Three Illustrations

Column

Gary Parr | May 16, 2016

Conferences have been a big part of my life lately. Fortunately for me, I enjoy them because I enjoy learning. In the two most-recent conferences I’ve attended, from all of the Powerpoint slides and spoken words, three illustrations/graphs stayed with me because they made me analyze things on several levels. I share them with you on this page, hoping they make the same impression on you.

The first comes from Ryan Avery, who presented a keynote address at the Uponor Connections 2016 conference in Las Vegas. Avery’s talk was “Motivating Millennials.” Uponor North America, headquartered in Apple Valley, MN, is a manufacturer of PEX piping systems. The other two graphs are from talks presented at the Reliability Conference, also held in Las Vegas. That conference is produced by the ReliabilityWeb.com people.

I hope these three visual items generate some thinking and maybe even inspire you to make some changes. MT

gparr@maintenancetechnology.com

Ryan Avery tells us that, if you assign shapes to generations, baby boomers are a triangle because we operate in a hierarchical world with someone always at the top, calling the shots. Millennials are a circle because they like to be part of a community and don’t care for bosses. They’d rather be coached. Learn more about millennials here.

Jason Trantner (Mobius Institute, Bainbridge Island, WA), in his talk, “Condition Monitoring is Not Enough: You Can’t Monitor Your Way to Improved Reliability,” suggested that people who are looking on the P-F curve for reliability are just doing a better job of managing failure. True reliability is realized if you go back in time and consider whether you have a bad installation, what happened the last time failure occurred, and even back to the beginning to analyze the original design/specifications.

In his talk, “Secrets of Success with Procedures (and Processes),” Jack Nicholas showed this “eyelash curve,” adopted from 4th Generation Management by Brian Joiner. The graph shows what happens to the company learning curve when turnover occurs. If processes and procedures aren’t documented, you get eyelashes as each new employee has to start from scratch. If documentation is done properly, true progress occurs (dashed line). Learn more in Jack’s book, Secrets of Success with Procedures, available at Amazon.com.