James Kovacevic — Thought Leader

Author of Maintenance and Reliability articles, ebooks, and host of Rooted in Reliability, co-host on Speaking of Reliability.

This author's archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.

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41 – 2016 SMRP Conference Round Up with Christopher Mears

2016 SMRP Conference Round Up with Christopher Mears

This episode of the weekly podcast is focused on the 2016 SMRP conference and is described in detail by one of the Board members of the SMRP itself, the education director Christopher Mears. Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals is a shared group where you get many opportunities to learn, experience, and improve your working skills for your own and your organization’s benefit. They have an annual event in October called the SMRP conference where professionals from around gather and get a know-how about the best practices that many good quality CMRPs use in different industries. It is shared event in which many companies exhibit in workshops which technologies they are using right now. What have they come across while dealing with the reliability improvements and what are they up to—not the specific details like confidential designs, documents, and charts. But kind of keynotes that are food for thought if you are keen to make yourself better in the race of reliability professionals. Apart from this yearly event, you can find the webinars of SMRP members on the official site along with the presentations of different professionals that are working in the leading organizations of the field. The exhibitors of this society are very successful at what they do and if you want to start your reliability engineering journey—doesn’t matter if you’re a student, earlier in the career, or an experienced professional—there’s plenty for you to do in the workshops along with a chance to see the best facilities of the city in which the conferences are held.
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Win People to Your Way of Thinking

Road caution sign with Think below — Photo by Taymaz Valley

Applying the Dale Carnegie Principles to Build a Reliability Culture

Building on the Dale Carnegie® Principles from the famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, we can progress to the next set of principles.

Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization. In the previous post, we covered how to build authentic and meaningful relationships.

If you have not read that post, yet, please go back and do so before reading on.

I was part way through my Dale Carnegie® course when I was challenged to make a change at work by using one or two of the principles below.

We were struggling with being able to complete our weekly PMs because we had to support the production line changeovers. Dwelling on this, I approached the skilled trades that were preparing to perform a changeover. I asked them about the changeover, and what were the sticking points.

I allowed them to do a great deal of the talking. I listened to the challenges they had and why the changeovers took so long. [Read more…]

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40 – Moving to Proactive Maintenance with Scott Kelley

Moving to Proactive Maintenance with Scott Kelley

In this episode of the rooted in reliability podcast, the guest Scott Kelly explains the sixth cell of the hexagon of Plant-Hexcellence Model. All the cells of this model are linked together so that every cell is critically important to get good results from your plant. But there are always prioritized standards for different people working in the organization and most of them consider the proactive maintenance above all as it’s the best way to save both time and money. Basically, it is a strategy through which you plan your asset management process from the very start till the end by looking at the design of the machines, construction, visual inspection, and so on.
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Become a Friendlier Person for your Reliability Culture

Dale Carnegie founded his training program in 1912.

Over 100 years later, the same course is taught to students, business people, and leaders. The course is not just about public speaking, but building relationships, influencing people to your way of thinking and finally becoming a leader.

In 1936 he wrote his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It is from this book, that the principles to winning friends and influencing people were born. Using his key principles as a guide, we can bring about change within our organization.

How these principles enable a Reliability Culture will be covered in this and the next two posts. [Read more…]

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39 – Managing Performance in Asset Management with Scott Kelley

Managing Performance in Asset Management with Scott Kelley

In this episode of the weekly podcast, the guest Scott Kelley explains the 5th cell of the Hexcellence Model. All of the previous cells of this hexagon are connected to each other and are equally important when it comes to getting the superior asset management outcomes. But when it comes to achieving optimum results for the company some sort of performance measures must be done and each of the factors involved in determining the performance level must be taken care of. Not only that you need to understand these factors deeply, you need to relate them to your baselines for budget and time as well. In this way, you will be able to meet the expectations and standards that ultimately lead to focused improvements in the long run. Now, these measures will change the behavior of your organization. So, you have to be careful while using any metrics for measurement to get those numbers that will determine the behavior of your people. A good performance metric is always balanced to avoid any counter-productive outcomes. You can create as many metrics as you want but unless those are aligned with your strategic goals, they won’t be of any help at all. That’s why all the metrics that you use should be fit for purpose—meaning that look at the overall picture and make the indicators in a comparative fashion if you want those to make sense.
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5 Days to a Reliability Culture

What you can do to foster a reliability culture at your operation

Reliability culture is like clockwork — © William Warby

Improving reliability is easier said than done.

Often times you can develop great PM routines, improve equipment and have the right processes in place, but reliability doesn’t improve. Why is that?

It all comes down to people. People are the heart of reliability, whether they run the equipment or maintain it.

Changing people’s perception of reliability can be a very difficult task. So where do we start?

When trying to implement such change, you will often hear of change management and change framework.

This is a great exercise and contributes greatly to success. But what if you are a Maintenance Supervisor who needs a tangible action that you can run with? [Read more…]

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38 – Utilizing Policy and Procedures with Scott Kelley

Utilizing Policy and Procedures with Scott Kelley

In this episode, the guest Scott Kelley explains another cell in the hexagon of Plant Hexcellence model and that is, Policies and Procedures. This cell is pretty much based on standards and the directions to follow these standards but before you get into the details, it is extremely important that you understand the basic terminology. A policy is comprised of the written guidelines that are officially part of any organization where the employees are bound to respect and follow these documented and published, set of rules. The procedure is a technique or method that you use to support and repeatedly implement these guidelines in that particular organization. Then these terms are tied back to the processes as they include the step by step graphical interpretation of the methods that you are going to adapt—answering what’s and how’s to achieve the guidelines. Another term that is often confused with the policy is the practice that is different—unless organization wants to make it officially part of the policy—as it’s not documented like policies. Now as all of these terms as dependent on each other because written guidelines are always easy to keep in mind and follow one way or another. The procedures are documented to make them easier to follow or at least the standard and basic procedures are to be strictly adapted in every good organization.
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Do You Make This Critical Mistake? Find Out If You Are Contributing to Reactivity

What is the one thing that all operations have? If you guessed a breakdown hero or fire fighter, you are correct.

You know the person who swoops in like Superman and repairs a machine quickly. These breakdown heroes are the people who reduce the time to repair, but do they contribute to or reduce the reactivity of the site? [Read more…]

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37 – The Benefits of Processes with Scott Kelley

The Benefits of Processes with Scott Kelley

In this episode of the rooted in reliability podcast, Scott Kelley talks about the benefits of the processes. A process is a visual representation of work depicted in flow diagrams that demonstrate the path you have chosen along with alternative paths to accomplish your goals, also including the decision making.
A process gives you the insight into the most efficient methods of doing your work and then document them for future use. These processes are directly tied to policies and procedures of an organization. You can also use CMMS for gathering information and then implement these methods accordingly in a better way as you will know exactly what kind of system you need depending upon your requirements.There are following things that you need to know while building a process map; who does the work? Who authorizes the work? Who hands-off the work and who they hand out to? Who verifies the work? Who approves the changes? This part continues until all the stakeholders such as suppliers, owners, customers, community, employees, and regulators are involved.
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Focus on the Foundation: It Will Sustain You

As Engineers, Craft and Maintenance people, we have a tendency to be excited by the technological advancements that become available.

This is not a bad thing provided we do not let them become the flavor of the month or take our attention away from what we are here to do. Enable Reliability and Maintenance.

Often we find much information on the advanced technical topics such as Reliability Engineering, Life Cycle Costing, or various CBM technologies. When properly deployed, these techniques allow us to further our success in Reliability and Maintenance.

But what about the foundations that make these interesting techniques successful? [Read more…]

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36 – What a Plant Consists of with Scott Kelley

What a Plant Consists of with Scott Kelley

In today’s episode, the guest Scott Kelley tells the audience about the importance of a plant in the asset management model. The plant cell is not just limited to the physical assets of the organization but it also includes the methods, risk evaluation, and mitigation strategies which you need to take care of to keep your plant performing at its best. The physical assets, facilities, and the equipment that you are using play a critical role when you need your plant to be working successfully. To accomplish this, you will need an asset management plan which should answer the following questions; what to maintain? How to maintain? When to maintain? Why maintain? Who will maintain? How and where to document the information? What is the cost involved? What are the consequences of non-maintenance? Now there are some facets that need to be kept in mind while planning for the asset management especially your plant.
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See How Easily You Can Succeed in Reliability: 7 Critical Steps in Making Reliability a Way of Life

Why is it that Reliability Programs often fail and are not sustained? Bringing about such a change in a large organization is often one of the most difficult tasks that we undertake.

This undertaking requires a shift in mindset and in the ways people work. People love the status quo and are often afraid of the change. We must show them that there is nothing to be afraid of and that the change will be beneficial.

[Read more…]

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35 – Importance of People in an Asset Management Model with Scott Kelley

Importance of People in an Asset Management Model with Scott Kelley

In this episode, the guest Scott Kelley explains the role of the people component in the asset management model. Asset management is the most effective way of making the best use of investment and improve the production level of any organization. There are total six components in the model; people, plant, processes, policies and procedures, performance, and proactive maintenance. The people factor is of top priority among all of these factors. Why is the people component most important? Well, considering even if you have excelled in every other cell, you are going to need people to manage all of these and above all well trained and skillful people to make this work. Now, this cell in the model contains things such as organizational development, organizational structure, continuous improvement, change management, and operational excellence.
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SOR 175 The Difference Between Maintenance and Asset Management

The Difference Between Maintenance and Asset Management

Abstract

James and Fred discussing the connections and differences between these two terms.
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How to Measure Success: The 7 Key Performance Indicators You Must Measure

Being able to see what world class Reliability & Maintenance looks like is one thing. Communicating that success and level of performance to non-maintenance people can be difficult. Not to mention, that we always need to improve, and how can we if we only use qualitative measures?

I remember one time, trying to explain how Maintenance Planning & Scheduling has improved our maintenance department. I used explanations like; “The team isn’t wandering around looking for parts” and “They don’t need to leave the job to get the manuals anymore”. I was met with blank stares and was asked “How much were we saving on labour” and “How much were we able to reduce planned downtime”. [Read more…]