Certification for Condition Monitoring, Is There a Need?

Certification is the latest buzzword floating around the corporate world. Should the company strive to attain ISO 9000 certification What about ISO 14000 What about all the maintenance initiatives TPM, CBM, RCM and other TLA three letter acronyms Putting together a condition monitoring program requires determining what to do, when to do it, and with what technology. Going on-line, or soliciting information from vendors will give several different answers. Of course, you can hire a condition monitoring consultant, but how do you know the consultant is truly qualified If you are a large company, and you want to hire a condition monitoring expert yourself, what requirements do you look for While some condition monitoring technologies have certification programs, how does the training and testing compare from one vendor to another. When there is no certification available, or existing Non Destructive Testing criteria do not appear to apply, what experience do you look for Of course, the question of how old the knowledge is might well be asked. Even with technology certification, there is still no certification for condition monitoring per-se. We need to ask if there is a way of training maintenance professionals condition monitoring that allows rational decisions to be made by management. This paper will explore the issue, and while it may provide some preliminary answers, it is primarily designed to provoke discussion and comment within the condition monitoring community.