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human capital management

Do You Fit the Bill? 8 Crucial Skills Maintenance Managers Must Have

As a maintenance reliability professional, you have technical training of some kind, basic knowledge of asset management principles, technical knowledge of the equipment you manage and practical experience from years working in the field. These are the hard skills needed to perform your job. However, technical education, training and knowledge will not give you the skills you need to effectively manage a team of maintenance professionals. Along with hard skills, you need a very particular set of soft skills to excel in your role. These skills will lead to greater productivity and efficiency across the maintenance team. More importantly, they will lead to less stress, greater job satisfaction and ongoing career achievement for you. These soft skills are:

Leadership for Reliability

Human Capital and the Internet of Things: Managing Talent and Leveraging Experience

by Burt Hurlock

If you have children aspiring to attend college, then you know that somewhere between the time of their birth and the present, the world changed. It went from valuing being well-rounded to valuing specialization. Whether that's a healthy development is a worthy debate, but not the purpose of this article. This article explores the role of the connected world in propagating specialization and how specialization has the potential to supercharge the value of old-fashioned human judgment.

Leadership for Reliability

Get Ready, Here Comes the Ultimate Multi-Skilled Worker

It seems like everyone is talking about the skilled labor shortage. From the New York Times to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), people are debating the issue of whether there really is a skills shortage or a lack of people with the right technical skills to work in today’s manufacturing. Many, including the New York Times, blame the problem on what they refer to as mismatched skills. Or, in other words, the workers have skills, just not the ones they need for the growing complexity of manufacturing.

Competition With a Purpose

"Competition with a purpose," Honda North America's Hugo Beltran smiles as he summarizes Honda's first Skills Olympics held at the Marysville, Ohio, site on March 6, 2014. "As a company, we recognized the need to focus some effort on our equipment service technicians (aka skilled tradespeople), how they are an integral part of our organization. On a daily basis, we depend on our equipment service technicians to communicate with our operations people, troubleshoot equipment, identify faults, and make repairs or modifications to keep our equipment up and running. We also wanted to create an event that incorporated the teamwork from the executive level to the equipment technicians, while incorporating Honda's core philosophy of a challenging spirit," the associate chief engineer explained. "At the end of the day, while only one team went home with the gold medals, everyone who was involved came out a winner."

Safety and Reliability Concepts

A Review of the Pyramid and Swiss Cheese Models

by Ron Moore

The safety pyramid was first proposed by H.W. Heinrich, whose 1931 book, “Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach,” stated that 88 percent of accidents are caused by “unsafe acts of persons” and put forth what is often referred to as Heinrich’s accident pyramid.

Where Have All the Bearing Scrapers Gone?

by: William Hillman

A 2013 paper titled, The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, by Justin R. Pierce, an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and Peter K.Schott, Yale School of Management and the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that the sharp decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs is a result of imports from China¹. Regardless of the cause, the fact is that U.S. manufacturing has declined over the past several years. Along with the decline in jobs, there has been a decline in the technical skills needed for performing manufacturing jobs. The loss of technical skills is largely due to the fact that as manufacturing jobs declined, job training refocused to other areas, such as service sector jobs.This all happened at a time when baby boomers, who were the backbone of American manufacturing, began leaving the workplace in droves due to retirement. The age of the baby boomers is rapidly coming to an end, but due to the decline in manufacturing, there's been no concerted effort to replace them.

Leadership for Reliability

A Reliable Plant – Good for Personal and Process Safety

Do you believe in safety? There is always a unanimous and resounding "Yes!" when this question is asked, particularly from executives. If you, particularly you executives, believe in safety, then you must believe in reliability and, more importantly, have the appropriate policies, systems, practices and measures to support reliability. You must walk the talk about safety.

4 Ways To Break Free From Being ‘Too Busy’

America began to acknowledge its cultural obsession with "busyness" a few years ago, when Tim Kreider wrote the now legendary piece "The Busy Trap" for the New York Times. Nearly three years later, while our culture certainly hasn't changed, an admitted addiction to busyness has at least transitioned from groundbreaking journalism to mainstream conversations.

Leadership for Reliability

Blame Complacent Engineers for Bad Management Decisions

Author's Note: While I'm solely responsible for this article, I am also entirely indebted to a process hazard analysis and loss control engineer (PHA/LCE) at a major refinery. In his contributed material, he is not disclosing anything of a proprietary nature. Still, it's a sign of the times that he has to remain anonymous. Perhaps it's because his expressions contain a measure of mild irony as he invades the comfort zone of equipment reliability engineers (REs). He quite obviously takes issue with their custom of limiting their work to mere analysis and recommendations. The REs, he notes, then consider their job done and let managers make decisions, some right and some wrong.

PEARL Certifies First Electrical Reconditioning Technician

The Professional Electrical Apparatus Recyclers League’s (PEARL) Technician Certification program helped to make the industrial and commercial electrical markets safer and more reliable in October when it certified Adam Tappe, a 22-year veteran at National Switchgear (Lewisville, Texas), as its first Level 1 electrical reconditioning certified technician.

Growth Brings Change: HIMA Adds New Senior Management

Over the past 10 years, safety automation expert HIMA has doubled its sales, tripled its workforce and increased its number of Group companies worldwide from two to 16. To ensure continued growth and success, the company has created the new positions of chief executive officer (CEO) and chief financial officer (CFO).

Hydraulic Institute Enters Into Training Partner Agreement With Abb and Baldor Electric Company

The Hydraulic Institute (HI) has entered a Training Partner Agreement with ABB, a leader in power and automation technologies and Baldor ElectricCompany, the leading North American manufacturer of industrial electric motors, drives and mechanical power transmission products. Through this relationship, all three companies will broaden educational opportunities for pump end-users, distributors and consulting firms by developing high quality, co-branded educational and training programs and sponsoring technical webinars and e-learning courses focused on a variety of pump topics as well as host the expanded Pump Systems Optimization courses.

New Hire Announcement

John Bickley has been hired as the Vice President of Sustainable Utility Sales at Hydrotex®, a manufacturer and distributor of high performance lubricant and fuel improver solutions. Bickley has over 35 years of experience in electric utility operations, maintenance and technical support, collaborative R&D, consultative sales, transmission systems reliability and compliance monitoring. He has held various positions at previous employers, including; TXU (Luminant), The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Pavilion Technologies, The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) and Shermco Industries.

human capital management

Do You Fit the Bill? 8 Crucial Skills Maintenance Managers Must Have

Human Capital and the Internet of Things: Managing Talent and Leveraging Experience

Get Ready, Here Comes the Ultimate Multi-Skilled Worker

Competition With a Purpose

Safety and Reliability Concepts

Where Have All the Bearing Scrapers Gone?

A Reliable Plant – Good for Personal and Process Safety

Is Your Company Fit for Deployment?

4 Ways To Break Free From Being ‘Too Busy’

Blame Complacent Engineers for Bad Management Decisions

PEARL Certifies First Electrical Reconditioning Technician

Get Out From Behind The Desk

What Chile Can Teach the World About Innovation

Training and Professional Development Make Happier and More Productive Employees

Adult Education On-Board an Aircraft Carrier: The Institute at Patriots Point Has Launched

Growth Brings Change: HIMA Adds New Senior Management

Comdel, Inc. Announces Leadership Changes

Okuma and Partners in THINC Announce Sandvik Coromant as Partner of the Year

Hydraulic Institute Enters Into Training Partner Agreement With Abb and Baldor Electric Company

New Hire Announcement