HM:
Is “Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices” your first book?
Gulati:
Yes, that was my first book. I’ve been teaching, preaching, practicing these best practices, and publishers were coming after me. As a part of certification here at AEDC, we have more than 130 people certified in maintenance reliability. There are many books, and this was my attempt to have in one place all the good practices. It is a documentation of some good practices that need to be implemented, and we have done many of them at AEDC.
HM:
Who’s the target audience for your book?
Gulati:
It’s mostly aimed at maintenance and reliability practitioners, designers and project managers, in fact, anybody who works with assets as an operator, maintainer or in any other capacity. I’m also working with educational institutions, so it could be adopted to classroom settings, too.
HM:
You bring years of actual “shop floor” and management experience from different industries to the table. Is that where these best practices come from or is it more philosophical or educational?
Gulati:
It’s both, but mostly it’s from my experience from day one on the shop floor. I started my career at a foundry and I was mad and upset at how the systems were designed. Over the years, I changed industries and gained experience about the right things to do.
HM:
Terrence O’Hanlon wrote in the forward that at AEDC maintenance seems to be viewed as an “important enabler of the mission” instead of as a necessary evil or cost center. Is this the kind of culture you are trying to instill at AEDC and recommend through your book that other industries adopt?
Gulati:
Yes. Terry O’Hanlon has seen how we have evolved from reactive to proactive in 15 years. We believe in sharing our good practices with others; that’s how we learn.
HM:
Can you define this concept of best practices? What do you mean when you say that?
Gulati:
Anything that produces better results than what you have been doing is a best practice. Caution: you have to tailor any practice you bring. Most people fail to do that, and that’s why they are not successful. As you implement a best practice, tailor it to your needs and your environment then it will be good.
HM:
You say that implementation is not as simple as just putting something into effect. Why is that?
Gulati:
There are data available that more than 50 percent of RCM (reliability centered maintenance) projects don’t get implemented. They stay on the shelf. It’s a lot of work to implement changes, and it takes a lot of patience and management support. And that’s why I say it’s not that easy to do these best practices. There are a lot of challenges, and that’s where tailoring comes in the picture. Anything you want to do as a best practice is a change. We don’t like change.
HM:
It’s important to get the workforce to “buy into” this concept to give them a good understanding of maintenance and reliability principles isn’t it?
Gulati:
Yes. You know I started teaching 10 or 12 years ago doing two- to four-hour long classes; now I have almost two days of class. I used to twist many arms to get them in my class. Now the culture is changing, and people are coming and ready to go to the next class.
HM:
There is also a connection between maintenance, reliability and safety. Should management and workers alike have an interest in this?
A reliable plant is a safe plant. A safe plant is a reliable plant. As the safety goes up, the injury rates goes down; the reliability goes up, or vice-versa.
HM:
By the very nature of the concept, some of this book gets fairly technical, but you’ve made it as readable as you could.
Gulati:
Yes. I tried not to use technical jargon. I tried to make it simple so anybody can understand it.
HM:
You’ve got a chapter about work force management and the generation gap. Why is that important?
Gulati:
When we were developing the CMRP (Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional) exam, we found that we had to deal with people.
Right now our work force is varied and there are a lot of different generations and different ethnic backgrounds. We have to work with them, so I thought it was appropriate to talk about these things.
HM:
You have another book that has just been published, don’t you?
Gulati:
This new book is called “The Professional’s Guide to Maintenance and Reliability Terminology. “
The concept of these books took four to six years. My coauthors, Jerry Kahn, Robert Baldwin and I were working on the best practices committee of SMRP, and we were struggling to find the standard definitions of our maintenance and reliability terms.
That’s where the concept started. So we documented about 3,000 items in it. It has all the definitions, abbreviations and acronyms we use a lot, and it will be a good reference for anybody coming into the field.
“Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices,” published by Industrial Press, is available at major book stores, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble and MRO-Zone.com
“The Professional’s Guide to Maintenance and Reliability Terminology” is published by Reliability Web.Com and is available through MRO-Zone.com
By Shawn Jacobs, Aerospace Testing Alliance