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UNRELIABILITY
As a magazine and web publisher as well as a conference
organizer, I get to read a lot of papers, case studies
and articles about successful reliability programs. This
information is always interesting and knowledge can usually be
gained from each.
Conversely, when I am out in the field and visiting various
plants and facilities, I often engage in real-world conversations
about what failures occurred and what strategies did not work.
These raw stories are usually charged with emotion and bias,
however, not being vested in the outcome, I can usually listen
to the story to gather enough fact to gain some very powerful
lessons.
It would be very exciting to have a magazine like Uptime®
feature epic failures like the ones I hear about in my travels and
planned visits. Imagine the insight you would take away from
a conference where people were not presenting their happy
shining maintenance reliability accomplishments, but were
instead lifting the hood on their failures and letting us all learn
from their mistakes
that failures are our biggest opportunities
for learning. Understanding failures
illuminates the path toward reliability
and safety.
Embrace your failures and extract
every ounce of learning possible for you
and your team. You will be better for it.
If you are brave enough to write an article or
make a presentation about equipment failure,
program failure, management failure or any other
type of failure please contact me for a venue.
Terrence O’Hanlon tohanlon@reliabilityweb.com
Terrence O’Hanlon is the CEO and Publisher of Uptime Magazine
and Reliabilityweb.com. He is also the acting Executive Director of
the Association for Maintenance Professionals. His profile can be
found at www.maintenance.org
Obviously, people are not too excited or motivated to speak at
industry conferences or write magazine articles featuring their
failures. However, I speak from experience when I tell you
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