Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast

A weekly Maintenance and Reliability podcast covering common industry challenges and what you can learn from them. Each episode dives deeper into critical issues and explains how you can begin correcting theses maintenance flaws today. Sharing new tips and techniques to help you achieve industry best practice and shining a light on widely debated maintenance topics with special guest experts.

Your host and founder of Rooted in Reliability James Kovacevic, will take you on a weekly tour of his 13+ years of shop floor experience, along with special guest that lend an expert look inside your maintenance departments problems and concerns.

Plane, train, or automobile, however you’re traveling to work Rooted In Reliability is compatible for listening on the go.

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146 – Distance Learning and Coaching with Bill Leahy

Distance Learning and Coaching with Bill Leahy

Distance learning is becoming more trendy in the industry and is preferred by a lot of students especially the ones doing their Masters. The biggest reason that the students choose distance learning over traditional learning is because of the flexibility of the process. Due to this supreme advantage, anyone can get into an online course. It is particularly very advantageous for people who have jobs or need to take care of their families. It is really good for the parents who have limited time and need flexible study hours which distance learning provides. The institutions are becoming more inclined towards it these days.

In this episode, we covered:

What is distance learning?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of distance learning?
How to excel in distance learning?
And much more!

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145 – How to Choose the Correct Seal Type with Chuck Tanner

How to Choose the Correct Seal Type with Chuck Tanner

Seals are very important to contain machine fluids and keep them from different sort of contamination. There are different types of seals in the market such as traditional packing, mechanical seals, air seals, and other seals that keep bearing hoses in check. Traditional packing is one of the cheapest sealing solutions out there in the market. The only difference between a mechanical seal and packing is that the mechanical seals work very well for the rotating piece of equipment. They give precision and accuracy where is needed as compared to the traditional packing where there are a lot more chances of errors while holding the fluids in.

In this episode, we covered:

What are seals?
What are the different types of seals?
What seal types are best for various applications?
Can you retrofit different types of seals?
And much more!

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144 – Understanding Asset Hierarchy with Shon Isenhour and Brandon Weil

Understanding Asset Hierarchy with Shon Isenhour and Brandon Weil

Asset hierarchy is very important to utilize the limited resources of an organization in the best way possible. It helps manage time and cost by prioritizing our assets. That’s why every organization needs to have a hierarchy. There are a lot of standards out there to help you build an asset hierarchy. ISO 14224 helps greatly in the matter. It contains guidelines that a maintenance and reliability organization can use to define some sort of organized processes and procedures that are important to have in the facilities. When they have laid out a foundation that way, it gets easier to do all sorts of things.

In this episode, we covered:

What is Asset Hierarchy?
Why is the asset hierarchy needed?
How should an asset hierarchy be organized?
How to develop an asset hierarchy?
And much more!

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143 – The Soft Skills Reliability Engineers Need with Fred Schenkelberg

The Soft Skills Reliability Engineers Need with Fred Schenkelberg

In every industry, people skills contribute a lot to the success of an employee. The thing is that engineers and especially reliability engineers are not taught soft skills like change management and communication strategies across different facilities in the maintenance and reliability oriented organizations. The reason that engineers don’t have enough soft skills because organizations don’t have enough time or resources to do this. Most of the times, an organization just doesn’t realize how important it is to be able to communicate the procedures in the right way to the people that are concerned with it.

In this episode, we covered:

What are the soft skills reliability engineers need?
Why are these soft skills required?
How can a reliability engineer develop these skills?
What skills are most important?
And much more!

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142 – Developing Failure Codes with Bill Leahy

Developing Failure Codes with Bill Leahy

Failures codes help the reliability engineers to make intelligent business decisions regarding the issues with the assets. It is a formula that helps you understand how an asset fails and how can you gather the needed data to mitigate a failure? A good failure code contains a hierarchy of the problem towards a suitable solution. The best practice to devise a failure code would be to break it into a sequence of Part, Problem, and Cause. In short, failure codes help you describe and understand the problem based on the failure data, and you can trend that data to prevent those failures in the future.

In this episode, we covered:

What are failure codes?
Why are failure codes needed?
How can organizations develop meaningful failure codes?
What role does ISO 14224 play in failure data?
And much more!

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SMRP18 – Online Monitoring with Maureen Gribble

Ultrasound is a great tool but using it to monitor your equipment needs resources and time. When you install sensors for data capturing, there are a lot of values that come up. That much amount of data can overwhelm your engineers. That’s why it is better to have an online monitoring solution that can do that job for you. One of such tools is ‘Forecast’ designed by UE systems. All you have to do is plug the device to the critical equipment, put the sensors at various vulnerable points, and you have a got a wired online monitoring system for you.
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SMRP18 – SMRP Conference Discussion w Fred Schenkelberg

This episode is about the learning and value that conferences hold. In SMRP 2018 conference, there were a lot of companies that participated along with their workers so that they learn something new. This yearly conference is a great opportunity for people who are struggling with different things in reliability and maintenance programs. There are presentations, workshops, and discussions all around from where you can learn to change reliability practices, improve, and sustain the process for a long term. There are a lot of new engineers or trainees who are looking for a field that would help them or catch their interest.
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141 – Continuously Identify Problems w/ Peter Horsburgh

Continuously Identify Problems w/ Peter Horsburgh

Extraordinary Reliability Engineers always have some habits that differentiate them from the rest. One of these habits is that they identify the problem and really make sure that they understand it before they continue working towards its solution. A successful reliability engineer doesn’t just rely on the failure data, he actually analysis the problem, understands it, takes feedback from different people, and then deploy resources to fix that problem. When you really know what’s going on with your assets, only then you can hope to come up with a good solution that will stop that problem to occur repeatedly.

In this episode, we covered:

What are the 5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer?
What is Habit #1?
Why Habit #1 is so important?
How to incorporate Habit #1 into your day to day activities?
And much more!

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SMRP18 – Power Monitoring with Alex Desselle

Condition-based monitoring is one of the best ways to proactively approach the solution to the problems. When you are looking at the equipment for expected failures, it is very important to check the power conditions. There are a lot of failures that can be captured ahead of time if you have the power quality checks in place. When we talk about Power monitoring, the maintenance managers have to look for voltage spikes, current flow, and thermal changes in the operating environment of the equipment. This can be done by using thermal sensors but there are specific solutions for doing it in efficient ways.
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SMRP18 – The Importance of Procedures with Adrian Messer

There are a lot of plant facilities that do everything right but the results are never what they expect. The reason that they can’t get a hold of the problem and solve it for good is that they don’t have the procedures in the place. So, they are doing the right things but not in the right way. That’s why there should be procedures in place before any kind of maintenance work is done. Procedures not only help and support the maintenance personnel does their jobs the best way but they also support them to improve what they are doing. ᐅ Play Episode

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140 – The Job Plan Library with Brandon Weil

The Job Plan Library with Brandon Weil

Technicians and engineers carry out their day to day tasks in a standard way. Sometimes, there are variations in the operating conditions but the standard procedures stay the same. They are doing PMs and different sorts of analysis. Some are really good at it because they have been doing it for a long time. The experience and knowledge of those people should be written down somewhere so that others can adopt those best practices to carry out their standard routine work the same way. This is something a Job Plan Library can help with. It is the standard plan work that is written down and implemented the same way every single time.

In this episode, we covered:

What is the Job Plan Library?
Why we need a Job Plan Library?
Where do we start when building a Job Plan Library?
How should a Job Plan Library be organized?
And much more!

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SMRP18 – Electrical Motor Maintenance with Howard Penrose

Motor maintenance is very important because the electric motors are vital parts of every machinery. There is a trend in the organizations that they don’t pay much attention to the motors. This is also because of the lack of communication between mechanical and electrical technicians. Sometimes, they are not trained and other times, their roles are responsibilities are not clearly defined. This creates great confusion in the mind of the cross-sectional departments and motors end up either not being maintained. Another reason behind motors not being properly looked after is that the technicians don’t have the training to do so.
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SMRP18 – What is Machine Learning with Philip Garcia

SMRP 18 – What is Machine Learning with Philip Garcia

Reliability is a very wide term and has numerous applications in different industries. With the new technologies, concepts, and reliability solutions based on iIOT, Cloud servers, and distributed computing, the reliability programs do everything on any kind of machines. Machine Learning plays a huge role in doing these wonderful things. Machine learning can be used to do enhanced condition-bases monitoring. There are a number of variables that we need to take care of if we want to prevent failures ahead of time and increase the uptime of the assets. This is a very generic application of Machine Learning.
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139 – Change Management with Scott Deckers

Change Management with Scott Deckers

The organizations are always going through one or the other change. Whether it’s the change in roles and responsibilities, the change in the technology or the change in the CMMS itself. Everything changes in the industry all the time and it is always at a higher rate than the organizations keep up with it. When we talk about the change, it always starts with the change in processes. When a business process changes, everything else changes with it. Whenever a change is to be implemented, the first question that pops up in everyone’s mind is ‘WHY’.

In this episode, we covered:

What is Change Management?
The various Change Management models available
What organizations need to do to prepare for change
The never ending journey of change

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138 – 4 Tips to Elevate your Coaching with Lisa Brownlee

4 Tips to Elevate your Coaching with Lisa Brownlee

Coaching is one of the key activities that help individual employees bring out the best of themselves to the table. It helps in maximizing their performance by making the best use of their abilities. A good coach helps the trainees to focus on the work they are doing. He facilitates them in every way he can so that they would improve their work by themselves. It can be a hard job sometimes because it’s a two-way street. The coaching will only be effective if the employee and coach are both receptive to the learning. They need to be willing to make improvements.

In this episode, we covered:

How to coach your people
How to motivate and put your people to their highest performance
What is the proper coaching
How to be an effective coach
What is LACE and what this affects your coaching technique
And much more!

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