Work management for condition monitoring.

Datum carries every escalation through eight stages, from the analyst's call to the post-repair reading, and counts it as a save only when that reading shows the repair worked. Your CMMS still executes the work. Datum holds the condition evidence, the decisions and the proof.

What Datum holds.

The reliability record often kept in spreadsheets and email, in one place and attached to the equipment it concerns.

Eight-stage escalation workflowFrom the analyst's call to the validated close, each stage assigned to a defined role.
Remote analysts and site, one recordAnalyst and site work from the same escalation, wherever the analyst sits.
Joined to your CMMS by work orderRecorded against the work order number, so your CMMS keeps executing the work.
Asset and componentTied to your hierarchy, with the asset's criticality rating.
Severity and remaining reliable lifeThe analyst's determination, and the time it affords you.
The stage it occupiesWhich of the eight stages, and how old the escalation is.
Production impact and maintenance costRecorded at approval rather than estimated afterwards.
Baseline and validation measurementsThe readings before and after that show whether the repair worked.
Root cause analysis and evidenceFive whys, physical and latent causes, corrective actions, attached files.
Bad actors and repeat offendersAssembled from the escalation history rather than from memory.
Missed escalationsFaults that were detectable and not caught, logged by category with what they cost.
Program reports as PDF or CSVOn demand, drawn from the escalations themselves.

Escalations from vibration, oil analysis, ultrasound, infrared and motor current all follow the same process.

Follow one escalation through Datum.

A drive-end bearing on a boiler feed pump, from the analyst's call to the validated close. Then the program it feeds, and how a site is set up.

Prefer to watch? See the films: two minutes for your role, then the chapters.

Ordered by consequence, not arrival.

Every open escalation, ranked by the asset's criticality, the severity of the fault, the remaining reliable life and the production impact on record. Each card shows the stage it occupies and the role it is waiting on; one with no remaining reliable life recorded says so, and is ranked as if it were imminent.

The escalation queue: open escalations as cards ordered by severity, each showing its asset, defect, remaining reliable life, cost and an eight-stage progress strip.

The analyst's call.

On boiler feed pump BFP-102, the analyst records a drive-end bearing defect: outer race, High severity, 35 days of remaining reliable life, replace at the next outage. The reasoning behind the call is recorded with it, and so is the reading it is raised on — 0.41 in/s at the drive-end bearing, against a 0.30 alert limit. The spectrum behind it attaches here.

Stage one of an escalation: asset, component, technology, defect, severity, remaining reliable life, the reading of record with its measurement point and alert limit, and the recommended action, entered for boiler feed pump BFP-102.

Verified at the equipment.

A technician at the site confirms the sensor, the machine and the symptom, and attaches the work request raised in the CMMS. A misidentified asset is caught here, before anything is planned.

Stage two: the field technician's sensor check, work request number and agreement with the analyst's assessment.

Approved, with the cost of waiting.

The asset owner authorizes the work order and records what a failure would cost: three hours of downtime, priced at the area's production rate at the moment the decision is made.

Stage three: work order number, priority and the estimated production impact of a failure, calculated from the area rate.

An escalation is a record, not a ticket.

Planned into the boiler outage with labor, crafts, parts and scope. The original call, the verification and the approved impact stay attached, and a search on the work order number brings it up.

Stage four: target date, labor hours, crafts, parts and scope, with the maintenance cost estimate calculated.

Watchlisted until the outage.

While it waits, the escalation carries its instructions, duty coverage and site contact. If it worsens, what to do is already written down.

The watchlist entry for the escalation: escalation clauses, weekday, weekend and overnight duty coverage, site contact and target outage.

What the crew found.

Executed in the outage. The crew sees the plan it is executing and records what they found on opening it — a spalled outer race and six mils of misalignment — what they did about it, and the actual downtime, labor and parts the repair took.

Stage five: the planned work from stage four, the maintenance crew's account of what they found on disassembly and what they did, and the actual downtime, labor hours and parts cost.

Signed off, then rechecked.

Sign-off confirms the machine is back in service. That closes the work, not the escalation: the technician then rechecks the same point, 0.41 in/s when it was raised and 0.05 now.

Stage seven: the reading of record from stage one, the post-repair reading taken at the same point, and the sensor check.

No post-repair reading, no save.

The analyst sees the change against the first reading — 0.41 to 0.05 in/s, 88% lower — then confirms the repair worked and records the root cause. A reading that rose and stays over the limit can't be a save; it goes back for a recheck.

Stage eight: the stage-one reading and the post-repair reading side by side with the change between them, the cost of the repair, confirmation that the repair worked and the root cause.

Stage by stage.

How many open escalations sit at each stage and how long since they were raised, with the on-time rate and total cycle time.

The pipeline view: open escalations at each stage, their age since raised, cycle time and on-time rate.

The state of the program, without assembling it by hand.

Open escalations by severity and technology, response against target, closed work and the cost recorded against it. Every figure is drawn from the escalations themselves: a save is a validated close, an accepted risk is counted as what it is, and an escalation with no remaining reliable life on record is scored as imminent.

The reliability dashboard: open, watchlisted and critical counts, response against target, validated saves with the closes without correction and accepted risks beneath, closed work and an alert feed.

The same machine, again.

Chronic assets surface from the escalation history on their own: how often each has returned, its severity trend, its recurring defects and what it has cost.

The bad actors view: chronic assets ranked by recurrence, with severity trend, recurring defects and escalation history.

Patterns across every escalation.

Defect types and severity mix by technology, and for every validated close, the root cause recorded against the defect it presented as. Each figure is a count from the record, not an inference.

Defect analytics: defect type distribution and severity mix for vibration escalations, and a root cause by defect type table across validated closes.

Root cause analysis, kept with the escalations it came from.

Five whys, physical and latent causes, corrective actions and evidence, each linked to the escalations that prompted the investigation.

The root cause analyses list, with open and closed counts and corrective-action completion, each analysis linked to its escalation.

What the program missed, recorded as carefully as what it caught.

A fault that was detectable and went uncaught is logged by category — detection, interpretation, coverage or process — with the reactive cost it carried.

Missed opportunities: faults that were detectable but not caught, with totals, reactive cost and the gap category behind each.

The program's own scorecard.

Validated closes beside logged misses, RCA completion and action closure, with misses by technology and the gap that let them through.

Program health: validated closes beside logged misses, RCA completion, action closure and the reactive cost of missed faults, by technology and by gap category.

Reports when you need them.

Program reports as PDF or CSV, generated on demand from the same record the site works from.

The reports view: on-demand program reports with PDF and CSV export.

Your hierarchy, from a CSV.

Upload a CSV loadsheet and map its column names — whatever your plant calls them — to site, area, system, asset, component and, if your sheet carries one, criticality. Nothing is written until you have previewed what will change.

The loadsheet import: a customer's own spreadsheet columns mapped to site, area, system, asset, component and an optional criticality rating.

Consequence sets the order, not arrival time.

Each asset is scored once against four criteria — safety, production, repair cost and lead time, redundancy — and the tier that follows feeds the queue's ranking from then on, beside severity and remaining life, with who assessed it and when on record.

The criticality assessment: each asset listed with its system and area, a critical, high, medium or low rating, and where the rating came from — scored, imported or seeded, by whom and when.

Screenshots show Datum's demonstration facility, an integrated paper mill. Select an image to open it full size.

Detection is rarely the problem. What follows it is.

A capable analyst identifies a developing fault and issues a report. It reaches the site as an attachment. From there the escalation depends on recollection: someone has to read it, judge it, raise the work, schedule it, and afterwards confirm the condition actually improved.

Each of those hand-offs happens outside any system that records them, and any one of them can quietly end the matter. Programs seldom fail because the analysis was wrong. They fail because a sound call was made and nothing durable was built around it.

The report goes out, and nothing comes back.

An escalation moves through eight defined stages and always occupies a known one. What was raised, what was decided and what remains outstanding is visible without anyone being asked.

The work order was closed. Whether the fault is gone is a separate question.

No save is counted without a follow-up reading taken against the baseline. Completion and correction are recorded as the different claims they are.

Everything is urgent, so work happens in the order it arrived.

Order is set by the asset's criticality rating, the severity of the escalation and its remaining reliable life — not by who raised the matter most recently.

“We’ll pick it up at the next outage,” and then nobody does.

A deferral carries a review date and returns to the queue when that date arrives. A hold left open indefinitely ages and is flagged rather than forgotten.

The same machine keeps failing and no one has joined the incidents up.

Repeat offenders are assembled from the escalation history itself, so the pattern is visible from the record rather than from whoever happens to remember it.

The one that was missed is never examined.

Faults that were detectable and not caught are logged against the program by category — detection, interpretation, coverage or process — with the reactive cost they carried.

Eight stages, and an escalation always occupies one of them.

An escalation enters as the analyst's call and leaves as a validated repair or a recorded decision. Every stage is defined, and the record always shows which one an escalation sits at. Nothing rests in an undefined state.

Select a stage to see what it involves.

Stage 1 of 8 · Analyst

Raise escalation

The analyst records the determination against the asset and component: technology, defect, severity, and the remaining reliable life the condition affords. Spectra and supporting data attach here, so the reasoning travels with the escalation rather than in an email beside it.

Stage 2 of 8 · Field tech

Verify

Someone at the site confirms the machine, the component and the symptom against what was called. A remote analyst works from data; verification is where the escalation meets the equipment, and a misidentified asset is caught before any work is planned.

Stage 3 of 8 · Asset owner

Approve WO

The asset owner accepts the escalation and authorizes work, recording the production impact and the expected maintenance cost at the moment the decision is made rather than reconstructing them afterward.

Stage 4 of 8 · Planner

Plan work

The planner schedules against the outage calendar and raises the work order in the CMMS. The work order number is recorded here, and from this point it is the join between the two systems.

Stage 5 of 8 · Maintenance crew

Execute

The craft performs the repair and records what was done, including what was found on disassembly. Where that differs from the original call, the difference is part of the record and feeds the analysis later.

Stage 6 of 8 · Asset owner

Sign off

The asset owner confirms the work is complete and the machine is back in service. This closes the work, not the escalation — the two are deliberately separate.

Stage 7 of 8 · Field tech

Baseline

A fresh reading at the same point records the machine's condition after the repair. Without it there is nothing to validate the repair against.

Stage 8 of 8 · Analyst

Validate

The analyst compares the new reading with the first and confirms the repair worked. Only here can it close as a save. If the condition persists it goes back for a recheck instead of closing on a completed work order.

See the eight stages running on your own equipment.

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Datum does not replace your CMMS.

Your CMMS plans labor, reserves parts and records completion, and it should go on doing so. What it was never designed to hold is the reasoning behind the request: the spectra, the severity judgment, the remaining life estimate, and the measurement that afterwards shows whether the repair worked.

Datum holds that material and references the work order by number, so the two records stay joined without either system pretending to be the other.

Your analysts work wherever they are.

Whether an analyst sits in the building or reviews your routes from three states away, escalations are entered into the same record the site works from. The site can see the reasoning behind a call; the analyst can see what became of it. Neither has to ask.

See it on your own equipment.

A thirty-minute walkthrough of the process, end to end: an escalation on one of your asset classes, from the analyst's call to the validated close.

Sign in with Microsoft Entra ID or email. Roles for analysts, technicians, planners and asset owners.

Bring your asset hierarchy in from a CSV. Export program reports as PDF or CSV.