The Maintenance & Reliability Journey with Paul Crocker
In this episode, the guest Paul Crocker tells his inspiring Maintenance and Reliability Engineering journey. He is an Uptime award holder in the innovative use of photography for maintenance in the Kansas City. He has been taking pictures of every equipment in the workshops, in the field, and everywhere he can. These pictures have worked like a living notebook for him—just a much better to look at, kind of. He suggests it to his coworkers and trains people to do the same as pictures of issues that an engineer faces in routine, failure data and equipment information can be pretty useful sometimes.
When he took his first big job at Nearman Water Treatment Plant as a supervisor, he was very overwhelmed by the post but did a great job by working really hard with a lot of struggling making his way to a never ending challenge. He used to work in a spear arts storeroom where he organized the parts, documented them along with the related information, and uploaded them in Maximo. That was his first experience at any structured organizational change by helping the supervisor put things right. The change is very difficult stairway sometimes but you have to start slow and steady—get a momentum going step by step. You can make the machines do whatever you want, modify the programming, and add things that you need. But the hardest part is to make the people see that this change will benefit them—if not for short term then definitely in the long run.
When he took his first big job at Nearman Water Treatment Plant as a supervisor, he was very overwhelmed by the post but did a great job by working really hard with a lot of struggling making his way to a never ending challenge. He used to work in a spear arts storeroom where he organized the parts, documented them along with the related information, and uploaded them in Maximo. That was his first experience at any structured organizational change by helping the supervisor put things right. The change is very difficult stairway sometimes but you have to start slow and steady—get a momentum going step by step. You can make the machines do whatever you want, modify the programming, and add things that you need. But the hardest part is to make the people see that this change will benefit them—if not for short term then definitely in the long run.
Most of the people take CMMS just as an asset management tool but in actual, it’s much more than that as it is a management tool to help you document everything and make better decisions based on that information that you get from your systems. Then, the stakeholders are the ones whose support will always be valued on the top of every effort that you make to help the people understand the process of change that will be in their individual and organizational interest. So take the CMMS just as a baseline for best practices, work out your processes, write them down and improve them with the help of available system by streamlining it. The people who are struggling with their jobs in the field, they need to be patient and take their time as it’s a long journey. You need to build everything step by step, make improvements, promote the change, and engage as many people as you can by creating awareness among the leaders—since awareness makes them understand things in a right, solid way.
You can always take the pictures of something that you are having trouble with, send the email, contact the professionals in the field and get the help without any hesitation. You are the one who has to reach out and take all the knowledge from the people in the communities of reliability engineers with tons of experience who can give you some great insight about what you are looking.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio, LLC
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance – Free eBook
- Maintenance Planning & Scheduling: Planning for Profitability Video Course
Paul Crocker Links:
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