From vibration to work order: anatomy of a Cortex detection
A minute-by-minute walkthrough of what happens inside TGM Expert when a guide bearing starts to misbehave — from raw sensor stream to a scheduled intervention.
09:41 on a Tuesday. Unit 3 has been running flat-out for six days on spring melt. Somewhere in the guide bearing, a lubrication film is starting to break down. Nobody knows yet — the vibration is still inside alarm thresholds. Here’s what happens next.
09:41:52 — the stream
The bearing’s vibration sensor reports through the plant gateway as it has every few seconds for three years. The reading lands in the time-series store, joins the live dashboard, and feeds the model that has been trained on this sensor, on this unit — not an industry-average baseline.
09:42:07 — the detection
Cortex flags the pattern: a subtle shift in the vibration signature that resembles nothing in this bearing’s healthy history. Crucially, it’s still below the static alarm threshold — a conventional SCADA alarm would stay silent for days.
The anomaly is scored, classified and checked against the plant’s false-positive suppression rules (the team flagged a similar harmless signature on Unit 1 last autumn; that rule doesn’t match here).
09:42:08 — the prognosis
The remaining-useful-life model re-runs with the new evidence. The estimate for this bearing drops from “no concern” to 47 days. That’s the difference between a planned intervention during the scheduled October outage and a forced stop in August at the peak of generation season.
09:42:09 — the work order
Cortex generates work order WO-2841: inspection of the Unit 3 guide bearing, with the anomaly evidence attached — the signature plot, the RUL trend, the affected component in the asset hierarchy. It lands in the maintenance queue with parts, procedures and required permits pre-linked.
09:45 — the human
The reliability engineer gets the notification on her phone. She opens the evidence, agrees with the call, and drags the work order onto the next maintenance window. Total human time invested: about four minutes.
If she’d disagreed, one tap marks it as a false positive — and Cortex learns: a suppression rule is created, synced to the detection pipeline, and that signature never pages anyone again.
Why this matters
The interesting part isn’t any single model. It’s that detection, prognosis, evidence and action live in one system. No CSV exports, no “the monitoring vendor says, the CMMS says” reconciliation meetings. The signal becomes a decision while it still matters.
That bearing got its new pads in October, during the planned outage, on a Tuesday nobody remembers — which is exactly the point.