blue pencil

While some would believe good leaders are born and not made, I believe you can not translate any gift into talent without training and development.  It is a crime that they don’t have decent management training in engineering schools.  In the five years I studied Engineering at university there was plenty of technical slog but little to nothing on managing people.

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Most maintenance practitioners are familiar with the plant reliability benefits that can be gained from using Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) to design the maintenance regime for your plant, but does your RCM process identify and manage the risk of high impact plant failures.

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Many blogs and forums are dedicated to debunking myths about planning and scheduling and how these processes can or can not assure plant reliability.  They are all missing the point because they have not recognized that these processes are simply elements within a system.  Unless you understand the elements that define this system, you will not be able to manage it and realize the plant performance you desire.

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Management Commitment and Leadership is essential for an operation to realise goals related to both business success and continual improvement.  However, management and leadership are completely different attributes. Leaders are not always managers and some managers are poor leaders.

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Angelo Agresti - September 2008

Pundits suggest that establishing a proactive operation culture where maintenance and production people work in cooperation is the Holy Grail [*]. You’ve got to be kidding! Production and maintenance working in cooperation is fundamental to operational performance.

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Paul Sebire - August 2008

Many businesses endeavour to measure business performance by using Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).  The theory being that these performance measurements will expose both achievements and short comings and allow managers to take targeted action to improve the performance for which they are responsible.

At first glance this sounds like a great and relatively simple method to manage and increase performance, and it certainly is!

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Michael Wood - July 2008

The increasing need for organisations to be responsive and competitive requires a new approach to leadership, one that considers managing the capability of both the hard (plant) and soft (people) assets.

The maintenance function is typically a technical environment, the realm of engineers and tradesmen. When implementing improvement, it is quite often an incomplete understanding of the complexities of culture and how to change it, that undermines improvement efforts.

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