Hi all, I wanted to start a discussion on this as I have noticed a general trend emerging on the board in the questions asked.
This board is a very good source of expert information on a wide variety of technical subjects - not just preventive maintenance affiliated but also plant maintenance in general.
Are we starting to see more of the general maintenance questions being asked on the board and is this due in part to the dwindling number of plant experts now on manufacturing sites.
I wonder if this shortage is prompting people who would have otherwise confered with on site wisdom (which has now either retired or been made redundant) to turn to online forums or any other neutral and reliable resource to get their questions answered?

Is this a good thing, a bad thing?
Is this becoming more apparent to you guys?

Mike.

I guess people want to share their knowledge and experience.

Mike

It is very likely part of the transition of the workforce. The baby-boomers, who made up a majority of the present workforce, are transitioning out. There is a gap and then the baby-boom echo generation (larger) will begin to transition in about mid-way through the next decade.

It's not just the loss of expertise, it is the shrinking workforce at plants as companies try to reduce the head-count in a 1980's management philosophy. The remaining personnel do not have the luxury of time to consider, individually, or as a group, when they run into a problem. Couple that with the philosophy of 'quick' training times and the unwillingness to mentor as well as the resistance to plan ahead with additional apprenticeships, and you have yourself quite a situation.

There have been a lot of thoughts that came out of a series of workforce studies that were released early last year. We worked with ReliabilityWeb to develop a study of our own. It studies the studies then presents the results of a 'MaintenanceBenchmarking.com' survey from 2005.

I am attaching the full study and would look forward to discussing the results and conclusions.

Sincerely,
Howard

Skilled_Workforce_in_the_21st_Century.pdf (464 Kb, 41 downloads)

Our industry has a large demand for skilled workers. We actively try to help with this. This is a good time for people interested in working.

The Texas City-based Center for the Advancement of Process Technology (CAPT) is a national effort between education and industry that furthers the cause of process technology.

CAPT now has nine regional alliances in 18 states in the continental US and Alaska. These alliances, which involve 47 community and technical colleges, support BP facilities around the country.

CAPT includes such key alliances as the Alaska Process Industries Careers Consortium (APICC), which supports North Slope E&P assets, and the newest alliance: the Great Lakes Process Technology Alliance (GLPTA). GLPTA, added in 2005, serves Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Ontario, and provides personnel for some of our refineries. Another alliance is forming in the Southeastern US.

The process technology training initiative began in 1993. BP and seven chemical companies in Texas City helped start this. The first step was the creation of the PTEC program at College of the Mainland in Texas City. Then, after word spread about the innovative training effort, CAPT’s first alliance, the Gulf Coast Process Technology Alliance (GCPTA), premiered in 1995. To this aim the design curriculum training these people was closely aligned with the skills needed in these jobs.

A big boost to momentum then came when the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, and the US Department of Labor contributed grants to help pay for creating instructor manuals, student textbooks, and other support materials.

Clear-cut benefits include the performance of PTEC graduates being higher than the industry average, and PTEC-trained employees have a 37% better safety performance based on data from their first two years of employment.

Do we need more polytechnics than universities?

While the government will be involved in this desision most everywhere, I think the will of the people (market - not bureaucrats or politicians in the government) should be the main factor determining this.

What society needs is very complicated. Who defines the need? You or me?

Government involvement... Now, there is a recipe for success.

I think industry will adapt. We as societies are very good at adapting to whatever we find befalling us.
Adaption may take the form of new technology (eg.self diagnosing machinery), it may be industry becoming third world based and trained (there is great drive and thirst for knowledge in technical fields over there, it may be that most kids these days will aim to get a college/university degree education. You can't prevent society from developing and lets face it - most parents want to see their kids with higher forms of education (let me rephrase) - don't see the technical trades (as a ) higher form of education.

Of course then you have the Y generation traits (not to generalize to much in case a Yer is reading this - but I doubt it) - use to living for today - consumerism - wrapped up in self etc.

Society is evolving - so where will we be in another 20 years?

Just my 2 euros worth.

Mike.

Gentlemen.

To add my tupennyworth to this most important subject.

Many a time a person finds it hard to confront the reality that he may not know the best practice relating a particular topic. Where we work, because of the positions we hold, we find it hard to go to the lower ranks and seek for a solution amongst the subordinates, maybe for fear of losing face and prestige.

Consequently, these online forums provide many with an opportunity of seeking the information we may need, without loss of presitige.

Mike,
You said,

quote:

I wonder if this shortage is prompting people who would have otherwise confered with on site wisdom (which has now either retired or been made redundant) to turn to online forums or any other neutral and reliable resource to get their questions answered?

Is this a good thing, a bad thing?

I see two aspects to your question.
1. Is the dwindling skill pool scenario genuine and a matter of concern? My view is yes to both questions, but I can't see an easy way out. We have reduced or eliminated apprenticeship and craft training schemes over the last 20-30 years. This is shortsightedness on the part of industry, promoted by a cost-cutting mentality focussed on the short-term.
2. What this forum and others of a similar nature do is to help stem the rot. The trouble though is that there can be no moderation, resulting in a reliability wikepedia of sorts, with no QA check on who writes what. This means that people may occasionally be misguided - that is a price we have to accept.

As to whether it is good or bad thing, I suggest that is just a fact of life to accept and move on.

Hello all,

I tend to agree with Vee. I would like to add a couple more thoughts. Any venue that gets us to seek and learn what others in various industries and around the world are doing and thinking is definitely a good thing. As long as the reader understands the context of the forum, I see tremendous benefits. Granted, an on-line forum can't be the only source of one's education, but it certainly adds breadth and a practical perspective. So many companies train their staff to learn "our way" of doing business, and by doing so they can squash innovative ideas that may come from a combination of many nuggets of wisdom picked up from places such as this forum, technical conferences, publications, etc.

Another great thing about these forums is that one can quickly search for, read, or initiate topics as soon as a need arises in his/her own job. I have really enjoyed this accessibility that didn't exist prior to the formation of this forum.

Shelley

Mike,

My company provides Condition Based Asset Management services to asset intensive businesses. The majority of our customers are mining companies with large fleets of mobile equipment.

The story is almost always the same:

1. As the workforce ages, we are loosing the technical expertise that we must have to be successful.

2. There are not enough people with the necessary skills and expertise to go around.

3. I have a hard enough time finding people to operate the equipment, much less people who understand and can implement PM and PdM.

4. When I do find people with the necessary skills and expertise I am under fierce competitive pressure keep them

5. There are major gaps between the number of people required, the number of people currently available and the number of people that are being trained.

Everyone recognizes the problem, but few know what to do about it.

If you need an Electrical Engineer today your only real choice is to throw money at the problem. The real answer to the problem takes a long-tern approach.

The companies that I see overcoming this challenge do four things:

1. They make their company a great place to work: These companies work very hard to ensure that ABC is a great place to work. They make sure that working at ABC is better than working for any other company competing for the same talent.

2. They give opportunities to people with great attitudes: They hire people that have great attitudes and help them to acquire the necessary technical expertise. You can teach skills, but you cannot teach attitude.

3. They invest in their people without fear of loss. They can afford to spend the time and money to develop talent without fear of loosing their investment to a competitor. They have made ABC a great place to work and their employees are surrounded by like minded people with good attitudes.

4. They look outside themselves for help / Technical expertise on demand: They only pay for expertise when they need it.
a. My company provides technical expertise and spreads the cost out to several companies. We implement CBAM programs without increasing head count and after the work is done pass the programs off to existing staff so they can continue to realize the savings.
b. Show me the money: Our customers see and average return on investment of $4.50 for every $1.00 invested.

If you would like some assistance overcoming the technical expertise gap, please feel free to contact me at bsolem@dingo.com

Bsolem

Thanks for the monetary quote of your customers returning $4.50 for very $1.00 invested.

It sounds like you can print money. What smart business leader would not choose to turn $1 into $4.50?

Please post the actual financial examples for us to look at so we know that is not just "market speak" or "sales speak".

Our members are looking for these solid financial examples.

Thanks

Terry O

Terry,

I would be happy to post examples of the how, what and why of Dingo's CBAM ROI.

We don't say it unless our customers can prove it. Our ROI numbers come from actual CBAM customers, not from the marketing department.

I am on the road today, but will have an example up on Tuesday.

If you send me your email address, I would like to share more detailed information about how we do what we do and who we are doing it with, including additional ROI examples.

Thanks,
Brian

Likewise: I've found through tracking maintenance and cost that for every $50,000 spent on PdM you'll have a payback of between $175,000 and $800,000 from a quality program dependant on involvment and type of industry. This happens when PdM moves on to include RCA and hands-on with maintenance techs providing training. These numbers are not made-up but real from honest tracking and accounting from the customer. One also should realize during this time that PdM alone doesn't provide this savings but with RCA and eliminating and/or correct major problems and catching big machine saves from trouble-shooting, a big boost will be realized from time-to-time.

Bsolem & Sam:

Are most of your customers in a manufacturing/production business? Do you have any customers in government/academic/research facilities? I find that it is harder to quantify the PDM savings when you can't show the impact on production, yield, or sales. The maintenance / asset replacement savings pale in comparison to increasing uptime on a sold out production line. Do you have ROI examples that are not related to production?

Thanks much,
Shelley

I have water plants and treatment facilities that's as close to gov as I can get except for some things I do with colleges.

But, maintenance savings alone should put you in the black or you need to re-evaluate. Save vs catastrophic failure.

Other was aerospace dept for GA Tech as trouble-shooting consultant on the Army payroll or via Army approval for research work in a wind tunnel. My end was to make to run smooth at a known so data could be valid and relate to??????????????????

Shelley,

The majority of our customers are large mining companies. Many asset intensive industries could benefit from Condition Based Asset Management, (CBAM) and we are currently exploring opportunities in the shipping and railroad industries.

Our customer’s average ROI of $4.50 is based on a formula that is agreed to prior to the start of a project. The calculation is a percentage of the component cost based on average historical life. The formula does not include avoidance of lost production or potential secondary damage.

Avoided production loss is real. The number can be enormous, but is too subjective for us to make it part of our ROI calculations. Our customer’s average ROI of $4.50 is bulletproof. We feel that pumping up the number with something as subjective as avoided production loss would bring the rest of the calculation into question

We discuss avoided lost production with prospects, but leave it up to them to assign a value to it. Our customers know the value of an hour, day or week of lost production and some include it in their internal calculations.

Brian Solem,
Dingo Maintenance Systems
bsolem@dingo.com

Brian and others,
Permit me to offer a different perspective.
Tools and processes are enablers for improving performance. Used correctly, they can lead to large savings or earnings. But they are only enablers, important though they may be.
In my view tools such as CMMS or processes such as RCM or PdM enable us to make improvements, but only when we applythem properly. It is the execution of the outcome of the analysis that produces the savings/earnings. Thus the business process which ensures that work is executed along the chosen path is what brings results. No lathe or milling machine ever produced results by itself; it is the process of applying skilled resources, correct raw material and supervision/coordination andthe use of the machine tool that yields results. A CMMS used as electronic paper does not yield great results, but if it is used to change the way people work, it can yield large results. I am not reducing the importance of PdM or any other technique, process or tool. But I am stressing the importance of the whole process, in which such tools play an important role, that of enabler.

None of this stuff works without skilled labor. Corrections must be made timely (max life) but rebuilt and installed correctly (training). Without working together and supporting personnel merging PM and PdM together into planning your savings won't be realized anything near to what it should be.