Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
This myth, planning should be done by the trades, has a big impact on common practice, but when you talk to those who do it, they’ll often agree that planners are needed. That is an apparent contradiction and it arises due to sloppy use of terminology in the maintenance world.
Many companies have heard that planners should be skilled trades and misinterpret that to mean that your skilled trades should do planning. No, no, no. [Read more…]
The more people I talk to in industry, the more I see a divide. I see a divide between companies who treat their employees like robots and companies who treat their employees with the love & connection that they deserve. We’ve all experienced disengagement, frustration and apathy throughout our careers and it costs us our happiness. It costs us our mental health.
It also costs our companies. It costs them big dollars. [Read more…]
While I have a very uncommon last name, I come from a big family. The picture below is the family my grandparents grew by having three sons. Thomas (my father) whose family is dressed in red, Walter dressed in white and Robert (Mike) dressed in blue had 16 children between the three of them and as a result if you live or know someone who lives around Spencerport, New York there’s a good chance they know a Plucknette or two.
I get asked a lot of questions and asked for a help. Sometimes the “ask” comes from senior management, sometimes middle-level management and sometimes even from the shop floor. People and companies need help to achieve more than they are today.
Performance is already known and often less than desired. Change is needed and that means new ideas. After all, if they had the ideas themselves, they may have tried something different before calling me in. Sometimes they have, and it hasn’t worked. They are stuck. [Read more…]
The tumblers all fell into place, the lock clicked, the door opened and it all became clear.
Bad leadership almost cost me my life.
This was a few weeks ago in a session with my coach, Susan Hobson. I hadn’t put the pieces together. I hadn’t seen the connection. I saw my depression, my suicidal thoughts, my pain, my struggles as part of my story but something that just happened to me.
Now I see that it’s a gift. [Read more…]
This particular myth is not overly common, but it still occurs, usually in the minds of people who are really good a fooling themselves. It becomes more common when it is modified to say, “…running as well as it ever has”.
There are two parts to this one: 1. We believe it is actually running well, or as well as ever, and, 2. We really think we’re great and there truly is no room to improve. [Read more…]
A lot of businesses have had to make tough decisions during COVID-19, including decisions that affect their people. Some of these decisions include cutting hours, cutting wages & lay-offs. Throughout my career, I’ve been affected by some of these decisions. The line that stuck with me the most, when I was being laid off by an HR manager, she said to me “this is a business decision”. [Read more…]
I’ve spoken with a few of my customers over the past couple of weeks, one who happens to be in the food business was cranking and working overtime to meet the increased demand that resulted from folks stocking their homes, the other two were labeled non-essential and were preparing to shut down for the foreseeable future. [Read more…]
Who really is our customer? Does your organization have a master: partner supplier relationship or a partnership relationship?
Consider that a customer regularly buys our goods or services. For operations/production to be our customer, then they would be paying maintenance for its service. Do they? In some organizations, this may be the case, but is it that way in yours? [Read more…]
Data is the most valuable commodity in today’s world, and it is no different in reliability engineering. As one of the emerging trends in maintenance space, data plays a critical role in implementing an effective RCM strategy. It is powered by an organization’s ability to integrate multiple data sources into one seamless platform designed to disseminate actionable insights from that data to its decision-makers at the right time.
Recently, I’ve been looking back over my career and trying to understand why so many companies struggle with their reliability programs. The processes, the technologies, the tools have all been around for a long time and yet we don’t succeed.
The reason we don’t succeed is poor leadership. [Read more…]
Usually, this newsletter comes out first thing on Monday mornings. Today, it’s late. It’s late because I didn’t get it done last week. It’s late because I stayed off my laptop all weekend. [Read more…]
I am convinced that our egos often get the better of us. We suffer as a result and so too do those around us. Believing that we have the answers to all of our problems reflects just how much we fool ourselves. Maintenance managers burn out because of it.
Let’s say you are a plant general manager in a facility that is under-performing or not quite achieving the performance improvements you want. Often that can occur because of machinery and system failures that half output, sometimes for long periods before they can be repaired. Once those are corrected you breathe a sigh of relief, thank your maintenance manager for the repair achievement, and ride your production or operations manager to “catch up” on whatever output was lost. [Read more…]
Recently, I’ve been talking about how being vulnerable is the only way to create connection with people and open ourselves up to the lives we want. I was asked the question:“Rob, how do leaders create an environment for our teams to be vulnerable?”
At first, my answer was that leaders need to lead by example and be vulnerable first.
This is true, but we need to take it a step further.
On this podcast, Brene Brown, a leading expert in vulnerability, talks with Pete Carroll & Steve Kerr about creating spaces for vulnerability. There are 2 key points:
This is the first in a long series of blogs about common myths I have encountered and continue to encounter in my work with various customers. None of these “myths” are universal either – some people believe them, others are not sure, others do not. Which are you? [Read more…]