Ignorance is contagious and you are the only one to save the day, according to maintenance expert Joel Levitt who shares the ten things your management needs to know NOW.

I believe that most training efforts are wasted unless the training is focused on the training needs of each individual. After going through training, a person should immediately apply the new skills. As the saying goes, “If you do not use it, you lose it.”

If you work in any aspect of manufacturing today, there is no doubt you are aware of a significant revolution underway. It is a new era for the industry, dramatically evident when you take a look around any reasonably maintained and updated manufacturing facility. What is driving this revolution, albeit a slow industry shift from a machinery-based environment to an information-based one? Quite simply, it’s technology and the big data that results from it.

With so many advancements in world-class technology, many maintenance leaders have failed to set a strong leadership foundation. All too often, they get distracted with starting predictive maintenance and oil analysis programs because these are the hot topics and buzzwords. Instead, maintenance leaders, prior to doing anything, must first gauge what their organizations need and set goals to achieve them. The type of leadership role can vary from manager to reliability engineer to predictive maintenance leader. However, the main focus is to lead others to get results.

I have especially seen the need for “know WHY” training when companies start including operators in inspections and other maintenance work. Often, we do the training for operators, but suggest that maintenance craftspeople attend so they can become the future instructors. It is very common that the craftspeople themselves then discover that they also need “know WHY” training!

When you think about the productivity of your workforce, a number of questions come into play. Are you meeting your daily goals? Have you correctly set benchmarks? Have the proper safety procedures been established and well-communicated with your team?

The phrase “It’s just common sense” is used quite often to describe conclusions or circumstances that are obvious to most people, at least those within earshot.  However, W. Edwards Deming, a well-respected management guru and quality expert, famously said ‘There’s no such thing as common sense.  If there were, it would be common.’  So, I suppose we have our answer to the title question, at least from Deming’s perspective. That said, let’s explore this further, and perhaps try to begin to understand why he said this, and why so often we see instances where “common sense” is not applied. Maybe it’s just not as common as it should be.

Most maintenance managers feel the pressure of lowering maintenance costs and at the same time improving reliability. As you know, annual maintenance costs have a strong correlation to how well basic work processes such as planning, scheduling, and preventive maintenance are executed in our mills, mines and factories. But, another factor that heavily influences maintenance costs is your existing “maintenance debt.”

A shift is occurring in maintenance of equipment and systems called prognostics and health management. Although it uses similar predictive maintenance (PdM) diagnostic tools such as infrared, vibration monitoring, and oil analysis to deliver the current condition of components, it differs in that it does not correlate and trend the measured parameters. When it comes to prognostics in compressed air systems, knowing what parameters should be measured and how they should be analyzed help to form good practices in condition-based maintenance (CBM).