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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67 – Women In Reliability and Asset Management (WiRAM) with Maura Abad

67 – Women In Reliability and Asset Management (WiRAM) with Maura Abad

Women In Reliability and Asset Management (WiRAM) with Maura Abad

The presence of women in different industries is a growing fact that cannot be denied. They are now involved in fields—from management to engineering—that were considered solely to be men’s and they are doing these jobs incredibly and competently. There are a very few platforms that emphasize on empowering the women and providing them with content that they need to get better at their jobs and be a valuable asset to the organizations they work for. Still, there is a large number of women who are making transitions to more technical jobs and WiRAM is one of those platforms where women can get the educational content and training they need to handle the asset management work and get ahead in the reliability and maintenance industry.
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65 – CMMS Implementation Pitfalls with Scott Rojas

CMMS Implementation Pitfalls with Scott Rojas

CMMS is the best way to ensure better performance of your assets and organizations tend to buy systems like that because they want to automate their job processes to monitor and control the performances closely. Putting together a team of experts is a good way to do your need analysis. The selection and implementation process depends on the experience of that team because there are a lot of CMMS available in the industry. Your team is going to help you select, design, and configure those systems depending on your requirements and purposes. The needs in some cases could be that you want to integrate the CMMS with other systems they have in place. The Mobility Solutions are what most of the organizations want now.
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64 – What is TPM with Greg Folts

64 – What is TPM with Greg Folts

What is TPM with Greg Folts

TPM or Total Productive Maintenance is a partnership between all those people who are responsible for the equipment that includes maintenance, operations, and engineering departments, usually to take better care of the equipment. The goal here is to select the best assets and maintain them properly in order to get optimal performance. There are five pillars of TPM and these are:
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63 – The Importance of Storeroom and Spare Parts with John Ross

63 – The Importance of Storeroom and Spare Parts with John Ross

The Importance of Storeroom and Spare Parts with John Ross

Storing the right parts in your storeroom at the right time and in the right quantity is always effective. Storerooms are very important to a company’s survival in the long run so they should be managed at the core competency level of our businesses. The fact is that there is no way your maintenance and reliability operation is going to be successful without an effective spare parts management strategy and well-maintained storeroom. Not every organization is has a good storeroom and there can be a different number of reasons for that. They may be good at other things and they don’t pay attention to spare parts because they have a limited budget or just don’t value it that much.
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62 – Workforce Survey with Tom Wilk

62 – Workforce Survey with Tom Wilk

Workforce Survey with Tom Wilk

This episode is based upon the workforce survey conducted by plantservices.com back in 2015 and now again in 2017. These surveys were done to know more about the workforce concerning issues that the professionals face during a change in technology, media, and external environment. These surveys are actually to help industry leaders and managers to get a better insight about their concerns regarding recruitment, training, and finding career opportunities. In this survey the respondents were divided into groups but most of the respondents lay in two major categories—Boomers were 49.8% and Generation X at 39.3%– based on the generational distinction.
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61 – Understanding Asset Criticality with Susan Lubell

61 – Understanding Asset Criticality with Susan Lubell

Understanding Asset Criticality with Susan Lubell

Now as a maintenance and reliability engineer, you need to come up with some tools to help you do this asset criticality activity. The heat maps are a good way as they include the asset hierarchy of the organization along with the budget details and other related information. You rank every system in the map by creating matrices that have different illustrations—usually red dots for critical ones and so on—to allow you to focus on specific factors and the determine the consequences if those assets fail. In order to do this, stakeholders, plant maintenance staff and concerned officials need to interact as it leads to right answers by asking the right questions and addressing the right issues in a right way. This is done by cascading everything from the corporate level to the site level.
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60 – What is High Impact Learning with Dan Anderson

60 – What is High Impact Learning with Dan Anderson

What is High Impact Learning with Dan Anderson

This episode is dedicated to the High Impact Learning that is not limited to just the information you are provided within the classrooms. It meant you have to truly learn about something by actually applying what you have acquired in a learning program so that you can deliver the desired results for your organization. The main focus here is to practically implement the course material for better understanding purposes. This can be done by promoting the activity-based learning in the organizations. Then it becomes a true process where you are doing performance-based work rather than just gaining bookish knowledge.
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59 – What is a Failure Mechanism with Fred Schenkelberg

59 – What is a Failure Mechanism with Fred Schenkelberg

What is a Failure Mechanism with Fred Schenkelberg

This episode is centered upon the failure mechanism that reliability engineers have to deal with in everyday work. Before we understand what a failure mechanism is, it is very important to know what is called a failure. A failure is a technically relative term that is used when the results are below the expectations. Now different people have different definitions of failure based on their own performance scales. The failure depends on the criteria of performance that you have set for a particular machine and when the machine falls short of generating that specific output, you call it a failure.
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58 – Understanding Thermal Growth with John Lambert

58 – Understanding Thermal Growth with John Lambert

Understanding Thermal Growth with John Lambert

In this episode, the thermal growth and the understanding of the phenomenon—how it occurs and how to prevent and calculate it—is being discussed by John Lambert. So, first of all, we have to know what actually the thermal growth is. The answer is simple. This phenomenon occurs when the rotating machines get hot due to the difference in temperature and they start to expand in every direction. As these machines are mostly metal so their thermal growth is explained by the coefficient of linear thermal expansion that is already known for many different materials.
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57 – Change Management and Your Maintenance Program with Shon Isenhour

57 – Change Management and Your Maintenance Program with Shon Isenhour

Change Management and Your Maintenance Program with Shon Isenhour

This episode focuses on the change management and the impact that it can have on your maintenance program. So, what is change management? It occurs at different levels in the organizations but the most basic level—the people level—that makes the organizational culture needs to be tended first. It happens a lot that after the successful planning and scheduling, work execution seems to be fine in the short term but fails horribly in the long term because the change process was not addressed and handled properly at all the critical levels in the organizational framework. So, what things need to be addressed first?
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56 – Are you a Victim of Reliability Drive By with Scott Kelley

56 – Are you a Victim of Reliability Drive By with Scott Kelley

Are you a Victim of Reliability Drive By with Scott Kelley

This episode of the weekly podcast is about reliability drive by that is very common in the organizations that have multiple sites. So how often does this happen and why? What exactly is a reliability drive by? Those organizations that have multiple sites with assets or plants there with teams working there often send their reliability engineers to check the site get any information that they can get in a specified—usually very short time—and then move on to the next sites for doing the same things they did on the previous sites. This is called reliability drive by.
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55 – Reliability from a CMMS Perspective with John Reeve

55 – Reliability from a CMMS Perspective with John Reeve

Reliability from a CMMS Perspective with John Reeve

This episode is about the book, Reliability from a CMMS Perspective by John Reeve that will be coming out this fall. Often times, companies just implement a CMMS into their reliability programs and the software doesn’t live up their expectations. So, what exactly goes wrong with such kind of projects? How do they get it right? The simple answer may be is that they expect too much and too fast. The results from any SAAS oriented system take time and they require patience. Then there needs to be some sort of consultation between the reliability engineers and the management of the company if they are ever going to implement a CMMS correctly.
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54 – What Makes a Good Consultant with Fred Schenkelberg

54 – What Makes a Good Consultant with Fred Schenkelberg

What Makes a Good Consultant with Fred Schenkelberg

In this episode, the guest Fred Schenkelberg explains what is a good consultant? Whenever comes the question of performance in an organization—performance of assets—there is always a consultant involved who is helping you make your organization better at what you do. So what is a consultant? The consultants are mainly categorized into three major types. There are contractors who help you set things in motion or strategists who make strategic decisions for you. Then there are facilitators or internal ones who you hire for specific projects so that they can assist you just like an extra set of hands. The last ones are trusted advisors who help you every step of the way and if they are truly capable—which they usually are—with experience and expertise, they can really make a difference with the knowledge and insights that they have.
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53 – The Importance of Leadership in Maintenance with Richard Rierson

53 – The Importance of Leadership in Maintenance with Richard Rierson

The Importance of Leadership in Maintenance with Richard Rierson

This episode is about the leadership that is the very backbone of the successful organizations that perform exceptionally every year and get better and better with time under the experience of the leadership they have. But was it the same from the beginning? No, it wasn’t. Not every leadership is perfect right from the start. There are a lot of phases through which they get and they fail sometimes too but what they don’t do is look weak in front of the people whose entire lives depend on them. The successful leaders get wiser by the time by learning from their mistakes. But is there some sort of special criteria for being a leader? Technically yes but in general terms, every other person can be a leader if he believes so. He just needs to understand what the true meaning of leadership is.
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52 – Education and Training in Maintenance & Reliability with Shon Isenhour

52 – Education and Training in Maintenance & Reliability with Shon Isenhour

Education and Training in Maintenance & Reliability with Shon Isenhour

This episode of the weekly podcast focuses on the education and training in maintenance and reliability. It is very important to practically implement the knowledge because that’s where you begin to develop skills and then you can improve those skills by continuously being a part of the applications in the field. The organizations like SMRP and eruditiollc.com help new people in the field of reliability by educating them first and then driving them to apply what they have learned. They help you whenever you need but they encourage the practice of self-driven learning because that is what helps you in the long run.
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