Keeping Your Equipment Reliability Team Sharp
We have just completed our annual Global TapRooT® Summit, and we all walked away with some terrific ideas to bring back to our companies. Many people think the Summit is only for our customers to improve their processes, but I ALWAYS come away with new ideas for myself.
Heinz Bloch was one of our speakers this year. He had two excellent sessions on how equipment reliability is tied directly to your company’s bottom line. As always, he had some great insights into how a company can integrate reliability techniques into its business model for real, measurable savings.
One of his observations is that, as technology progresses, it is imperative that your reliability and maintenance team keep up-to-date on the current best practices and technologies. It is too easy to assume your excellent reliability and maintenance engineers will just magically remain top-notch. His suggestion (almost a demand!) was to ensure we give our team the time and motivation to actually READ about their craft. Your team should be allocating some amount of time EVERY DAY to reading professional journals and articles to see what is happening outside their own company boundaries.
- Are you using the very best lubricant?
- What new bearing materials are available for your applications?
- How much can we save by investing in slightly more expensive but much more efficient technology?
- What are our competitors using for condition-based maintenance?
As managers, we should be giving our team both the time and the incentive to read these journals and articles. Trust me; your competition is doing this; don’t be left behind!
