leadership for reliability

By John Scott

We have all heard the old saying that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," but never did this Confucius saying ring truer than when implementing manufacturing excellence.

Uptime magazine Publisher and Editor Terrence O'Hanlon recently caught up with the following Uptime Award winning companies and asked them: "How did you get management's approval to move forward with this program and support you through the journey which eventually led to winning this award?"

All North American steel manufacturers face the same challenges: foreign competition, rising costs and falling prices. Dofasco responds to the challenges better than anyone; they are North America's most profitable steel company.

How does Dofasco do it? Can you become your industry's most profitable firm by applying Dofasco's reliability secrets?

Summary
This paper will discuss the five key elements required to successfully transition from a traditional, repair-focused organisational culture, to a proactive, reliability-focused culture, and reap the rewards of increased performance of both equipment and people.

By Gary Johnson, Reliability Manager, Alcoa, Inc. and Tom Dabbs, Managing Principal, Life Cycle Engineering

This excellent paper and others were presented at IMC-2004 - the 19th International Maintenance Conference.

By Ron Moore

Background and Introduction
During a recent meeting, a mid-level manager with a large petroleum company was asking my opinion about which manufacturing and industrial companies were the best in the world. My reply was that most large organizations had manufacturing plants that covered the spectrum ranging from very poor to excellent, but none that I had direct experience with stood out to me as being consistently excellent in their manufacturing practices across the board, that is, in most all plants. As part of that discussion, he also asked "How much autonomy do site managers have (in the organizations you've seen)?" I had to think for a moment, at which point I said, "They have very little financial autonomy, and nearly complete operational autonomy, a recipe for highly variable performance, and ultimately, failure." I'll explain my view.