Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
A lot of us are heading back to the office, back to the plant or back to the facility and the game has changed. Lock-down has changed our companies and our jobs in different ways. Are you seeing more tracking, more monitoring, more metrics, less trust? Are you seeing more love, more compassion, more human-centered leadership? How has your job changed? Are you excited or anxious about going back to work? [Read more…]
Yesterday, I got a question from the subject matter expert (SME) for one of the equipment types for which I manage the capital strategy. He asked me who was in charge of the operating scope (when and how long to run the equipment). My first reaction was that it was supposed to be him. [Read more…]
This myth is about who should schedule work.
There are three roles involved here: planners who plan the jobs, supervisors who supervise their crews and schedulers who create the work schedule.
Planning, as stated before, is all about what work gets done and how.
Scheduling is about when the work gets done. The practical constraint is that no work goes on a schedule until you are sure you have everything you need to execute that work when you schedule it. [Read more…]
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a widely implemented metric that characterizes the performance of a plant, and is expressed as a percentage of the total planned or scheduled production time. OEE essentially measures your plant’s performance in terms of equipment reliability and availability. It is calculated as the product of 3 factors – performance, quality, and availability:
This myth, planning meetings are for planning, is based on a misuse/misunderstanding of correct planning and scheduling terminology. Planning meetings are normally run by your planner, but they are not, or shouldn’t be, about planning. They are about scheduling – i.e.: when work will be executed. Planning defines what work (scope) will be done, how to do it (instructions, guidance, specs, etc.) and what is required to do it (resources, skills, permits required, etc.). Scheduling is done to define when the job will be executed and by which resources (skilled trades). [Read more…]
This past week, I was getting really frustrated, angry and hateful towards myself. I kept seeing the root cause of my problems and I wasn’t able to let it go, I wasn’t able to heal. I started laying into myself, beating myself up in a way that is appalling. I shut down. I stalled. On Friday, I had a call with my coach and she told me what I needed to do. [Read more…]
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…]