OEM remote monitoring is software that an equipment maker sells along with its turbines and compressors, to watch them in the customer's plant for years. OEM means original equipment manufacturer, the company that built the machine. The maker watches its own machines from its own monitoring centre.
Here is a typical case. A gas processing plant in Assam buys a gas compressor with a ten-year service contract. Sensors on the compressor send readings to the maker's monitoring centre. The maker's engineers compare them with readings from hundreds of compressors of the same model that run at other sites. One day, the vibration of this compressor is 20 per cent above the average for the model. The maker calls the plant, and sends a service engineer with the right spare part.
This gives the maker something the plant alone does not have. The plant sees only its own machines. The maker sees how the same model behaves at many sites, and knows its design well. So it can tell a harmless change from the start of a fault. The plant gains early warning. The maker gains a long relationship, because it earns money from the contract and the spare parts for as long as the machine runs. This business is called aftermarket services.
The plant should know what it is agreeing to. Its readings go to the maker, so the contract must say who owns the data and what the maker may do with it. The plant also cannot easily watch machines from several makers in one place, because each maker shows only its own. That is why a plant often keeps its own APM software as well.
The software is a form of asset performance management (APM), sold by the maker instead of by a software company. It is used mainly on large machines such as a gas turbine or a wind turbine. Its aim is predictive maintenance of the maker's own machines.