Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
It’s my pleasure at welcome back, Shon Isenhour to the podcast, the owner of R and D show.
In this episode we covered:
The Leadership Connection Host, Doug Plucknette, interviews reliability leader Shon Isenhour in Episode 4 of this series. Shon specializes in Adult Learning, Leadership, Asset Management and Reliability Engineering and has lead improvement initiatives for industries such as pharmaceuticals, metals, petrochemical, automotive, paper, and power generation, among others and is currently a Partner at Eruditio, LLC.
We’re glad to have Shon Isenhour, a founding partner at Eruditio, back with us. He was heavily involved in maintenance and reliability, industry, consulting and finally started Eruditio. He’ll help us know more about the role of a steering committee in maintenance and reliability implementations. That’s because many companies struggle with getting leadership and the lower levels of the organization on board. A steering committee is there to help with that change and implementation, but it’s often overlooked.
This episode focuses on:
… and so much more!
Shon has been on our past episodes. He is the founder of Eruditio LLC, a co-author of several books, a conference presenter, and he has been in maintenance and reliability for quite a while. He has been in the reliability sector for 20 years.
This episode focuses on:
On this week’s episode of Masterminds in Maintenance, we have Shon Isenhour, the Founding Partner of Eruditio, on the show!
Behind a successful reliability program, there’s always a great plan for implementation. This is something that maintenance planners handle. They are the ones who create job plans, strategize those plans, and then develop procedures to implement them with success. The scope of a maintenance planner’s job is flexible, so there are different type roles that a planner or a planner and scheduler plays depending upon the type of the organization they are working for. Some of the maintenance planners receive proper training while the others just get into the process as they go along.
In this episode, we covered:
RCA is one of the most basic yet most important of the processes in a reliability program. RCA isn’t just about solving a problem or fixing an error in your system. It is more than just finding a single root causes. When a problem occurs, there can be more than one reasons why that occurred in the first place. RCA helps us reduce the risk of that problem to a level that is acceptable to the organization. It is always a systemic and latent approach that takes time and should be done more often rather than just doing it when a problem has already occurred.
In this episode, we covered:
Asset hierarchy is very important to utilize the limited resources of an organization in the best way possible. It helps manage time and cost by prioritizing our assets. That’s why every organization needs to have a hierarchy. There are a lot of standards out there to help you build an asset hierarchy. ISO 14224 helps greatly in the matter. It contains guidelines that a maintenance and reliability organization can use to define some sort of organized processes and procedures that are important to have in the facilities. When they have laid out a foundation that way, it gets easier to do all sorts of things.
In this episode, we covered:
When you deal with machines on daily basis, machine failures are bound to happen. But what if these failures keep occurring? Wouldn’t you get tired and want a solution for these problems? This is why root cause analysis is so important in an organization. The basic idea of RCA is to know the reason behind the occurrence of a failure and then finding a solution to reduce a risk—certain or uncertain—in a cost-effective manner. You can’t just rely on a single approach all the time because it might not be applicable to your problem.
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In the maintenance and reliability industry, we have maintenance engineers, manufacturing engineers, and reliability engineers. There is a little bit difference between the types. A maintenance engineer is there to make sure the equipment is in running condition as soon as possible once a failure occurs. He has to get the asset operational the quickest possible time. He performs day to day routine checks to make sure the asset is running without defects. He does precision maintenance and promotes industry best practices. He is responsible for checking alignment, balancing, and other technical effects that might be overlooked by others.
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This episode focuses on the change management and the impact that it can have on your maintenance program. So, what is change management? It occurs at different levels in the organizations but the most basic level—the people level—that makes the organizational culture needs to be tended first. It happens a lot that after the successful planning and scheduling, work execution seems to be fine in the short term but fails horribly in the long term because the change process was not addressed and handled properly at all the critical levels in the organizational framework. So, what things need to be addressed first?
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This episode of the weekly podcast focuses on the education and training in maintenance and reliability. It is very important to practically implement the knowledge because that’s where you begin to develop skills and then you can improve those skills by continuously being a part of the applications in the field. The organizations like SMRP and eruditiollc.com help new people in the field of reliability by educating them first and then driving them to apply what they have learned. They help you whenever you need but they encourage the practice of self-driven learning because that is what helps you in the long run.
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There is a definite distinction between Reliability Engineers (RE) and Maintenance Engineers (ME). Although they are highly dependant on each other. REs rely a lot on MEs and vice versa. However, those roles are often confused let also not well understood by recruiters, managers or regrettably, even professionals in the roles.
In a Reliabilityweb.com article, Paul Barringer provides a good summary of this distinction. He also underlines the vital partnership between those specialties. Some aspects highlighted by Barringer are:
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It is my pleasure to welcome our panelists today, Eric Elder, Maureen Gribble, Jenna Johns, and Shon Isenhour.
In this episode we covered:
As the kids go back to school, maintenance, reliability, and asset management professional resume their professional learning. This learning usually takes place at one of the numerous world-class conferences available across North America and internationally. These conferences allow professionals to observe and connect with the latest tools, technology, and techniques in our amazing profession.
Sometimes it is difficult for the maintenance, reliability, and asset management professionals to get the approval or funding to attend the conference. Some organizations look at these events as a week of vacation, where there is little to no value from attending the conference. Changing this perception is not an easy task, but can be started by having an intention for the conference.
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