All of the sudden there is a maintenance crisis looming for US Industry. A lot of folks starting to blow their horns about this now, where have they been? Certainly not in the trecnh's, maintenance crisis is a U.S. Tradition. What are their motives? Time for a changing of the guard in the "U.S. Maintenance Trade".

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MAINTENANCE_CRISIS_2007_JL_ARTICLE_R1.doc (44 Kb, 86 downloads) Article MSWord .doc

I don't think that maintenance costs are the biggest problem in American Industry.
The biggest problem is the inflated salaries of the upper echelon of the companies. It is totally rediculous what top management thinks they should be compensated for especially in publicly traded companies. They get their buddies on the Board of Directors and then get these astronomical salaries just to jet around and try to woo the most disloyal people in the world, which are the stockholders. They will step all over the most loyal people, (the employess) to pad their pockets.

Oh Yes, you are probably right about this. Approach to management in U.S. Industry is most likely a much higher cost reduction opportunity for collective U.S. Industry. I do not dispute this fact at all. In my company there is no "Manager" Title for any employee. We prefer to refer to such administrators as "Strategist". U.S. industry is a proportional reflection of U.S. Culture. The Beast that has a hold on U.S. Industry is a Multi-headed Beast, just as John's, and, just as the Beast that has hold on our culture. The maintenance "Beast-Head" of Industry can be cornered, it is more of a possibility than any other, especially the "Mangement Beast-Head". If one head of the Beast is cornered, is not then the Whole Beast held at bay? At least long enough to tackle the bigger issue you speak of. Anyway, to tame a Beast must one not first corner the Beast?

We live in a time when the battle of good and evil may be forever decided. The U.S. is the last stand for good. What happens now that we have outsourced our manufacturing to other lands when we are blockaded by the rest of the world and cannot build the war machine necessary to win the battle? Remember World War Two? Rosey the Riviter, a Liberty Ship turned out each day! mobilization of industry is a historically dominent factor in the outcome of world conflict on the level of today.

I am a maintenance professional, this is the area I can have some impact upon. And this is my reasoning, and, is what I intend to do.

Nice reply, I appreciate the content very much and have long felt the same as you concerning "those people".

What are the differences between a manager versus a strategist? I have came across the differences between a manager and a leader before. Is a strategist the same as the leader?

If it's true that the pays for top management is unncessarily balloned up, then the cause (or threat) is inside rather than outside.

A Strategist is a leader. A strategist must know how to play the game. As a Leader The Strategist must work his way up through the ranks, he/she should be the best hands-on person of the Team, the mentor of the rest of the team. They should also be the member reporting to Staff, as would a manager be. To better get a grasp on this, the idea of my maintenance organizational hierarchial chart would be as a Industry standard:

Maintenance Strategist
|
|
Maintenance Engineer--|
|
|---------------|----|
Planner Coordinator
|
|-------------|-----|
Shift Techs Special Ops Techs

Also, by re-titling this position we can re-evaluate, Rate of Pay, Re-define Role, &, work on the problem (by example) expressed in the previous reply to this posting. (over payed executives.) In my company no one person is worth more than $120K/year, NOBODY, other opportunity for monetary compensation comes through the commission on sales, in which everyone in my company is a salesman.

These postings I am making are very little to explain The "WE NEVER SLEEP THEORY OF MAINTENANCE & RELIABILITY" I have over 300 pages of arguments for the book so far Titled "We Never Sleep Theory Maintenance & Reliability - Nature of the Beast". Look for it to be published within the next two years.

Josh the threat is all around! Maintenance is on the inside, in fact maintenance has the most leverage over executives. This is change coming from the inside. It is the start of change. read the article, the "old Guard" of maintenance are of the same mold as such executives with the balooning salaries. Both of which need to change.

We will sleep and have quality time if the maintenance and reliability is proper. Whi did you choose the book title of WE NEVER SLEEP etc because it sounds negative to maintenance and reliability. So can you change it to "WE SHOULD SLEEP etc" instead, to be more positive?

Maintenance & Reliability is alwatys in tactical mode. The name we never sleep comes from being the guy who gets called in the middle of the night for problems beyond the competency of the average maintenance shift technician.

Maintenance and reliability is a real problem in industry, that is the point! The traditional approach is illogical. That's is why guys like me didnt sleep for 20 years and one of the reasons that U.S. Industry cannot compete on a global scale. You need to read some of the articles and reports on the trade, I would suggest plantservices.com, the Aberdeen Group Maintenance Benchmark Report (2006), The Collaborative Asset Management Report By Aberdeen Group. I have a whole feasibility study for my company I would send you. Well over $1 Trillion annualy is spent on maintaining U.S. Industry operations, research indicates that 1/3 - 1/2 of these costs are in direct result of "MAINTENANCE FAILURE". This is do to the current state of the Trade, which is the only logical result in U.S. Industry's Traditional approach to maintenance solutions.
"The Nature of the Beast".

The industry is approximately $1.2 Trillion direct cost, of this approximately $500-$750 Billion is the direct result of poor maintenance practices. The effect of poor maintenance practices in the USA in 2005 was 20% of the national GDP, or $2.5 Trillion, in lost potential business.

See the attached report for more detail.

Howard

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SBD_Trillion_Dollar_Report.pdf (274 Kb, 21 downloads)

This put the 2005 R&M-based business losses, for the USA alone, equivalent to the full GDP of the third and fourth largest economies in the world. See the attached slide.

Howard

Impact_of_R_M_Introduction_101.pdf (94 Kb, 21 downloads)

There is a workforce transition. The baby-boomers are by-and-large leaving the industry. There will be a gap of a few years, then starting in about 2016, the baby-boom echo generation will be entering the workforce. While the baby-boomers were 78 Million strong, the echo generation (the children of the baby-boomers who waited to have children, of whom a majority are going to college, so they will enter the workforce at the age of 22-24 vs 16-20 for the baby boomers and 10-15 for the turn of the 20th century) is over 100 Million strong.

We have entered the gap between the two generations.

I believe the the 'maintenance strategist' is similar to the 'Knowledge Worker' that Terry O'Hanlon and I coined in the 'Skilled Workforce in the 21st Century' study. I am attaching a paper on it with this post and the complete study in the next post - although I believe I have posted it in the forums a few times recently.

Howard

The_Reliability_and_Maintenance_Workforce_in_2016.pdf (38 Kb, 24 downloads)

And, lastly, here is the Skilled Workforce in the 21st Century report.

Hope this all helps you in your endeavors.

Howard

Skilled_Workforce_in_the_21st_Century.pdf (464 Kb, 37 downloads)

Great stuff MotorDoc, Yes the Strategist is basically the Knowledge Worker as you have theorized. And thank you very much for the updated statistics. I have been in the process of business start-up for a little better than two years now and it is amazing how little industry executives understand the crisis we are in, and, the true costs. Seeking funding in this endeavor is very difficult to say the least. This is due to the lack of understanding of maintenance & reliability by those in this country who fund start-up businesses, Gov't Agencies, Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists, and even major U.S. universities. Your info will add quite nicely to my feasibility study. I started in the trench's of this field and worked quickly into administration of maintenance operations, but, I never quit "working" in the trench's even then, this is how the true nature of every M&R Tradesmen should be. My endeavor involves the evolution of maintenance workers into "Super Size" outsourcing companies, this is the only way I can see that any standardizatiion will come to the trade, this will drive down the cost of "Maintenance Process Efficiency Technology, which is very necessary to achieve Best-In-Class operation, and, it will "Streamline Utilization Of Available Maintenance & Reliability Skill/Knowledge Resources".

Maintenance could be like the "field of dreams" - as in "pay them and they will come".

The crisis is more like companies not willing to pay what a talented maintenance and reliability professional should earn in today's market (or even more for tomorrow's market).

Talented people will go elsewhere to apply their professional skills or will find work in other focus areas that are more lucrative.

Management sometimes fail to understand or appreciate the value of investment into maintenance improvements - why would we expect them to understand that they need to increase pay to attract top performers in this competitive market.

Terry O

On the drive home tonight was thinking back to an obligatory 2-EET college drafting course circa 1978, and remembered learning that mechanical drafting in more-or-less the same sense as used today came about in the 1800's.
It became necessary so there was a standard way to depict designs in order they could be easily replicated.

I can't recall the tale exactly, and can't kick up the text in question. Regardless, I think we are at a similar cusp regarding industrial equipment documentation, and machine maintenance. Lest my tongue snap from it's roller for excessive buzzwordery, I'd posit we are in need of a similar paradigm shift, and for roughly the same reasons.

The thought I had during my return voyage seemed so clear, but all I've created is a dust of thinly connected themes in search for an endpoint. Following is what amounts to a bit of rambling discourse in it's general direction, but is one aspect of the maintenance challenges I suspect we'll face as time unfolds.

In modern equipment we not only need to concern ourselves with mechanical layout and assembly drawings, but also a wide variety of other types of documentation available in a dizzying array of digital file formats.

CAD has become well entrenched over the years, and larger companies use CAD systems integrated to one degree or another into BOM generation, and other aspects of machine building processes.

These are all well and good, but from a maintenance user's perspective this remains sadly lacking.

Such highly integrated CAD/CAM systems cost a lot of money per seat, and are often 'modularized' (BOM generation is an add-on, PLC tag name generation is another add-on, and so on). It is unusual for the end user's standard CAD program (if they have one at all) to be the same base program as even one of their OEMs use, let alone have the same suite of add-ons.

It is almost certainly a moot point, because even if one desired, and had the means to clone every OEMs CAD/CAM system in-house, chances are enough proprietary information exists in them that it would be a political impossibility.

We need something else.

"Even simple things aren't"
I have a melt pump control system originally built in the mid-1980's which used an analog Barber-Coleman suction pressure controller, was replaced by a Gefran (when the by-then obsolete B-C unit failed), then, when the Gefran failed, to a Eurotherm 942S (which by then had become our in-house standard), and is currently running an Eurotherm 2604 because the 942S has since become obsolete.

During each iteration many of the details changed, including how each instrument's terminal blocks mapped out to function, sometimes the wiring internals were sufficiently different (one may have a pair of isolated NO/NC contacts for low pressure detection, and the surrounding circuit used both, but the replacement instrument may have a NO/NC contact set with shared common, or only a single NO or NC contact - instrument differences necessitated changes in the 'glue' circuitry), and always - parameterization issues (a leap from trim pots on analog controllers for setpoint, and P and I terms to panel-entered numeric setpoints in the digital controllers).

This is a lot better in terms of setup replicability and documentation than twiddling trimmer pots, and observing subsequent control operation. Here again, however, always with different interpretations of how P, I, and D operate, and what values are appropriate, even within instrument lines built by the same manufacturer (i.e. - a 'P' term of "100" on a Eurotherm 942S is in the same ballpark as one of "4000" on a 2604).

Not to mention, no commonality in how the user interacts with the instrument's control panel (how to "unlock" them to gain setup level access, how to navigate through menu structures and change values, terminology, etc.).

I'm fairly sharp with this stuff, but the flood of information (and other times, the desert - sometimes I need to know things vendors want to be tight-lipped about) and complexity of modern equipment make knowing them well an almost impossible task.

Entry level techs can easily be overwhelmed, and often fall back to techniques of dubious value (swap-and-hope, and others of this ilk) which can make the situation go from bad to worse.

Computer technology has come a long way since reading the fabled January 1975 Popular Electronics Altair 8080 issue on a school bus ride home, and I can see where soon advances in 'electronic paper', HMI improvements and miniaturization (look at an Apple iPhone yet?), wireless Ethernet, and a host of other related technologies will be able to provide a troubleshooting technician with a fairly affordable instrument encompassing the functions of a DMM, DSO, lux meter,IR thermometer (add any number of other inexpensive and small sensors that can be useful once the infrastructure is in place), digital voice recorder and visible light camera, and other doo-whackers as might now be toted around as separate entities. Lets go old school sci-fi, and call this gadget a tricorder.

What I want in front of me as a troubleshooting technician (and which would be especially useful for those with less background) are pre-digested answers to my questions, or at least partially chewed ones.

What needs to happen in computer and information technology so I can walk up to a production machine, take a couple of measurements at designated points as shown on my tricorder's screen, and either get an answer, or be prompted to get other information to firm up the diagnosis?

Like I said ... this ended up very much a rambling, only peripherally addresses the main theme of this thread, and has yet to get close to the point originally aimed at.

Nevertheless, I believe the original premise has value, and we do need a fundamental information technology change to help us do our jobs.

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That sounds like a literary writeup!