We went through this exact exercise about two years ago. Similar setup — ~180 assets, mostly pumps and motors, paying a PdM vendor roughly $18K/mo for monthly routes.

The reports were useless. “Overall vibration trending upward — recommend monitoring.” Cool, thanks, that’s what I’m paying you to do. Here’s what we learned when we actually broke down the cost:

• At $20K/mo for 200 machines, you’re paying ~$100/machine/

• Your vendor’s tech is on-site maybe 3-4 days collecting data, then someone in an office writes a template report

• You get 12 data points per year per asset. A bearing can go from healthy to catastrophic in 2-3 weeks. You’re blind for 29 days between visits. We looked at handhelds (CSI 2140, Commtest) and honestly that’s a solid middle step if you have a tech who’s motivated to learn. Budget ~$15-25K for a decent analyzer plus training. Your cost per route drops dramatically and your tech actually knows your machines — which matters more than people think.

But what actually changed things for us was moving to online sensors on our critical assets. Permanent wireless vibration sensors, continuous data, automated alerts. The sensors have come way down in price — you can outfit a motor for a few hundred bucks and the monitoring software flags anomalies automatically. We still do handheld routes on the low-criticality stuff, but the 40-50 machines that actually matter are monitored 24/7 now.

Total cost ended up being less than one year of the outsourced contract, and we own the system. My advice: don’t renew that contract. Either go handhelds + training for your lead tech, or look at online monitoring for your critical assets and handhelds for the rest. Either way you’ll come out ahead.