Articles
Voices: Human Capital
“We have too much to do!”
Preventive maintenance not getting done? Track your labor efficiency By Tom Moriarty, P.E., CMRP, contributing editor Plant Services Magazine Mar 26, 2015 Have you ever been told, or decided yourself, "There's too much work to do and not enough resources to get it all...
Are you making the right assumptions about the people you work with?
March 2015 Plant Services Magazine We all make assumptions about the people we meet and people with whom we work. We form impressions of people almost immediately upon interacting with them. Sometimes we observe a behavior once early on in our relationship with a...
ROI from Condition Monitoring
There are two different types of organizations that try condition monitoring solutions: successful and unsuccessful. If you’re contemplating a condition monitoring program (vibration analysis, infrared imaging, ultrasonic emissions, oil analysis, motor circuit...
Growing Your Own Leaders
In the 1970s companies aggressively worked to reduce costs because of increased competition from lower foreign labor rates, and elevated oil prices. There was a drastic reduction in the investment in people. Training, developmental assignments, and coaching time were...
Optimizing Your Suggestion Box
Many organizations put suggestion programs in place. These are intended to provide a means for good ideas to save money or improve efficiency to be generated, and perhaps rewarded. If the suggestion program is well managed then the organization will also benefit from...
What steps must you take before terminating an employee?
This article was published in Plant Services Magazine Not long ago I was on a very long trip, about eight hours driving, to take some vacation time with a couple of friends to play some golf. One of my friends is a medical professional, a doctor. He said he had a...
Being Right Isn’t Enough to Get the Job Done
Making a positive change requires both identifying opportunities for improvement and getting those improvements implemented. A lesson from history may help to illustrate the point. In the 1840s, the Vienna General Hospital’s Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien...
Managers Aren’t Paid to Take the Easy Path. You Need to do the Hard Things.
In late July I attended the ReliabilityWeb’s Solutions 2.0 conference. I sat in on a presentation about the results of an industry survey on asset information management. One of the presenter’s slides had a quote from James P. Womack, an author on industry,...
Silly Putty and the Fluid Workplace
Business decisions and the workplace have many of the same characteristics of a fluid reacting to its environment. The engineering definition of a fluid is a substance, a liquid or a gas, that continually deforms or flows under an applied shear stress. What it...
Making Good Maintenance Decsions
I had a job where my team was responsible to provide maintenance to ships. Over one short period of time we had two ships with different problems. Both problems involved ALCO 251 V-18 propulsion diesel engines. Both problems involved a key decision-maker; each had a...
Voices: Human Capital
Human Capital is a monthly column for plant managers, department managers, supervisors and aspiring leaders. This column provides a blend of leadership and organizational development concepts with practical applications and insight.