A Contrarian View: What Being Proactive Really Means

By Heinz Bloch, P.E.

A company I choose to call NTBO (“Not-To-Be-Offended”) will long remember a string of expensive pump failures that jeopardized the continuity of boiler feed water supplied to its power generation turbines. When all components were carefully measured, it was determined that the oil-slinger concentricity exceeded maximum allowable by a factor of 30. Oil slingers (cone-shaped collars on revolving shafts designed to return passing oil outward to the point of origin) are critically important components, but I don’t know if NTBO implemented the specification and inspection routines needed to capitalize on this costly experience.

Capitalizing on an event means not doing the same dumb things all over again. In NTBO’s case, bringing 30- or 40-year-old rotating machinery back to original tolerances should be one of this company’s priority tasks. In fact, the next shutdown might include retrofitting fluid machinery with more efficient blades, impellers, vanes, improved lube delivery, superior filtration and the like.

The time to be thoroughly proactive is NOW. Today is the best time to communicate with competent upgrade shops; or to write an oil-slinger-ring specification requiring stress-relieving (annealing) before finish-machining; or to find out if better reciprocating-compressor valves are available and cost-justified; or to determine if excessive pipe stress on the discharge nozzle of P-207 warrants pre-fabricating a spool piece for insertion between points A and B during the plant shutdown scheduled for later in the year.

Repeat failures in a plant should be thought of as management failures, plain and simple. Someone in management needs to hire, nurture or groom people who know that the above activities are among the hundreds of proactive tasks that fit under various subheadings in role statements for responsible reliability professionals. One such task is to keep current a list of actions that could be carried out if an unanticipated downtime event were to occur.

Say, for instance, the reliability manager tells you that one of your plant’s process units has just shut down because of a pipe rupture. He tells his engineers and technicians that unit restart is scheduled in 30 hours. A proactive reliability employee might, for example, immediately look at his/her two-day-opportunity list that prioritizes coupling replacement in P-207 B, followed by the addition of 24 pre-fabricated hydraulic tubing lines to 12 electric motors on pre-defined process pumps already hooked up to the plant-wide oil mist system.

But it’s a two-way street. A competent manager creates role statements and training plans for his employees. For their part, the reliability professionals reporting to this manager make sure they arrive at work knowing what tasks they will perform (on a “normal” day) in harmony with their defined roles. As they then return home at the end of the day, these professionals should ask themselves if they have added value and if—should they ever leave their current jobs—the present manager or employer would notice they were no longer there.

Granted, if you work for a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, the corporation’s end-of-year profit statement probably wouldn’t be directly affected by your presence or departure. But your group or section or department should notice if or when you’re no longer around.

So make a difference. Whether you’re a manager or a junior contributor, strive to be above average. Be self-motivated and proactive. Offer facts that comport with common sense and the laws of science. As I’ve mentioned before, anecdotes add nothing but wasted time. Factual information translated into cost-justified actions adds value. MT

heinzbloch@gmail.com