The chicken or the egg causality dilemma arises from the expression “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Chickens hatch from eggs, but eggs are laid by chickens, making it difficult to say which originally gave rise to the other. To ancient philosophers, the question about the first chicken or egg also evoked the questions of how life and the universe in general began.

In today’s engineering world, we are faced with an ever increasing amount of solutions surrounding maintenance improvement. All these solutions are offering maximum return on investment for the shareholders, with significant reductions in downtime, increase in production output, less accidents, all of which are very attractive to any business. Two solutions on offer are the use of Reliability Centered Maintenance and Root Cause Analysis – but which comes first? Should we put all our eggs in one basket and focus on one solution or spread the eggs across two baskets and implement the outputs from both?

In this workshop we look at how RCM and RCA are actually complementary of one another and how they both work towards the elimination of undesirable events through a proactive approach to maintenance.

In 1978, Stand Nowlan and Howard Heap created Reliability Centered Maintenance as a process to develop a complete maintenance strategy for commercial aircraft and the success of their methodology changed how both maintenance and reliability were viewed in this industry.

In 1997, using the original Nowlan and Heap RCM model, RCM Blitz was created to develop a complete maintenance strategy for manufacturing equipment and in the last ten years companies around the world are now using a methodology specifically designed to deliver reliability for manufacturing assets.

RCM Blitz offers a Reliability Centered Maintenance approach that reduces the time and resources required for Analysis. Attend this workshop to:

Is your organization hesitant to adopt a reliability-based approach to maintenance? Trying to change organizational culture is often challenging, but it is also very rewarding. The Reliability Game is designed to teach participants how to make the transition from a reactive to a proactive maintenance environment. They will learn to “follow the money” and further their understanding of the business potential of reliability.

Participants will learn:

The Reliability Game is played by teams of four people who will assume one of the following roles: Finance Manager, Purchasing Coordinator, Maintenance Resource Planner, Operations Coordinator. The concept is simple: each team determines the best way to manage their equipment, money, time, labor and material resources. Throughout the simulation, each team’s financial performance is tracked and discussed, creating a competitive atmosphere. By the game’s end there is typically a greater appreciation for the value of reliability and the entire reliability philosophy.

Your organization is asking your maintenance departments to keep machinery running longer with fewer people, solve problems and reduce failures, improve reliability, implement new programs, execute professional shutdowns and outages, and do so at reduced cost. This can only be accomplished if the maintenance organization is efficient, effective and good at coordinating with production.

OUTAGE! is fun, but it is also powerfully meaningful in the way it reinforces planning and scheduling concepts and best practices. This game is an exciting, interactive 8-hour simulation that replicates a real maintenance outage with the typical problems of parts, manpower constraints, QC problems, contractor issues, scheduling dilemmas, work orders, safety issues, work identified late, risk assessment, etc. It is played by teams of six to eight players. The element of competition works wonders. Each team is given an identical set-up, including parts, work orders, personnel requirements, schedule conflicts, etc.

Your organization is asking your maintenance departments to keep machinery running longer with fewer people, solve problems and reduce failures, improve reliability, implement new programs, execute professional shutdowns and outages, and do so at reduced cost. This can only be accomplished if the maintenance organization is efficient, effective and good at coordinating with production.

OUTAGE! is fun, but it is also powerfully meaningful in the way it reinforces planning and scheduling concepts and best practices. This game is an exciting, interactive 8-hour simulation that replicates a real maintenance outage with the typical problems of parts, manpower constraints, QC problems, contractor issues, scheduling dilemmas, work orders, safety issues, work identified late, risk assessment, etc. It is played by teams of six to eight players. The element of competition works wonders. Each team is given an identical set-up, including parts, work orders, personnel requirements, schedule conflicts, etc.

With the US and World economy going through stressful times we know maintenance budgets are going to see the affect so Ricky wants managers to have options to staff and train which will impact reliability of their assets in a proactive manner without having to go to anyone to ask for permission.

Ricky knows most of you either do not have all the positions that would make effective maintenance performance attainable including maintenance or reliability engineers. In many cases companies cannot staff all positions without exceeding the budget allowed. Ricky will discuss in this open workshop the function of maintenance and reliability engineering positions and offer you options so implementing these functions is possible with existing staff. You will learn some simple ways to make these functions work in your organization effectively with what you have.

This workshop provides an understanding of the basics that all organizations should routinely practice in order to be successful in reaping the benefits of cost reduction, avoidance and/or bottom line profit increases from one of the last frontiers for improvement in any manufacturing or service organization.

Subjects covered include:

During the workshop no less than 25 real-world case studies will be presented. These are from named North American companies that have survived and thrived (and some that failed because they started too late) to meet and overcome global competition even as pundits concluded they couldn’t continue to do business on this continent.

This hand’s on workshop will emphasize the PM Optimization (PMO) methodology, an RCM based approach to maintenance analysis. Whereas RCM was developed for new plant and the design process, PMO was developed specifically to improve the performance of established maintenance operations quickly and effectively utilizing RCM principles.

Rather than starting from scratch and evaluating many failure possibilities, PMO directly focuses on plant and personnel productivity by:

You and your team members will learn how to derive a focused strategy, deal with the demands of your CEO, read and analyze KPI benchmarking reports, which variables you can change over time and what effect they will have on the overall KPI score.

Being responsible for maintenance or asset management performance is not the easiest job. Whether your equipment is old and worn out or brand new and state of the art, you will face technical challenges on a daily basis. Empowering your people, improving your work, processes and leveraging your (IT) tools sounds good but how to do it in the best way? The results we have achieved so far, how do they compare to other companies in our type of industry? Should we focus on more uptime or reduce costs? Which are the ‘buttons’ to press on, what results will they have? There are so many best practices and 3 letter buzzwords out there, which of them to start with?

VDM Business experience is dynamic like real life. Strategy and decisions of all the teams are entered in a simulation tool, so your competitors will affect your situation. The team that creates the most economic value after a number of playing rounds wins the prestigious VDM award. Needless to say it is fun to play!

Are you ready to experience the VDM Business experience yourself?

In the past decade, most apprentice and technical training programs have been eliminated. The result has been a tremendous lack of technically skilled people entering the workforce. This coupled with the increasing levels of technology has left many companies with a severe shortage of technically skilled personnel in their plants.

The only solution? It is to re-institute technical training programs to raise the number of skilled individuals capable of maintaining and improving plant equipment and processes. Based on several case studies, this workshop highlights the processes necessary to develop technical training programs. Secondly, the workshop addresses the steps necessary to implement technical training programs. Finally, the workshop will show how to manage an on-going technical training program, including how to continuously track the training program to insure it delivers a return on investment.

Topics to be covered include:

The attendees will leave this workshop with the tools to evaluate their current workforce skills, the training options available to their organization, and a method for gaining executive support for the training initiative.