So, if you’ve had this discussion, which you will have at some point in your career, and if you haven’t heard it a hundred times already, you need to reduce maintenance costs. Have this discussion – how do we do this? What happens in most places is that maintenance cost X this year, last year it  was X minus 5%. Why do we do that? Well, this year we have this big rebuilding of boilers…

Technical visionaries often invoke terms like the Internet of Things, smart machines and machine to machine (M2M) to ease our fears about managing the upcoming brain drain that accompanies the graying American industrial workforce. The theory goes that one day, self-learning machines and massively parallel computing may replace the operator. Perhaps, but not in the foreseeable future. That’s because smart machines are very good at keeping us from doing dumb things, like stalling a commercial airliner, or pushing a gas compressor beyond safe tolerances. In the realm of black and white, the value of artificial intelligence is unassailable. But what about the rest of the time?

REM recently caught up with Christer Idhammar, founder and executive vice-president of IDCON INC, and asked him to share his perspective on World Class maintenance.

The way we see maintenance work being done, you have preventive maintenance which is done is to prevent a failure or to detect a failure early. Continuous improvement, you may have some those, those are the things to be done from redesigns. I can see you doing that in two cases…one is if you have a root cause and you see whatever you have a problem on you have a piece of equipment that is not working right…you may have to redesign it.

Improving the capabilities of those in a leadership position is viewed as a top initiative in many organizations. More and more companies are moving their focus in management from compliance cop to performance coach, due to the realization that if there isn’t an understood correlation between what performance obtained the results, the outcomes are due more to luck than purposeful effort.

How do you move your reliability improvements forward? Do you know how good you are? You need to identify the Reliability Gap.

Reliability is often used by plants to define future improvement efforts and set expectations for employees and managers. Understanding how it’s defined and how to measure it can often be confusing to your organization. This video shows how IDCON INC defines reliability in a partnership relationship between Operations and Maintenance.