274 – Dealing with Ramp Up and Degraded Assets with James Reyes-Picknell

Welcome James Reyes who is the author of Uptime and many other books, also a principal consultant at Conscious Asset. More about James:

Having a career that spans for 44 years, James has worked in different organizations and industries some of which include reliability on board both at sea and air. The guest began a reliability consulting career in 1995 focusing on the execution of reliability programs.

A lot of organizations slashed spending on maintenance, training, and capital upgrades during the shutdown over the COVID-19 period. Is this impacting asset operations as they ramp up?

Yes, it is. And it is going to get worse. Companies slashed all training, improvement, and consultancy expenses. Without the training, the workforce’s skills deteriorate and they do not learn anything new. Scaled down operations also means few challenges for them.

People in the workforce are afraid and therefore less focused. Also, during the pandemic, pieces of equipment were being run at low speeds giving a false image of longer uptime hence less maintenance. A ramp up will demand more from assets that haven’t been maintained for a long time. Consequently, the equipment will break down causing more losses.

Do you believe organizations are aware of these challenges?

A lot of people aren’t. There is a pent up demand for products yet nothing has been done to prepare assets for ramp up. A lot of people were laid off and most of the experienced talents are resorting to retirement after realizing the benefits of staying at home.

Less experienced and underprepared people are taking up management positions after shutdowns.

Supply chain is also a major challenge as parts and materials are taking longer lead time to arrive due to border restrictions and affected supply countries.

What types of Issues are companies going to face?

• Machine stressors shall be driven by demand yet the assets have not been prepared.
• Employees are going to make a lot of mistakes after a lot of time without working
• Ability to recover from breakdowns will be lowered.
• These challenges shall open doors to competitors who had earlier addressed them

Training live shall also prove a challenge and costly given the circumstances. More so in the face of already available alternative use of online materials which are scalable, cheaper, and convenient.

The challenges are causing pressure on reliability managers yet they are things out of their control.

Yes. Managers are stressed managing teams that are in different locations. Already a high turnover is being experienced.

How do organizations reduce the risks of these challenges?

It won’t be fixed immediately. The following are needed.

• Focus needs to shift from maintenance to reliability. Maintenance is more task oriented yet there are computer programs that can monitor day to day tasks.
• Focus on monitoring to capture failures before they fully manifest.
• A lot of reliability training is needed.
• The computer programs need reliable data which takes time to get.
• All the deferred capital investments, upgrades, and training will need to be executed.

Do you believe organizations are still hunkered down?

• They are because of supply chain issues
• People haven’t yet perceived the impact on asset operation

What are organizations to do if something like this happens again?

Think longer term especially in the face of climate change. Every business needs to think about the impacts of the conditions to their business. Cutting costs isn’t the only way during the pandemic.

The execution of such opportunities are not expensive, right?

Nothing in maintenance is complicated. Think and work smarter. A lot of challenges are yet to come- equipment breakdowns, high turnover rate

I have witnessed the same problems affecting my neighboring minivan factory. People are often out of work because of a shortage of parts from overseas.

That’s because the parts are not manufactured here. The borders are closed. The government needs to better support the supply chain in this situation.

Eruditio Links:

• Eruditio
• HP Reliability
• James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
• Reliability Report

James Reyes-Picknell Links:

• Past James Reyes-Picknell episodes
• James Linkedin
• Uptime by James Reyes-Picknell
• RCM Re-Engineered
• Paying Your Way
• Conscious Asset
• Conscious Asset Blog
• PEMAC.org
• Maintrain 2021
• MRO Magazine

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