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READERS’
CHOICE
AWARDS
2004
Plant professionals
declare who delivers
the best value

P H O T O G R A P H B Y S C OT T B R OW N E L L By Paul Studebaker, Editor in Chief

AS A PLANT MANAGER, maintenance practitioner or

engineer, some of the most valuable knowledge
you possess is your hard-won awareness of what
works—and what doesn’t. By buying, using,
maintaining and scrapping hundreds of exam-
ples of equipment, software and services, you’ve
winnowed out the losers and built respect for
the best stuff and the vendors that provide it.
But you don’t have first-hand experience with
everything.
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Where do you turn when it’s time to identify a new names or numbers of specific products or software pack-
source for one of the many products or services your facil- ages. Wherever possible, we recognize and translate these
ity relies upon to meet critical cost, reliability and per- responses into company names.
formance requirements? Whose opinion do you Our Readers’ Choice Awards methodology is not per-
want—your purchasing department? Your local reps? fect, and you have to understand how it works if you want
Magazine editors? The Web? to get the most out of it. It’s not a ranking of best/bet-
How about several hundred of your fellow plant pro- ter/good, but of the best in order of popularity. We hope
fessionals? That’s who Plant Services polled to determine you’ll use it as we do: a reference list of brands that read-
the recipients of our inaugural Readers’ Choice Awards. ers like you say offer benchmark value—a veritable Who’s
Early in December, we e-mailed survey invitations to Who of plant equipment vendors.
20,000 qualified subscribers asking them to “identify
those suppliers you recognize as offering the best value in Congratulations and thanks
their product category: the products that deliver the com- We’ve done our best to get experienced plant profes-
bination of functionality, durability and low maintenance sionals—people who have the necessary perspective and
that add up to the lowest estimated lifecycle cost.” wisdom—to judge, without prejudice or penalty, who
Exactly 295 respondents took on the challenge of our makes the best stuff for maintenance, reliability and
daunting, 63-category, unprompted, fill-in-the-blank elec- operations.
tronic ballot, enough to determine statistically valid scores We express our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to
within 3% for the categories and rankings presented on the hardy respondents who shared their valuable wisdom
the following pages. by selecting our winners.
The results are uninfluenced by Plant Services editors, And we congratulate each vendor mentioned in the fol-
sales staff or advertisers. lowing 63 categories on being recognized for delivering
value in our 2004 Plant Services Readers’ Choice Awards. p
No losers here
The fill-in-the-blank format means every supplier has an
equal chance—the choices are not limited to a selection Alignment instrumentation
1. Ludeca 52%
of entries determined by vendors, editors or other per-
2. Vibralign 15
sons who are not practicing MRO professionals.
3. Emerson Process Management 10
Every vendor named in the rankings has been desig-
nated as offering the best value by a significant number
of respondents. We do not ask who has the second- or
third-best offerings, so each company in the rankings is
Ludeca Rotalign Pro
rated No. 1 by a significant following.
On the survey, we ask respondents to vote only in those Balancing instrumentation
categories where they have personal experience. A vote 1. Entek/IRD Balancing 27%
for a specific company should mean the respondent has 2.* Emerson Process Management 20
found its products to be better than other companies’ in Schenk Treble 18
that category. But no plant professional has personal
experience with every company in a category.
Because more respondents have experience with com-
panies that have higher market share, the results are Entek Enpak
inevitably biased toward the larger companies. Further-
more, there are certainly small companies that don’t
Data collection equipment
make the rankings no matter how excellent their value 1. Emerson Process Management 17%
just because they are relatively unknown. If you have a
favorite smaller supplier, consider yourself fortunate and
don’t be concerned that they aren’t in our Readers’
Choice Awards.
While we ask respondents to write in the name of the
Emerson
company that offers the best value, some write in the CSI 2130 RBM Consultant
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MRO Software
Maximo
EAM/CMMS software Oil and fluid analysis
and systems 1. Analysts Inc. 13%
1.* Maximo/MRO Software 22% 2.* Mobil 9
Datastream 20 Emerson Process Management 8
3. SAP 7 4.* Herguth Labs 6
Insight Services 6
PdMA 6
Predict DLI 6
Datastream 7i Analysts Inc. Oil Analysis
* Differences of less than 3% are of marginal statistical significance.

Motor and circuit Vibration analysis

PdMA 20025kv condition monitoring 1. Emerson Process Management 40%
1.* PdMA 18% 2. Entek IRD 21
Fluke 16 3. SKF 12
3. Allen-Bradley 10 4. Bently Nevada 8
4.* Baker 6
Emerson Process Management 6
Fluke 43B Square D 6
Emerson Process Management
AMS Suite

Reprinted with permission from Plant Services, February 2004.

© PUTMAN. All Rights Reserved. On the Web at www.plantservices.com.