Equipment Health Scoring: How One Number Made My Operators Stop Checking the Dashboard

Operators in my last plant used to ignore dashboards — not because they didn’t care, but because the data was too noisy, too fragmented, and too abstract. I've seen this pattern again and again: a sea of metrics with no clear signal. But when I implemented a simple health scoring system that aggregated temperature, vibration, and pressure into a single number between 0 and 100, that changed everything. Now, operators check that number daily, and it’s the only metric they ask about during shift handovers. The key was making the score intuitive, real-time, and tied directly to the equipment’s state. I built it using a simple weighted formula that reflects the relative importance of each sensor. Temperature and vibration are more sensitive to wear and tear, so I gave them higher weight. Pressure, while important, was less of a red flag unless it spiked suddenly. This isn’t perfect — it’s not an ML model, it’s a rule-based system — but it works for my use case and it’s easy to maintain. He