In just one week the SMRP Annual Conference begins in St. Louis! It’s the first time many of us in this industry will see each other in person, and this year a great many virtual sessions will be available for those who are not yet able to travel for business. So for this year’s roundup of conference sessions that are on the Plant Services editors’ hotlist, we made sure that each session on our list is also available virtually!
If you’re on the fence on whether to register this year, check out these testimonials from past attendees. Also if you like podcasts, check out this episode of The Tool Belt podcast featuring my conversation with Adrian Messer, chair of this year’s conference, on what live and virtual attendees can expect this year.
Hope to see you next week!
1) Keynote (10/26 Tu 8:00 a.m. CT): Eric O'Neill, bestselling author and former FBI Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence Operative, and the inspiration for the film Breach. He currently is the National Security Strategist at VMWare Carbon Black, and will focus his remarks on the ways that cybersecurity is changing the role of everyone in the plant to be part of the same team.
2) Challenging the Norms…Using the “Norms”? 10/26 Tu 11:00 a.m. CT, with Jerry Good, Amazon Regional RM&E Manager, and Kevin Clark, CMRP, Accruent Vice President for Industrial Strategy. All the change we see today leaves us asking: Is technology the answer? Can we still advance with these norms – and if so, how do we leverage them with new technology? Do we have a solid grasp of where we’re going and what we must do? This discovery session will review how M&R best practices are being challenged by hyper-automation and remote work.
3) The Many Ways to Boost Schedule Compliance, 10/26 Tu 1:15 p.m. CT, with Doc Palmer, CMRP, Richard Palmer & Associates, Inc. and author of Plant Services’ Palmer’s Planning Corner column. The schedule compliance KPI is a great management tool for taking advantage of a huge variety of plant improvement opportunities, but the weekly schedule compliance KPI continues to bedevil us. We will see in typical instances, there are over twenty Management opportunities and only about three Supervisor opportunities that allow us to go beyond merely using the schedule compliance score to improve crew productivity. Stop mandating that supervisors deliver 90% schedule compliance and accept the score for what it is.
4) The 2021 Leadership Survey: Dissecting the Data, 10/26 Tu 2:45 p.m. CT, with Tom Moriarty, PE, CMRP, President at Alidade MER, Inc. This session reviews the results of the 2021 Leadership Survey, conducted in partnership with Plant Services magazine. Some of the data validated predictable, with the frequency of leadership training being directly related to leader motivation levels. Other findings were not-so-predictable: mismatches between what supervisors believe about how the workforce feels, and how the workforce actually feels.
5) Spreadsheets or Stories: What REALLY Creates Reliability Culture? 10/27 W 1:15 p.m. CT, with Michelle Ledet Henley, President of TMG Frontline Solutions, LLC. Creating a culture that supports highly reliable performance requires sharing stories of the desired behaviors that become legendary. But who knows about the “proactive heroes”? The mechanic who takes extra time to laser align, the operator who follows every procedure step and makes updates for changing conditions, the stores clerk who questions the vendor about proper part storage. Learn about the science behind the power of storytelling and create a culture filled with the legends of your organization’s reliability superheroes.
