Most industrial facilities don’t get to start from a clean slate — the gearmotors, gear units, and servo drives already installed often predate built-in condition monitoring. This guide covers two practical questions for plants in that position: how to retrofit older equipment with monitoring capability, and how to get that data working with the systems you already run.
Retrofitting Existing Gearmotors and Gear Units
Adding condition monitoring to equipment that wasn’t designed with it doesn’t require replacing the unit. Typical retrofit approaches include:
Bolt-on vibration and temperature sensors mounted externally on bearings or housings, rather than requiring internal modification
Oil analysis programs, which need no hardware changes at all — just a scheduled sampling process
Wireless sensor kits that transmit to a gateway, avoiding the need to run new wiring back to a central system
The main trade-off with retrofitting versus a monitoring-ready new unit: retrofit sensors typically capture fewer data points than factory-integrated systems, and accuracy depends on correct sensor placement on the existing housing.
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Making the Data Useful: CMMS and SCADA Integration
Collecting sensor data only helps if it reaches the systems your maintenance and operations teams already use day to day:
CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) integration lets condition data automatically trigger work orders, rather than requiring someone to manually notice a threshold was crossed
SCADA integration puts equipment health alongside the rest of your process data, so operators see drive system condition in the same view as production metrics
Without this integration step, condition monitoring often ends up as a separate dashboard nobody checks regularly — the data exists, but it doesn’t change behavior. This is frequently the actual bottleneck in monitoring projects, more so than the sensors themselves.
Baseline Maintenance Workflows Worth Running Regardless
Two low-cost practices worth running even before a full retrofit:
Periodic oil analysis, which flags contamination and wear particles early and is one of the cheapest predictive-maintenance signals available
Where SEW-EURODRIVE fits in:
SEW-EURODRIVE Canada offers retrofit sensor kits and DriveRadar IoT Suite integration for exactly this scenario — bringing condition monitoring to gearmotors and gear units already in service, with options to feed that data into existing CMMS/SCADA systems. For plants unsure whether their current equipment is a good retrofit candidate, SEW-EURODRIVE Canada also offers an assessment.