Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A presentation by Mike Sondalini at the Shutdowns and Turnarounds 2011 Conference.
The presentation covers:
One of the most important skill sets you could master to prepare you for business leadership is sales and negotiation. Some of you may be thinking, “Gosh, I’m not going into sales or marketing. I can skip this blog post!”
But I want to assure you, regardless of your field, sales and negotiation are part of it.
If you’re working in operations and want to expand your department, you need to sell that idea to your executive staff. If you’re a designer with a bright idea for a new line, you’re going to have to sell that idea to the people you work with … to the other managers, engineers and stakeholders in your organization.
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A well-designed maintenance program should eliminate the need to do condition assessments. These assessments are a form of condition monitoring, so why not include them in your proactive maintenance (PM) program? They are carried out to determine the current condition of an asset, determine if any remedial work is required, make an estimate of how long it will last, and forecast timing for eventually replacing the asset. In civil structures like buildings and bridges, these assessments are often called, “inspections”. When timed regularly they are no different from a condition monitoring task in any PM (proactive maintenance) program. Yet, they will be managed differently. Why that is so, doesn’t really matter, but arguably it just adds another program that must be managed in parallel with your maintenance program.
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Step Two: Be Honest With Yourself
Self-accountability is meaningless without honesty. It can be difficult to be honest with yourself, because then you’re pulling away all the excuses and rationalization that stand between you and what you want, but it’s the only way forward.
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Certain chemicals can pose explosion hazards due to their inherent reactivity or interaction with other chemicals or metals. A few years ago the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) had recommended regulating “Reactive Chemicals”. This begs the question – what are reactive chemicals?
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A Little History About How I Came Across Learning Teams.
A little over three years ago I was asked to speak at a conference that was entitled, Human Performance, Root Cause and Trending or HPRCT (great conference BTW and I encourage you to attend). This was a different world for me as I typically attended and spoke at Reliability and Maintenance trade conferences, but I was interested to see what it was all about (plus a good friend of mine was the one who invited me).
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I knew not to ask the question. I was almost certain I had heard the exchange correctly. I asked anyway, “Jim, I am not sure I understood you. Can you clarify that?”
“I said Ray is a dick,” blurted Jim at a tone that all 30 people in the room clearly understood. “He knows he is. He thinks he is being funny, but he’s not.”
So much for allowing Jim the opportunity to walk it back. Now, as the lead facilitator of a public decision-making group of twenty, I had to get things back on track. There was a deafening silence, only broken by a few smirks. Most of the group looked horrified.
Disruption is a reality. Disruption will occur. Great facilitators embrace the reality of disruption and are prepared to move through it.
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Companies are constantly looking for ways to identify and implement cost-saving measures. Computerized maintenance management software is used to record, manage, and communicate day-to-day operations in your maintenance department. It’s possible to use CMMS to save money in a number of ways. The following are areas in which large cost savings can result through the implementation of equipment maintenance software
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The Plant and Equipment Wellness Way lets organizations make their operating assets world class reliable so they can enjoy operational excellence success. A Plant Wellness Way EAM System- of-Reliability puts the reliability processes, skills, paradigm, and culture into companies that creates world class reliability and operational excellence.
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Do you have a reliability department, a maintenance department, or a repair department?
Do you avoid failures? Do you avoid or mitigate their consequences?
Or do you wait for things to go wrong, then fix them?
Repairs are all about fixing what has broken. When something breaks you lose whatever functionality it had. It more than likely broke when you were using it too. So you also lost the benefit of that functionality – often production or service delivery capability. The costs include repair, whatever secondary physical damage occurred, the loss of revenues and profits, plus safety and environmental consequences that arise. When something breaks its “useful life” is reduced – deterioration was allowed to accelerate, so even once repaired, the asset has lost some future useful life. The fix for that longer-term deterioration impact is a capital replacement – earlier than need be. If the breakdown was really bad, then it might be much sooner.
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I realized a while back that it can be too easy to mistake ‘simple’ with ‘easy’ and I’ve been concerned that promoting a simple approach to risk management might lead people to think that this makes everything easy. Unfortunately, even though a KISS approach makes risk management easier, it doesn’t do away with the need for hard work altogether. Worst of all, it can be easy to mistake shortcuts for simplification.
[Read more…]Explore what Protective Devices are and why they are so important to Physical Asset Management. Learn what a Failure Finding Task is and what must be considered to formulate the task interval. Come have fun with me as we explore Reliability…all as I get ready to surprise my sister on her Milestone Birthday!
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The presence of certain functional groups is considered an indicator of reactivity. This is the simplest possible reactivity screening method and serves as a guideline for further analysis. For example, chemicals containing the following functional groups can be considered potentially reactive:
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The boiler is the heart of a refinery or power plant. Boiler failures cause forced shutdowns and put the health of the plant at risk.
Some boiler designs run the risk of thermal fatigue failure. During service, the internal waterside surfaces of the tubes form a thin, protective oxide layer. Yet if the strains caused by the combination of (1) thermal expansion and (2) restraint during temperature fluctuations exceed the oxide strain capacity, the oxide cracks. Each thermal cycle will repeatedly crack the oxide, expose fresh metal when then oxidizes, eventually forming a crack. Technically this mode of cracking is corrosion fatigue-driven by thermal cycling. Yet since the boiler water will always be mildly corrosive, for boiler applications this mode of cracking is simply called “thermal fatigue”.
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Think about the three best-facilitated sessions you have ever attended. I will bet the facilitator used some type of activity that you remember. The exercise was unexpected, exciting, and effective.
Now consider the worst facilitated session you attended. If there were any, the exercises were as boring and uninteresting as the rest of the facilitation effort. My bet is that standard PowerPoint presentations and a traditional sticky dot exercise were part of the worst sessions.
Engaging exercises are that draw favorable attention or interest. Some synonyms for engaging make the point better: alluring, appealing, captivating, charismatic, enchanting, entrancing, fascinating, glamorous, magnetic, and seductive. From experience, a facilitated session has a good chance to achieve its outcomes if its exercises rise to the level of ‘engaging.
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