on Maintenance Reliability

Most of us would agree that there is a new global economy being forged in the manufacturing sector today. Inevitably, this translates to a renewed focus on transferring more business value to the customer. Driving value in maintenance translates to high reliability and central to this will be linking RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) facilitation with effective maintenance program implementations. [Read more…]

A lot of attention is going to Infrastructure and its renewal. Here in Canada the recently elected Federal Government is about to spend over $100 billion on “shovel ready and shovel worthy” projects. At the municipal level alone (where we “own” about 60% of Canada’s infrastructure), some $123 billion is needed for catching up on deterioration that’s been allowed to accumulate since the 1950’s. That doesn’t take into account needs for growth. I recently attended a conference and listened to a well-regarded key-note speaker who placed our overall spending needs on infrastructure (all levels of government) nearer to $1 Trillion! The number is huge – no matter what it is. [Read more…]

Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.

Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement. It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]

Most of my firm’s clients are in the private sector but occasionally we do some public sector work. We usually notice a number of distinct differences in practices and in what motivates those practices. It would be nice to say that one can learn a lot from the other, but in truth, both can learn a lot from each other.

I thought it might be useful to compare and contrast the two sectors (based on personal observations) and then propose an idea for learning from each other. [Read more…]

Good physical asset management is about making sure our physical assets do what we want them to do at optimum operating cost and tolerable levels of risk to safety, our environment and to your business.

Managing physical assets to achieve that in an industrial setting involves much more than simply buying and running a piece of equipment. [Read more…]