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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113 – Asset Management with David Albrice

Asset Management with David Albrice

When there is unplanned downtime and repeating failures in the plant, that means you are not managing your assets in the right way. Asset management can be used to enhance the value of a piece of equipment. So what is asset management? It is simply a process to make sure you get the value that you want from your machines. The idea is not just to get value in terms of money. It is about making sure that your equipment is in the optimum conditions and is running when you really need it to. This is something you can’t do without asset management.
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112 – Root Cause Analysis with Shon Isenhour

Root Cause Analysis with Shon Isenhour

When you deal with machines on daily basis, machine failures are bound to happen. But what if these failures keep occurring? Wouldn’t you get tired and want a solution for these problems? This is why root cause analysis is so important in an organization. The basic idea of RCA is to know the reason behind the occurrence of a failure and then finding a solution to reduce a risk—certain or uncertain—in a cost-effective manner. You can’t just rely on a single approach all the time because it might not be applicable to your problem.
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111 – Ultrasound Condition Monitoring with Adrian Messer

Ultrasound Condition Monitoring with Adrian Messer

There are certain things in the reliability and maintenance industry that are made easier with the help of technology. Condition monitoring is one of those processes that is effective due to the use of ultrasound technology. Usually, the ultrasound is used to clean different machine parts using high frequency powered waves. The type that is used in the maintenance industry makes it far more efficient when it comes to listening to the sound of the machines. They are constantly monitoring a machine to listen for any weird sounds that are the indication of a future failure.
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110 – Laws of Leadership with Bill Leahy

Laws of Leadership with Bill Leahy

Leadership is a very strong concept. It is unique to everyone. So how do you understand leadership? Well, different people have a different understanding of the word ‘leadership’. This is because we have our own unique perspectives. Every person has his own skills and is working in different fields of everyday life. These people can be leaders in their own way. It doesn’t matter if you are working in the office or just leading a teenage life. Once you realize that you are a leader, then you start showing abilities of one. But there are some laws that you can use to govern better leadership.
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109 – Top 10 Machinery Installation Issues with John Lambert

Top 10 Machinery Installation Issues with John Lambert

When you are installing a new machinery in a facility of the organization, there are certain issues. These issues are listed from top to the bottom categorized on the basis of seriousness. The top of the list is shaft alignment. It is the most common issue while installing the machinery. It occurs due to lack training or of precision instruments, as well as measurement misconceptions. Most organizations think they have achieved alignment just because an instrument showed so. They don’t take the stress and heating mechanisms into account which causes misalignment between the collinear wings of the shaft.
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108 – Maintenance Engineer vs Reliability Engineer with Shon Isenhour

Maintenance Engineer vs Reliability Engineer with Shon Isenhour

In the maintenance and reliability industry, we have maintenance engineers, manufacturing engineers, and reliability engineers. There is a little bit difference between the types. A maintenance engineer is there to make sure the equipment is in running condition as soon as possible once a failure occurs. He has to get the asset operational the quickest possible time. He performs day to day routine checks to make sure the asset is running without defects. He does precision maintenance and promotes industry best practices. He is responsible for checking alignment, balancing, and other technical effects that might be overlooked by others.
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107 – Maintenance Metrics with Brandon Weil

Maintenance Metrics with Brandon Weil

Whenever we talk about successful business practices, planning and scheduling remains a key element. Not only it helps you track performance but it also helps you build on the initial layout later on. Through performance management, you will know what’s going on inside an activity and process. Now, performance management is the combination of systems that are responsible for achieving the goals of the organization. These may include accountability, assessment, and measurement techniques that are used in the organization. On the lower level, metrics are being used to measure performance.
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106 – How to Learn from Failures with Fred Schenkelberg

How to Learn from Failures with Fred Schenkelberg

No matter how good you are at your job, there are always failures in the systems because of some reason. You can’t stop all of them but you can learn from them. There is always something to learn when a failure occurs. Whether it is finding the root cause or devising a solution to prevent it in the future. What happens in the industry that we forget what failures occurred in the last few years?—over the time. This is something that is alarming. It is your job to remember or communicate with those who might. That is how you can better assess the nature and root cause of the failure.
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105 – The Importance of a Reliability Engineer with Fred Schenkelberg

The Importance of a Reliability Engineer with Fred Schenkelberg

The main goal of every organization is to get the quality product in the market. That’s why they spend millions of dollars to stay on the plan they had in place. They can’t do that if their equipment keeps failing. The only way to make it sure is to maintain it properly. And that is a job for reliability engineers. They are the ones who maintain the assets of the company. They find the cause of the failures and stop it by making the system design better. They play a role similar to the process engineer but their job has a wider scope.
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104 – What’s a Process Engineer with Fred Schenkelberg

What’s a Process Engineer with Fred Schenkelberg

The organizations that are more innovative and have a mark in the industry tend to do things that others don’t. So, what are those things and how do they do that? This is an area where process engineers play their role to increase the production and solve problems that come along the way. Sometimes they have to experiment using different chemicals, use the calculations, and use the recorded data to come up with processes that can increase the yield of a product without compromising the quality. Their job is to come up with the best ways to quantify product.
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103 – Leadership with Bill Leahy

Leadership with Bill Leahy

If there are a couple of things that pops to mind when talking about leadership is that leaders are made not born and that all leaders shared the same set of qualities that make them as such (think about John C. Maxwell’s book “The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader”). These two statements seem to complement each other and reflect the general tone of today’s podcast episode.
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102 – Reliability with a Best Practice Organization with Heinz Bloch, Part 2 of 2

Reliability with a Best Practice Organization with Heinz Bloch, Part 2 of 2

Striving to be best in class is perhaps the ultimate goal of every organization. But what exactly does it take to get there? In the first part of this podcast, we talked about the changes seen in maintenance, reliability, and failure analysis over the years and what makes these practices successful in best in class organizations.
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101 – Reliability with a Best Practice Organization with Heinz Bloch, Part 1 of 2

Reliability with a Best Practice Organization with Heinz Bloch, Part 1 of 2

The leap towards becoming a best-in-class company is challenging. If you’re like most people, you might have wondered the difference between best in class companies and typical companies as far as reliability practices are concerned. While it’s true that there are other elements that are at play that make for a best-in-class company, one can’t deny that maintenance and reliability is one differentiating factor and a critical element at that.
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100 – People and Recruitment with Scott MacKenzie

People and Recruitment with Scott MacKenzie

In today’s labor market, recruiting and retaining skilled workers is still a challenge in the industrial sect. In the case of Scott MacKenzie who is the President of LEAF Services, a company that provides cost-effective industrial labor solutions, clients come to him to look for manpower who are safe, focused, and with industrial background. The problem? Clients’ demand for labor is urgent, and some may even request “I need people tomorrow”.
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99 – Reliability with Ron Moore

Reliability with Ron Moore

True enough, a reliable plant is a safe, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly plant. In compliance with safety laws and with workplace accidents becoming increasingly common, workplace safety is apparently one of the biggest challenge employers are facing today.
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