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RuleDesk™ Brings Revolutionary Level of Customization to Machine Condition 'Expert System' Software

For more information:
Scott Williams
Program Manager
Bently Nevada Corporation
1631 Bently Parkway South
Minden, NV 89423
Phone: (775) 782-3611
Fax: (775) 782-1822
E-mail: scott.williams@bently.com











For images, contact tannis.causey@bently.com.
 MINDEN, NEVADA, 25 May 2001 - Bently Nevada Corporation, the leading global provider of machinery protection and management products, today announced the release of RuleDesk™, a powerful enhancement to their Machine Condition Manager™ 2000 (MCM2000) software package. RuleDesk™ allows users to create complex, custom machine diagnostic rules with an easy-to-use graphical interface.

Steve Sabin, Corporate Marketing Manager, comments on the importance of such capabilities: "We've been supplying rules-based 'expert system' software for 10 years now, as a way to automatically sift through the reams of data our condition monitoring software collects and flag developing machine problems. It has evolved from a fixed set of rules and advisories to a product with fixed rules but highly customizable advisories and notification mechanisms. However, the capability our customers have most frequently asked for is a way to customize the system easily so they can write their own machinery rules. Our challenge was to do this in a way that was simple for the user and did not require them to learn a special programming language or have special computer skills. With RuleDesk™, we've succeeded."

RuleDesk™ uses an extremely user-friendly graphical environment that lets users create custom machinery analysis rules by simply drawing boxes with plain-language statements of the conditions they wish to monitor and connecting these boxes with appropriate lines and mathematical operators. If the user can write their desired rule on a chalkboard using basic flowchart concepts, they can use RuleDesk™.

Scott Williams, RuleDesk™ Program Manager, describes the product as a way for users to maximize the usefulness of MCM2000 by "tweaking" it to perfectly match their specific machinery and plant conditions. "Obviously MCM2000 provides an extremely powerful machine-management environment," Williams says. "It comes with an extensive range of built-in rules, but every plant is different and there's no way MCM2000's programmers could accommodate every possibility. That's where RuleDesk™ capabilities shine. They provide a level of flexibility that goes far beyond anything else on the market. For example, most rule-based software routines consist of simple statements providing instructions for a single, tightly-defined event on one machine. RuleDesk™ software allows users to create rules recognizing the relationships between any number of machines, and provides a host of variable-dependent actions."

Williams goes on to explain that, beyond its unique flexibility, one of the most powerful features of RuleDesk™ is its ease of use. "The great thing about this product," says Williams, "is how it lets a non-programmer quickly create custom rules. By using a step-by-step software wizard, operators can easily select the machine for which a custom rule is desired, pick the measured or derived values they need as part of the rule, connect these values using appropriate logical or mathematical operators by literally dragging lines between boxes on the screen, and then establish the appropriate alarm level severity and advisory messages that are to occur. Multiple rules can be built up from smaller rules and combined in almost any way imaginable. The power of this product is really limited only by the user's imagination."

RuleDesk™ is the latest in a series of ongoing initiatives by Bently Nevada to evolve condition monitoring systems from plot- and data-intensive environments requiring extensive, specialized analysis by machinery specialists into more user-friendly systems capable of automatically detecting machinery problems and generating plain-language advisories suitable for operations and management, not just machinery specialists. Bently Nevada's President and Chief Operating Officer, Roger Harker, refers to this as "Actionable InformationSM " and describes it as "information people can act on instead of just more data that needs to be interpreted." He concludes by noting, "The phrase we've been using is 'Move Information, Not Data™,' and it exactly conveys our emphasis and what our systems can deliver."


Bently Nevada maintains nearly 100 sales and service offices in the principal industrial centers of 43 countries around the globe. In addition to its Machine Condition Manager™ 2000 and RuleDesk™ software, the company offers a comprehensive scope of instrumentation, advanced bearing technology, lubricant condition monitoring, and engineering services, as well as fundamental rotor dynamic research - all with a common objective: helping customers protect and manage all their machinery.

Machine Condition Manager, RuleDesk, and Move Information, Not Data are trademarks and Actionable Information is a service mark of Bently Nevada Corporation.

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