How institutional memory drives innovation in maintenance and reliability
The July/Aug issue of Plant Services features a terrific cover story from Ron Marshall, our resident expert on compressed air systems. His story continues our occasional look back this year at the past 10 years of maintenance and reliability, and he charts the evolution of compressed air technology across three key areas: technology design, asset management, and industry-wide performance metrics and training opportunities.
Part of what struck me about Ron’s article was the breadth and depth of his memory when thinking back on significant changes in industry. True change often happens when an innovation is so compelling that change doesn’t feel like a disruption. In cases like that, it can take a good memory and strong attention to detail to remember how things used to be done, and why they were done that way.
In general, people who work in our industry have an unusually strong sense of concentration and institutional memory. With physical assets that can last 20 years or more, it’s practically a job requirement for maintenance technicians to have a deep knowledge of those assets’ operating histories and failure modes. I was reminded of this during a podcast interview with Cintel’s Dave Aebischer, who I met at this year’s Leading Reliability conference. He gave a presentation on how he used vibration analysis and motion amplification technology to troubleshoot a structural resonance issue on power generators that were failing regularly the field.
Thing is, to help solve the more recent problem, Dave remembered back 25 years to when he had seen a similar resonance issue crop up on previous generators used in the same footprint. His ability to recall and apply that previous solution was key in getting ahead of the more current set of failures, something that he discusses in depth in a new episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast.
Our leadership columnist Joe Kuhn calls this a “Go and See” mindset, where intense observation and frequent floor walks are used to reinforce a problem-solving mentality. Joe writes in this issue that “observation is required to fully understand current state and reveals simple and rapidly implemented solutions—most often at zero cost.”
Condition monitoring tools and data historians have given technicians the ability to scale their knowledge and expertise, but the human mind is still critical in knowing what to observe and how to make key problem-solving connections across time and across assets.
