Training - online
Did you know that Conscious Asset provides a free introductory webinar of our essential Uptime Program?
Our online learning platform provides many courses which can be taken in an efficient and timely manner, this prevents downtime with staff who would normally have to take many hours a day out of their routine to allow for training of similar courses. Read more “Uptime Webinar – free!”
UPTIME
Many believe that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That’s just not right. Measurements can only count what is countable – dollars, production numbers, headcounts, timeliness, etc. They can’t count the achievement of objectives unless those objectives are purely numeric in nature.
For instance, you can count attendance or ticket sales for an event. It might appear to be a huge success by that measure, but is it a success if those attending didn’t enjoy the event? Read more “Myth Busting 15: KPIs”
Technology
In theory, integrated computer systems enable multiple uses for any single piece of data that is input only once. Data becomes available wherever it needs to be in whatever business process is integrated into the whole. In a sense it is like our brains – information and experience is registered once and available for access whenever needed for any purpose. Integrated systems should make our lives at work easier, but they seldom do that. Read more “Myth Busting 14: Integrating systems”
Asset Management
Financial managers, directors and CFOs are primarily concerned with company financial performance. Really good ones are far more than controllers and accountants, they take a forward view of the business and contribute to its growth and health in ways that go beyond accounting and merely complying with rules about reporting.
CFOs can be very helpful allies as maintainers and physical asset managers embark on making improvements. Read more “The bottom line”
Technology
You’ve acquired and are now implementing a new CMMS / EAM (Computerized Maintenance Management System / Enterprise Asset Management) computer software program to help you manage maintenance. It may be a simple functional system that only looks after maintenance and likely Maintenance, Repair and Operating (MRO) spares, or it may be part of a much bigger enterprise system that handles many business functions. Regardless, one question almost always arises when converting from one to another system – what should we do about our old data? Read more “Myth Busting 13: We need our old data”
Change Management
Technology provides us with some fantastic tools to help us work better, smarter, faster and more efficiently. BUT, it doesn’t help us think any better. We can actually get too dependent on it and our thinking is weakened. If you don’t believe that, just watch what happens when you try to buy something and the computerized cash register goes down. Can they actually take payment? And if you use cash, can the clerk make proper change without looking at the cash register to tell them how much to give you.
We have an amazing array of computerized tools to help us manage our maintenance work. Literally hundreds of different options exist. Some are complex enterprise systems integrating with all your other enterprise systems for finance, human resources, etc. Read more “Myth Busting 12: CMMS is the Silver Bullet”
Reliability
Even if you have excellent planning and scheduling, you may still experience excessive downtime. Some consultants will promise that you’ll save a great deal of money with good P&S simply because planned and scheduled work is less expensive to execute. They are partially right too! But that’s only part of the picture. That excessive downtime you are still experiencing has nothing to do with P&S skills and schedule compliance. In fact, even with good P&S, if you are doing the wrong proactive maintenance, then you will have difficulty achieving high levels of schedule compliance. You need to put the other piece of the puzzle in place – reliability – start doing the right maintenance. Read more “Stop doing too much maintenance”
Planning and Scheduling
Surprises happen anywhere and to anyone. In your operation, you can expect that regardless of your best efforts, some work will arise that must be done right away. Most would call these emergencies.
To me, an emergency is something that is or is about to have a MAJOR impact on: Safety (i.e.: injury or death), Environment (i.e.: a major incident that is likely to get you fined or shut down), or Production/service delivery (i.e.: irreparable impact on the bottom line in the financial reporting period). Read more “Myth Busting 11: Leave Room for Surprises”