reason you can defend.
The full 2026 Rotating-Equipment Reliability Report follows early next month and you’ll get it then too.
Where the Numbers Come From
The Condition-Monitoring Service Houses Directory: 99 verified companies across 13 APAC markets, tagged by technique, each carrying an indicative 2026 cost band.
Beside it, the Vendor & OEM Directory: 52 manufacturers of pumps, compressors and motors, filterable by class and region. Nobody paid to appear in either, and there’s no mechanism to.
Every listed company was contacted before publication and given a window to correct its entry. That window stays open.
What fails, what catches it, how much warning you get. Send me the two pages →
