Guest blogger Ray Beebe says that he got bitten by the “condition monitoring bug” when he started his 28 years as a mechanical engineer in steam power generation in Australia and the UK. He built on that with nearly 17 years at Monash University, leading their off-campus postgraduate programs in maintenance and reliability engineering since 1996.
Each year, around 200 students around the world study while working in their home country.
Ray is committed to learning and sharing. He has written two books and many papers for conferences and technical magazines. As the Monash studies are work-place oriented, he and the other 6 staff teaching the programs add to their own experiences by learning much from the students.
As with our other invited columnists, he has a free rein to cover any aspect he considers relevant.
“Maintenance is out, Asset Management is in”
What’s in a word? People have been working in the maintenance and reliability area for years. Standards have evolved that often include definitions or terminology, professional organisations work on agreeing in terminology, yet….
As one guy said to me, “maintenance means the janitorial aspects”. I have never had that understanding. To me, maintenance means stewardship of the plant so that it produces at the quantity and quality to meet the needs of the business. That includes activities to improve plant reliability or output. I altered the title of our Monash programs to reflect that wider view.
“Asset management” can also mean juggling financial assets: stocks, shares etc.), so a more correct label is “physical asset management” as used by John Mitchell in the title of his excellent book. Asset management does imply wider coverage than just the engineering part, and should therefore draw in other professionals than engineers.
A catchy definition I heard is "lust to dust". This is a fine overall concept, but how many of us have the luxury of being involved in a plant asset from the start? Like I suspect is so for the majority of engineers, I have worked at several places in the middle - someone else had decided the design, someone else again built it, and after I left, someone else will decide the decommissioning and dismantling.
Two of the plants I worked at have been demolished - both with their latest parts built in 1960 or so (yes, before my time: just!). Not too good to get emotionally involved with your workplaces! What really means something other than a name is the expectations of a job's role. Maybe I have a renegade tinge, but many of my jobs have evolved rather differently to the starting expectations as set out in the job description. Maybe this is part of what is meant by "managing upwards?"
I could have added to my little story. Engineers who manage the construction of a plant learn a lot of the details as it comes together. In the late 1960s, as I crawled around underneath a 200MW generator trying to figure out the cooling gas flow path, I wondered why they who had seen it in pieces as it came together did not stay to run the plant, rather than depart for the next new plant. After some years, I figured that they did not stay because they are fundamentally a different type of person.
Waxing literature-wise, the English engineer-author Neville Shute said in his biography "Slide Rule" that he left his company Airspeed in the 1930s because he "was a starter not a runner". His best selling books no doubt helped him decide. (As a kid, I remember the filming of “On the Beach” in Melbourne, Australia with Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck. Ava is supposed to have said that Melbourne was the perfect place to make a movie about the end of the world!” It came out later that she did not say that at all- it was made up by a journalist).
The then State Electricity Commission of Victoria, Australia (incidentally, Sir John Monash was its founding General Manager from 1921) had many good practices as a government-owned business. The SEC mined the brown coal (some of it up to 69% water content), then generated, transmitted and distributed electricity. Since privatisation from the mid-1990s, there are now several companies involved.
In the 1970s, for the building of the Loy Yang power stations (now 3000+MW), some 20 or so engineers from the production group of departments were assigned to the spec writing/tender review teams. The two on the boilers and turbines were full-time, the rest of us part-time. We had to ensure that field experience was included, and I think the results show in the excellent reliability of the plants since. Would a private company do the same? How would today's short-term focus on building "shareholder value" fit?That Loy Yang work sounds like asset management to me. I too would be interested to know of any such organisations.
So, whatever terminology we use, the key issue is surely that engineering is required with a focus on the business. Has that changed? I think not.
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