What’s Stuck in My Head

When an issue of Maintenance Technology goes in the mail, we send it with every confidence that, upon receipt, you’ll cancel all activities for an afternoon, go home to your favorite reading spot with your favorite beverage, and devour every word. We also sleep well at night knowing that the things you learn from the issue are shared with your colleagues the next day.

Hey, I’m entitled to dream!

From our end, when we send the magazine to the printer, we will have literally read and edited every single word, and done so numerous times (I don’t want to hear about any errors you find.) As a result, by the time you receive this issue, or read it at maintenancetechnology.com, we’ve forgotten about the content and are deep into the next issue.

But this issue is a little different.

As I write this, just a few days before it goes to the printer, there are some items in the following pages that simply will not leave my head. Because of that, I’m going to put them in your heads before you get much further into the magazine.

Cyber security

The item that is “bothering” me the most comes from our cyber-security article, “Do Employees Make Your Network Vulnerable?” by Dennis Egen, president of Engine Room, Philadelphia.

In an article packed with excellent advice for shoring up your cyber security, Egen makes three statements that will have you calling an immediate company-wide meeting:

“It has been estimated that 60% of data compromises are caused by employees or insiders (freelancers, contractors, consultants). The vast majority of these breaches are unintentional.”

“According to one provider of identity protection and fraud-detection solutions, about 60% of users who have access to a company network use the same login credentials as on other non-company sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Since many targeted breaches begin with a phishing effort to grab users’ social-media passwords, many inadvertently put confidential company login information right out for anyone to see.”

“A recent survey showed that 60% of employees either have no security or have stuck to the default settings for their mobile devices.”

After I finished editing that article the first time, I didn’t call a company-wide meeting, but I can assure you that some passwords got changed. Yes, I was guilty as charged.

Reliability

The second item that’s stuck in my head comes from Jeff Dudley’s article, “Change Your Game to Proactive” (p. 24). Dudley tells us that Q1 (first quartile, i.e., the best) performers deliver more than 97% mechanical availability year in and year out. More than 75% of their downtime is due to planned and scheduled outages (turnarounds).

Later he states, “Note that game changers [high-reliability operations] are not the lowest-spending organizations. In fact, our research has shown that the lowest-spending operations typically have poor reliability and are normally Q3 performers.”

The quest for reliability is talked about quite a bit in our world. Is there more talk than action? Knowing that running an unreliable operation basically blocks movement toward Q1 performance should be enough incentive to start putting the talk into action.

Unreliability

If that message doesn’t hit home, this one will. In a second article from Al Poling this year, he demonstrates the impact that unreliability has on sales. The article, “Calculate the Impact of Unreliability on Sales” (p. 21), is a “sister” article on “Calculate the True Cost of Unreliability,” which we published in Feb. 2016 on p. 13. In this issue, Poling demonstrates the incredible influence that reliable operations have on sales revenue. In his example, committing to reliability results in a $314 million increase in sales revenue.

We are convinced that you should have both of Poling’s articles in your hands. So much so that we have combined them into a pdf ebook that you can download at maintenancetechnology.com/calculate.

I point out these items because they are stuck in my little brain. But, while you’re spending that afternoon at home, reading this issue, I also encourage you to read our Plant Profile and Voice from the Field features to learn what your colleagues in other operations are doing. MT

gparr@maintenancetechnology.com