A few years ago, someone mentioned to me that many of his machines were not good candidates for oil analysis because they used little oil that wasn’t worth saving. He added that by the time you flushed the sampling port and pulled a proper oil sample, you’ve almost done an oil change. Why bother with oil analysis?

I’m sure you recognize the misguided purpose of oil analysis in the mind of this individual. While oil analysis can certainly aid in better timed oil changes, it has so much more to offer. In fact, for machines that are mission-critical, the cost of changing the oil is small potatoes in comparison to the value gained from averting a catastrophic machine failure.

If oil analysis was only about tracking the remaining useful life of the lubricant, only a fraction of the oil samples analyzed every year could be economically justified.

Think of the oil more as an information messenger of numerous failure modes and root causes of failure. As I’ve said many times, it’s hard for a machine to be in trouble without the oil knowing about it first. For most labs, the number of non-conforming samples from oil analysis will generally exceed 20 percent.

In other words, more than one out of every five samples has a reportable condition that requires a corrective response. For this reason, you must be prudent about which machines are selected for oil analysis as well as the sampling frequency.

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The term “oil analysis” has been used with respect to lubrication and machine reliability since the 19th century. Yet, over the years I have seen only a few attempts to assign a specific definition to the activity despite its widespread application in industry. Most of these definitions are too narrow or fail to include important integral activities such as machine wear monitoring and fault detection.

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Arguably, more change has occurred related to lubricant analysis and condition monitoring in the past 30 years than all other areas of lubrication. Why does this make sense? The wisest among us know that relentless measurement is a key enabler to forward progress and change. Measurement leads us to awareness and finally to action (tangible results). Of course, there are many other factors that share in importance too. These are thoroughly mapped on the Ascend Chart.

There are nine critical factors in this Condition Monitoring, Lubricant Analysis and Troubleshooting Lifecycle Stage of the Ascend chart. Each one is important enough to justify a feature article describing its purpose and application. And honestly, one or more articles on each of these subjects can already be found at machinerylubrication.com. What has become clear after years of working in the lubricant analysis field is that the concept of best practice is not as intuitive as one would expect at the outset. As a result, from my observation, the vast majority of oil analysis and inspection programs fall miserably short of their full potential.

Therein lies the opportunity and low-hanging fruit ready for harvest. Even those who have benefited from training often seem to struggle with anything more than fragmented execution. We are fully aware that knowing is not the same thing as doing. The Ascend Methodology was devised specifically to enable user organizations to succeed in full and successful execution, each stage, each level, each factor. The roadmap is clear, the journey and execution remains with you. Listen to your oil… listen to your machine. Lubricant analysis and inspection serve as the most important metric of a lubrication program. I often say, “it’s darn hard for there to be a problem with the machine without the lubricant knowing about it first.” So, let’s examine the oil the right way, again, again and again. The story is being told but we must listen and act.

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