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        <title>GGeneral's - Thoughts from Experience</title>
        <description></description>
        <link>http://www.maintenance.org/index.php?page_id=1007&amp;module_name=sblog_info&amp;sblog_id=</link>
        <lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:11:43 +0100</lastBuildDate>
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        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:11:00 +0100</pubDate>
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            <title>“How do I quantify my finds, where do I go to establish my credibility??”</title>
            <link>http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/199</link>
            <description><![CDATA[ Grow a thick skin, fast, you have to develop some way of bring some sense to the finds you have made in your program.
 Now that trust has been established, your routes are being executed, you wonder if the work you are doing is worthwhile, are there any finds to report on to show you are doing a good job.  How do I quantify the finds that have been reported, put a dollar sign to the finds, to prove the system is working to the benefit of the company or department, that we are saving money, that the trust you have been afforded is well founded.
Nobody teaches us how to do this, it is one of the most difficult processes one has to establish in their PdM program is a way to quantify a find, to justify the program’s existence.  My way of quantifying a good find was simply to use a delay avoidance process, to take the cost per hour of rolling time and multiplying that times the number of hours saved by not having to shut down.  There are a lot of fancy systems out there where this multiplied by that, then divided by something else, gives you a number, why so complicated.
My first’ find’ saved 4 hours, instead of being down for seven hours we were down three hours.  Infrared showed a differential between the 4 pistons in the project block, I selected the bottom right cylinder it was correct, hooray!!  Repairs were made to the cylinder, it was pressurized and there was no leak, we came ahead and rolled for the duration on the repaired system.  Cost avoidance was 4 X $40,000.00, $160,000.00, my camera was paid for, my wages were taken care of for the rest of the year,  the system worked, I finally realized what I was doing was the right thing, it could be very successful and a value added exercise.
May you be successful in your career in your chosen field. I hope you find it very rewarding
Kindest regards,
 
Geoff
 <a href='http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/199'>(more)</a>]]></description>
            <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 23:46:46 +0100</pubDate>
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            <title>Now your program is running What do you do now??</title>
            <link>http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/184</link>
            <description><![CDATA[
	&ldquo;Now you have your program running, what do I need to do to keep it running, how do I build &ldquo;TRUST&rdquo;???&rdquo;

	Now that you have finished your lists, the work begins, so you have just:

	1. outlined the equipment you want to check, using Excel or some other program where you can create lists that are easily edited, with input from you conversations with the area experts, ask them the criticality of the equipment in their area that is on your list, this info will give your starting point for the infrared, vibration, ultrasonic etc. routes you will develop

	&nbsp;2. taken those lists you in which you have broken out your high priority items,&nbsp;for a second reading by the area experts and ask if it fits their vision, if it does ask them where they are having problems, highlight these on your list

	3. realized this equipment becomes the critical components in your list , the place to start.

	4. found out the criticality progression goes from, in order of importance, areas with problems first, critical equipment next, all other areas as you can do it&nbsp; 

	Once you have started your routes here are some pointers for you as you execute the routes and to get better buy in from your customers:

	1. you will find as you complete your routes you will cover all of the other areas as part of your route execution with difficulty at first, which becomes easier as time progresses and you become proficient with your equipment and the routes you are executing.

	2. remember your reports are your first and most important line of communication with your customer, make them the best you can, always include, equipment ID, area you are in, any information that identifies the equipment to the person receiving the report.

	3. ask for feedback, this will be difficult to get all of the time, be persistent, always ask, always meet with the customer to see if there is an ongoing problem right now you might be able to help with right now, if they see you are willing to help, they will call you more and more often to help, when that happens you have gotten the &ldquo;TRUST&rdquo; you deserve.

	With thorough work up front each of your next steps in the journey will become easier and easier, second nature, your confidence will increase with each good call.&nbsp; Your customers, the area experts will rely on you more and more for good data and insight into problems they may be having.

	May you be successful in your career in your chosen field. I hope you find it very rewarding

	Kindest regards,

	&nbsp;

	Geoff
 <a href='http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/184'>(more)</a>]]></description>
            <pubDate>Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:38:20 +0100</pubDate>
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            <title>The effort and hard work you put into your program now, will pay off in the future.”</title>
            <link>http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/181</link>
            <description><![CDATA[
	When you have developed a network of people, either through conference attendance or training classrooms, to bounce things off, or now the more informal&nbsp; avenues like Blogs and other PdM forums, which is even easier today than when I started, you have a place to use as a sounding board for developing your program. 

	Though, in my experience, I believe the only way you are going to develop a sound program, for any of the disciplines (IR, vibration, motor testing, vibration etc) is to put in some hard work yourself, determining what should be included, and not included and to make some decisions on what the criteria will be on how to determine that.&nbsp; This may be an easy task or a difficult one, but it is one that has to be done, there is no easy way to do this, you will make some mistakes, these will not be earth shattering ones, only doing inspections that do not need to be done or are of little value to the operation of the plant you are developing a program for, it will be worth it in the long run.&nbsp; I believe to have more than not enough is key.&nbsp; You an always pare items from your program, I believe you need to pare the items based on your experience using your infrared camera, motor testing equipment, vibration data logger, or ultrasonic probe.&nbsp; Each item you pare from your program will be based on your testing and experience and by doing this you will have helped to develop your technique and experience using the equipment.&nbsp; At first you will go through a lot of pads of paper outlining what you believe is what should be included and you will be constantly checking your operator&rsquo;s manual for your equipment, in the end you will know the equipment you will be testing/scanning.

	Walk the &ldquo;routes&rdquo; you have developed.&nbsp; This helps you determine if they are viable or not and based on geography you can modify them so there is a &ldquo;flow&rdquo; to the walk around, always turn on and take your IR camera or ultrasonic equipment with you, listen or look at the things you would be surveying, it will be very enlightening, because you will be challenged to adjust the ranges of your equipment so you can get a feel for what you are looking at.

	Now you need to document your &ldquo;routes&rdquo; somewhere, I have used Excel extensively for two reasons it is easy to send the routes for editing by subject matter experts, equipment specialists or whoever are the experts on the equipment you will be surveying, Excel is also very easy to add and delete information in your &ldquo;route&rdquo; outlines.&nbsp; Once you have developed the &ldquo;routes&rdquo; you believe cover what you think should be included, take it with you and have some discussions with the people on the floor, they can give you insight into the problem areas and will probably give you areas they want included.&nbsp; Also if delays are tracked you can see if there are some chronic failures you may e able to give people some insight on with the information you can gather using your equipment, you will be amazed at the insight gained by these people when you do this for them.&nbsp; At first there will be some reluctance to be involved, but persistence on your part will pay off especially when you hand off some information that helps them with a nagging problem.&nbsp; Each &ldquo;find&rdquo; will cement your good relationship with these people, to the point that when they are troubleshooting a situation they will call you in for some expert advice or another view on what is going on with their equipment.&nbsp; Your reputation will grow into other areas as well, soon you will be called by a varied group of people all through word of mouth and a good reputation as someone who is willing to help out to determine what the problem is.

	Any work done up front, developing the routes, updating your &ldquo;route&rdquo; lists, talking to the experts, learning to use your equipment well, will take time and effort, but it is the best possible energy you can expend on your program, because several years down the road, you will say to yourself, &ldquo;Gee, things seem to be much easier today than when I started, even though I am doing more than before, I wonder why??&rdquo;&nbsp; You have developed a skill set that will be invaluable from now until you retire.

	May you be successful in your career in your chosen field. I hope you find it very rewarding.

	Kindest regards,

	&nbsp;

	Geoff
 <a href='http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/181'>(more)</a>]]></description>
            <pubDate>Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:28:32 +0100</pubDate>
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            <title>My PdM career has evolved</title>
            <link>http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/180</link>
            <description><![CDATA[From Geoff Generalovic, Maintenance electrician at ArcelorMittal Dofasco Inc.&nbsp; 
My career in predictive maintenance (PdM) has evolved since my formative years in 1995 and my first exposure to it via simple Excel charts tracking resistance to ground readings on our runout table motors. This was actually the topic of my first-ever presentation at a conference. It was the Society for Maintenance &amp; Reliability Professionals conference in Atlanta in 1998. I sweated the topic big-time. I was extremely nervous because the audience, I believed, would see huge holes in my presentation and ask questions that I could not answer. The presentation was received well and there were many questions that I was able to answer effectively and well. I know my success was due to the fact that I knew about my topic, I had lived with the program, and could give answers based on sound knowledge and experience.
One reason I believe I was effective in my first-ever presentation in front of an audience of my peers was due to a book I had read. It was Dale Carnegie’s “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking”. My wife and I were visiting relatives in the Atlanta area. We went to several small towns, and in one we found an old bookstore. I didn’t find anything to read, but my wife’s cousin presented me with one of the original copies of this book after we left the store because he knew I was presenting my paper and knew this was a good book to improve one’s presenting skills. The book was a bargain at $1.50. I read the book cover to cover before I presented my paper. It put my mind at ease, but didn’t stop the butterflies in my stomach. Upon returning home, I enrolled and then took the Dale Carnegie course which developed my skills in presenting even more. The course also gave me more confidence in all aspects of my career and personal life.
I have presented papers at many conferences since that first presentation - at AIST (steel manufacturers conference), PPM conferences, PdMA motor testing conferences, Snell Infrared events and others. My success at these conferences was due to me living my program, developing it and seeing through. I was confident in what I was presenting.
Looking back on my career, this confidence was not felt in executing my infrared program. I was a timid thermographer when I started. I stressed over the possibility of making a bad call. My first call as a thermographer came in our mill; it was diagnosing a press block problem using my newly purchased IR camera. It was only a 1.5-degree Celsius difference, but it was correct. It reduced the mill delay from being seven hours to three, saving several hours in downtime, and was instrumental in increasing my confidence in my abilities.
Like my presentation journey, my thermography journey followed the same pattern, I went from inexperienced and being somewhat unsure to a thermographer with confidence in my abilities. This came with knowledge gained through training, contact with others in the thermography field, and executing a sound program based on good information. My education continues even today.
When you surround yourself with people with your best interests at heart, you can only be a success. This is not something that comes easy. You have to attend courses, classes or conferences to develop and nurture a network of peers who will always be there to help you via phone calls or e-mails to determine what a problem may be or to just talk about all things predictive. This support allows you to put yourself out there while executing your program and to always be looking for new opportunities to apply to your thermography program.
May you be successful in your career in your chosen field. I hope you find it very rewarding&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Kindest regards,&nbsp;Geoff&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href='http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/180'>(more)</a>]]></description>
            <pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:12:16 +0100</pubDate>
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            <title></title>
            <link>http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/176</link>
            <description><![CDATA[My career in Predictive Maintenance (PdM) in Dofasco’s HotMill started late in 1995 September to be exact.&nbsp; It started with a question “Do you want to be involved in Predictive Maintenance??” I didn’t know what I was getting into,but it sounded a lot better than what was going on in my career at that time.&nbsp; My manager saw that the way to go for maintenance in the future would be the Predictive maintenance one, so I was the lead in that direction with his support.
&nbsp;&nbsp;My PdM career actually started with Jack Nicholas, who was part of PdMA at the time, he was brought in to train all of the electricians atthe time in motor theory, something which many electricians are not trained in very well in their apprenticeship programs.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;Jack was also consulting with us on our maintenance program as well, I saw the benefits and believed it would be a good idea to follow these classes closely and to listen to Jack about the direction PdM was going.&nbsp; Jack was instrumental in my early PdM education, so under his tutelage I developed sound ideas on what I wanted to do in this program.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;My first introduction was using Excel to trend meggar readings on our Runout table motors, the program is still in use today.&nbsp; We developed monitor, open and inspect and change out limits in our program, it was very successful.&nbsp; We were able to reduce our delay time from over 800 minutes a year to a consistent 90 to 100 minutes for all of the 410 motors in the mill . 
&nbsp;I presented my first paper at the SMRP conference in 1998 in Atlanta based on this program, I think it was 1998, I’m and older guy can’t remember back that far.&nbsp;So it began, I moved out of the mill into the PdM offices.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;It turned out we had bought a motor test unit, the silver case unit from PdMA, one of their first, I found out two of my bosses had attended the training in Tampa, Florida,I was not to be so lucky.&nbsp; The tester was plopped on my desk without any manuals, neither of my bosses could start up thetester, it had been so long since they had attended the training.&nbsp; I did find a 1-800-number for PdMA’s techhelp line, what a great benefit that was, I got to know Rudy very well overthat phone line, they still have one of the best Help lines I have ever come across, kudos to PdMA for maintaining that.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;So my motor testing career started, we had done RCM studies at the time so I utilized that and my cohorts knowledge to determine the most critical motors in the system, entered them into my Excel database and started my testing based on that.&nbsp; Today we have both PdMA’s MCEmax, MCE offline and on-line testers and the Framtome, on-linetest equipment.&nbsp;My mandate was to develop an infrared program as well.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;There was money in the budget for an infrared camera, so we purchased one of the first cooled focal plane array cameras on the market, the Agema 550, with as many options as we could get, extra lensesand the like. That was and still is the best camera available the resolution was incredible for its time.&nbsp; I started taking basic images, then took Level I courses, progressed to Level II&nbsp; courses always getting better with the camera each time.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;I developed the program still in use today, using my cohorts knowledge, RCM data and data I picked local experts brains for, so I used their ideas and methods, then developed my own.Again all of that data was entered into my Excel sheets, which again are still being used to this day.&nbsp;I believe the ground work for any program is key to a sustainable program, whatever leg work you put into your program now pays off in spades in the future. 
&nbsp;&nbsp;Today I am part of the Central Predictive Technical Services team applying everything I learned in the Hot Mill plant wide. It has been an incredible journey, during which I have met many people in the field who still keep in touch.&nbsp; I’m still on my journey.&nbsp;This Blog is the next step, I have many ideas based on experience, some work well some are OK, so if I can help send you in a direction that will save you time, money and frustration, then my talking to you is worth it \.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;Kindest regards,&nbsp; 
&nbsp;Geoff <a href='http://www.maintenance.org/blogs/77/176'>(more)</a>]]></description>
            <pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:12:51 +0100</pubDate>
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