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139 – Change Management with Scott Deckers

Change Management with Scott Deckers

The organizations are always going through one or the other change. Whether it’s the change in roles and responsibilities, the change in the technology or the change in the CMMS itself. Everything changes in the industry all the time and it is always at a higher rate than the organizations keep up with it. When we talk about the change, it always starts with the change in processes. When a business process changes, everything else changes with it. Whenever a change is to be implemented, the first question that pops up in everyone’s mind is ‘WHY’.

In this episode, we covered:

What is Change Management?
The various Change Management models available
What organizations need to do to prepare for change
The never ending journey of change

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SMRP18 – Planning and Scheduling with Jeff Shiver

Planning and Scheduling with Jeff Shiver

Planning and scheduling is a term often used in the organizations. It might be used together but there is a difference in ‘planning’ and ‘scheduling’. Planning is when you determine what jobs you have to do, develop a procedure to execute the job, assign resources, and then utilize those resources in the best way possible. Only when you have successfully planned a work-order, you can decide when to do it in the scheduling part. So both the processes go together and one can’t be completed successfully without the other. Only scheduling something is not going to help you successfully implement it.
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97 – Planning and Scheduling with Brandon Weil

Planning and Scheduling with Brandon Weil

Planning and Scheduling is the core of any reliability program. It is part of Work Control process which is described as the execution of a work order from start to end, and setting the right expectations to everyone involved. The role can be viewed separately or as a hybrid, depending on the maturity of the organization and the complexity of the process.
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96 – Electrical Reliability with Mark Rodgers

Electrical Reliability with Mark Rodgers

Electricity or energy is what gives power to a production plant. Any organization spends a considerable amount to keep their equipment in optimal condition and ensure maximum production efficiency. If the electrical system is not up to the mark, this will not only affect the production output but also will expose the employees to potential risks.
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95 – Recruitment & Retention Best Practices with Joel Crawford

Recruitment & Retention Best Practices with Joel Crawford

Recruitment and employee retention are few of the areas that every company has to spend resources on. It’s not unusual that an employee may leave his/her jobs after a period of time (even during training) for various reasons. No matter what the HR initiatives and employee engagement programs are, it’s always a fact that employee will come and go, even to the best of organizations; and the only remedy to this is to keep the attrition rate to a minimum.
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94 – How to Create an Effective Corporate Reliability Group with Scott Kelley

How to Create an Effective Corporate Reliability Group with Scott Kelley

Most of the organization in the maintenance and reliability industry don’t have a consistent improvement in the plant production or they are not making progress at the rate they should after investing that many resources they put in the sites. The problem occurs when you don’t have an effective corporate reliability group and that is a structured unit that is actively involved in visiting your sites, reviewing your business processes, and then helping you achieve your organization’s goals by doing everything that needs to be done. They are the ones who help you see your vision for your organization see clearly.
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93 – ‘Why Does Everyone Hate Me’: How You Can Improve Your Pumpside Manner in 3 Easy Steps with Katie Switzer

‘Why Does Everyone Hate Me’: How You Can Improve Your Pumpside Manner in 3 Easy Steps with Katie Switzer

Most people struggle with their jobs, not necessarily due to the lack of technical know-how, but because getting along well with others seems to be a challenge. This is one of the pain points that many reliability engineers and professionals are facing.
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92 – Operational Risk Management Framework with Paul Daoust

Operational Risk Management Framework with Paul Daoust

When you are striving towards excellence in maintenance and reliability, there are a lot of activities that you have to perform to avoid any risks. The asset management is one of the top activities that goes on in the organizations and there can be certain risks involved while performing different operations in this phase. That’s why you need better insights to foresee the risks and try to mitigate them effectively. This is where operational risk management framework helps you to reduce and control the risks. You can identify the operational risks earlier and perform regulatory compliance more safely than ever.
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91 – Uptime: Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management with James Reyes-Picknell Part 2

Uptime: Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management with James Reyes-Picknell Part 2

In every organization who is in the business of maintenance and reliability, the first challenge is always reducing the unnecessary downtime in the machines. There are a lot of strategies that engineers come with to get that level of excellence where they can truly achieve the desired uptime for their assets. For similar guidance such as in this endeavor is provided by James Reyes-Picknell’s book Uptime: Strategies and its latest edition contains a lot of knowledge about how to get your goals about keeping your workforce focused and getting the results that you want from your reliability and maintenance programs.
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90 – Uptime: Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management with James Reyes-Picknell Part 1

Uptime: Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management with James Reyes-Picknell Part 1

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50 – Root Cause Analysis Made Simple with Susan Lubell

Root Cause Analysis Made Simple with Susan Lubell

This episode of the rooted in reliability podcast covers the Root Cause Analysis in the light of a book written by Susan Lubell – the guest herself—and the book is part of the made simple series. In this book, Susan has covered a number of matrices that need to be answered very specifically and clearly based on the methodologies adopted by different organizations. This book doesn’t just focus on the terminologies and specific techniques that are used by the experts. It actually covers the very baselines of the RCA methods such as how to get started with the analysis and what to look for in order to successfully implement it. This book is more of a guide for those who want to start their journey in the field and can use a bunch of best practices that are used by the top-notch organizations in the industry. It’s not about the fault tree analysis or other techniques that are used to determine the root cause. It’s more about the people managing side of the Root Cause Analysis like why do you need to perform an RCA and what are the factors that drive it.
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41 – 2016 SMRP Conference Round Up with Christopher Mears

2016 SMRP Conference Round Up with Christopher Mears

This episode of the weekly podcast is focused on the 2016 SMRP conference and is described in detail by one of the Board members of the SMRP itself, the education director Christopher Mears. Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals is a shared group where you get many opportunities to learn, experience, and improve your working skills for your own and your organization’s benefit. They have an annual event in October called the SMRP conference where professionals from around gather and get a know-how about the best practices that many good quality CMRPs use in different industries. It is shared event in which many companies exhibit in workshops which technologies they are using right now. What have they come across while dealing with the reliability improvements and what are they up to—not the specific details like confidential designs, documents, and charts. But kind of keynotes that are food for thought if you are keen to make yourself better in the race of reliability professionals. Apart from this yearly event, you can find the webinars of SMRP members on the official site along with the presentations of different professionals that are working in the leading organizations of the field. The exhibitors of this society are very successful at what they do and if you want to start your reliability engineering journey—doesn’t matter if you’re a student, earlier in the career, or an experienced professional—there’s plenty for you to do in the workshops along with a chance to see the best facilities of the city in which the conferences are held.
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40 – Moving to Proactive Maintenance with Scott Kelley

Moving to Proactive Maintenance with Scott Kelley

In this episode of the rooted in reliability podcast, the guest Scott Kelly explains the sixth cell of the hexagon of Plant-Hexcellence Model. All the cells of this model are linked together so that every cell is critically important to get good results from your plant. But there are always prioritized standards for different people working in the organization and most of them consider the proactive maintenance above all as it’s the best way to save both time and money. Basically, it is a strategy through which you plan your asset management process from the very start till the end by looking at the design of the machines, construction, visual inspection, and so on.
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39 – Managing Performance in Asset Management with Scott Kelley

Managing Performance in Asset Management with Scott Kelley

In this episode of the weekly podcast, the guest Scott Kelley explains the 5th cell of the Hexcellence Model. All of the previous cells of this hexagon are connected to each other and are equally important when it comes to getting the superior asset management outcomes. But when it comes to achieving optimum results for the company some sort of performance measures must be done and each of the factors involved in determining the performance level must be taken care of. Not only that you need to understand these factors deeply, you need to relate them to your baselines for budget and time as well. In this way, you will be able to meet the expectations and standards that ultimately lead to focused improvements in the long run. Now, these measures will change the behavior of your organization. So, you have to be careful while using any metrics for measurement to get those numbers that will determine the behavior of your people. A good performance metric is always balanced to avoid any counter-productive outcomes. You can create as many metrics as you want but unless those are aligned with your strategic goals, they won’t be of any help at all. That’s why all the metrics that you use should be fit for purpose—meaning that look at the overall picture and make the indicators in a comparative fashion if you want those to make sense.
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38 – Utilizing Policy and Procedures with Scott Kelley

Utilizing Policy and Procedures with Scott Kelley

In this episode, the guest Scott Kelley explains another cell in the hexagon of Plant Hexcellence model and that is, Policies and Procedures. This cell is pretty much based on standards and the directions to follow these standards but before you get into the details, it is extremely important that you understand the basic terminology. A policy is comprised of the written guidelines that are officially part of any organization where the employees are bound to respect and follow these documented and published, set of rules. The procedure is a technique or method that you use to support and repeatedly implement these guidelines in that particular organization. Then these terms are tied back to the processes as they include the step by step graphical interpretation of the methods that you are going to adapt—answering what’s and how’s to achieve the guidelines. Another term that is often confused with the policy is the practice that is different—unless organization wants to make it officially part of the policy—as it’s not documented like policies. Now as all of these terms as dependent on each other because written guidelines are always easy to keep in mind and follow one way or another. The procedures are documented to make them easier to follow or at least the standard and basic procedures are to be strictly adapted in every good organization.
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