Uptime: MARCON 2015 an Impressive Display of R&M Know-How

The University of Tennessee (UT) Reliability & Maintainability Center (RMC) presented its 19th annual Maintenance & Reliability Conference (MARCON) in Knoxville during the week of Feb. 23rd. Running under the theme of “R&M implementation… from Start to Winning,” this year’s event attracted more than 350 practitioners, leaders, innovators and purveyors of R&M resources—all of them seeking and sharing success stories from across industry. Despite several days of winter weather, the program was able to roll out 10 full-day workshops, five keynote presentations and 27 conference sessions.

Having attended at least 10 MARCON events over the years, I can attest that this was the most impressive of all. The conference maxed out its former hotel venue in 2014 and claimed the Knoxville Convention Center as its new home for the first time this year. This is a precursor for MARCON’s 20th anniversary conference scheduled for February 2016.

Pre-Conference workshops

Two days of eight-hour workshops ranged from “Maintenance Planning and Scheduling” to “Total Productive Maintenance as a Foundation for ISO 55000.” Two others—“Asset Management, Maintenance Strategies, Reliability-Based Design, Simulation Modelling, Culture Change” and “Best in Class Field Application Techniques”—rounded out the workshops.

The “Basic Introduction to Reliability Engineering” workshop spanned two full days, as did “Roadmap to Reliability.” Led by highly experienced facilitators, the workshop participants rolled up their sleeves and dug into many real-world problems and solutions.

Keynotes

“Reliability Leadership—Why It Is Broke & How To Fix It” was the title of Terry O’Hanlon’s keynote presentation on the first day of the regular conference. Takeaways included:

• Leaders desiring reliability improvement often fail to engage those closest to the needed change.
• Organizational culture is the single biggest obstacle to reliability.
• Leadership, from top management to plant floor, drive the organization culture, status quo or new directions.

“Successful and Sustainable Reliability Improvements?…The Right Answer is Not Enough!” was the message from Terry Jarret, Global Reliability Director for Koch Industries. His keynote emphasized several points, including:

• Sponsorship, visible and effective, is the most important part of change.
• Ineffective sponsorship is the biggest obstacle to successful change management.

“Reliability is Not Just Maintenance” was the theme of a keynote by Jack Clark, Vice President & Chief Technical Officer of Novelis (a leader in rolled aluminum products). The company’s reliability-improvement journey began in 2009 when Novelis North America’s President asked for a corporate-led effort. The approach included reliability assessments, reliability-engineering training, a roadmap for improving reliability, and growth to a global initiative. Clark outlined the “Reliability Playbook” a global operating system based on reliability best practices. (For more information, see the September 2014 issue of Efficient Plant.)

The power of leadership at Novelis was illustrated in an example where the mean time between failure (MTBF) was increased by more than 300% (on average) plant wide. Clark pointed out that the leadership group in this plant engaged the entire workforce—from the plant manager down—to achieve this dramatic breakthrough. Takeaways included:

• Reliability must be a core competency for a manufacturing company.
• World-class reliability requires close collaboration across many functional areas.
• Standardization of approaches simplifies and accelerates best practice sharing.
• Reliability is much more than maintenance.

“Implementing Reliability Based Equipment Maintenance Programs” was the title of a keynote by Scott Piech, Division Manager of USA Maintenance for ArcelorMittal. He discussed how his organization’s implementation of reliability-based equipment maintenance improved the bottom line of its $5 billion steel mill in nine months.

As a preface to his presentation, Piech showed a video that ArcelorMittal developed to introduce high-school and tech-school students to careers as maintenance technicians. In the video, six technicians told their stories, showed what they do and discussed how math and science and working with tools and computers helped them succeed in their jobs. This video is an ideal tool for getting the word out about rewarding careers in maintenance and reliability.

Regular conference sessions

The rest the two-day conference program was filled with 27 excellent presentations that covered the onshoring of manufacturing, the manufacturing resurgence and how to establish a skilled-workforce pipeline. Sessions were organized into six tracks that provided a variety of learning opportunities for the many company teams in attendance. They included:

• Preparing for Success
• Condition Monitoring
• Asset Management
• R&M Implementation
• Work Management
• R&M Toolbox

These 45-minute sessions provided many case examples of basic, intermediate, and advanced reliability and maintainability practices. First-hand insights from the plant floor and many “how-to” sessions were sure to provide new pathways and best practices as well as reinforce current practices.

Work culture is the most important factor: Jeremy Smith of LUDECA conducted a Thursday session entitled “Cultural Alignment.” While I had understood the basics of shaft alignment and LUDECA’s laser tools, I was curious about the cultural aspects of alignment. Smith pointed to the fact that precision alignment involves much more than the tools. Too often, he said, the people (or culture) and procedures (or processes) are either left out of the equation or under-emphasized, which is a big mistake. He detailed the importance of procedures, specification, tolerances and careful inspections.

On the people/culture-side, though, Smith stressed the importance of core values, competency, care, training, transparency, documentation and communications. We should all thank him for reminding us how critical the “people-side” of innovation is to the workplace.

Community colleges meet the challenge: Roane State Community College (Harriman, TN) showed how its participation in a U.S. Department of Labor-funded “STEM Consortium” program helps train and develop skilled workers. Roane State’s one-year certificate program will become a two-year associate’s degree program this fall (2015). The curriculum includes CAD, engineering drafting, 3D printing and robotics, as well as the basics of mechanical and electrical systems, PLCs, hydraulics, pneumatics, and brings it together in the study of mechatronics.

According to Bob Gatton, Director of this program at Roane State, there are growing opportunities for experienced and retired maintenance and reliability leaders to serve as instructors. “Finding qualified instructors,” he said, “is our [the program’s] biggest problem.” Two people in the audience raised their hands to offer their services.

Skilled-workforce training: Another presentation involved Nissan and the Automotive Manufacturing Technical Education Collaborative (AM TEC), which partnered to share their experiences in “Establishing a Skilled Workforce Pipeline of Maintenance Technicians.” Nissan’s successful model in Tennessee helped reduce a six-year apprenticeship program to three years, and clearly improved the skills and knowledge of the automaker’s maintenance workforce.

Kevin Smith (Nissan) and Craig Hopkins (AM TEC) shared this success story, starting with the program’s developmental stages and culminating with an account of its first graduating class of 22 participants. A second class of 24 individuals recently embarked upon the journey to become skilled maintenance technicians.

Features of the Nissan/AM TEC initiative include a Monday-through-Thursday class schedule that allows students to work Friday through Sunday as interns in the Nissan plant. This gives the facility additional help and provides students with real-world experiences as they work along-side skilled Nissan maintenance team members.

Industrial maintenance excellence

During my four days in Knoxville I was invited to attend the Board of Directors meeting for the North American Maintenance Excellence (NAME) Award—an annual program to recognize North American organizations that excel in performing the maintenance process to enable operational excellence.

The NAME Award is managed by the non-profit Foundation for Industrial Maintenance Excellence (FIME), established in 1990, whose board of directors comprise past NAME Award winners. These volunteer board members represent some of the best-of-the-best owner/operator practitioners in the business. Companies represented belong to multiple business verticals, including automotive, biomedical, chemicals, food, mining and metals, petroleum, pharmaceuticals and pulp & paper. To date, NAME has attracted more than 70 applicants and 22 have won the award. NAME Award objectives are to:

1. Increase the awareness of maintenance as a competitive edge in cost, quality, service and equipment performance
2. Identify industry leaders, along with potential or future leaders, and highlight “best” practices in maintenance management
3. Share successful maintenance strategies and the benefits derived from implementation
4. Understand the need for managing change and stages of development to achieve maintenance excellence
5. Enable operational excellence

MARCON 2016

The time I spent this year at MARCON was an invaluable opportunity to learn about and peer into the future of maintenance and reliability. Networking with presenters and participants who were on their own journeys to improve maintenance and reliability in their plants and facilities was a powerful benefit of attending. Congratulations to the Reliability & Maintainability Center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for another job well done.

Given the success of this conference in its new venue, the 20th anniversary of MARCON scheduled for Feb. 22 to 25 in 2016, is positioned to be one of the best reliability and maintenance conferences of the year.