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Safety failures seem to fall into two categories.
In the current pandemic, we are seeing grocery stores accelerate their adoption of robots to restock store shelves. Once done, this will never go back to the old ways. The world of maintenance in our pulp and paper mills (and downstream plants) can work the same way.
If there is one thing the current COVID-19 crisis should teach us, if taken as an allegorical experience, is that dangers affecting safety are not always out in the open. I've told this story many times before, but perhaps you have not heard it...
No, I am not going to give you another COVID-19 advisory. You have no doubt already read countless admonishments on that subject. You do need to take them seriously, of course. But at this point, for the literate and sighted part of the population, I say let Darwinism take its course--you have been warned. For the infirm, the weak, the young and the very old -be generous and help them out. What is appropriate, though, in this first week of Safety Month, is to warn you about distractions. I can't think of another time in my nearly seventy years of life that I have ever seen the entire world focused on one subject as it is now. And, admit, it is a distraction. Distractions take our attention off safe practices.
The first thing that popped into my mind was to dress all your maintenance people in pre-Civil War hoop skirted ball gowns. Although it will maintain the distance, I can think of many other reasons this won't work. For the future, this just emphasizes more predictive maintenance and solid maintenance monitoring. If you know the condition of your equipment and the failure curve it is on, you can plan on how to prepare it in a timely fashion.
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OK, everything today is coronavirus. No matter which way you turn. Reminds me of a year's worth of Reader's Digest that I bought at a flea market years ago. The year was 1944 and nearly every story in every issue of that year was about the war. Well, one might say we are in a war now. If you are a maintenance contractor, likely you need to step up your game.
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When you look at auto racing, at least 50% of the difference between winners and losers is maintenance. The recent movie, Ford vs. Ferrari, drives this point home. Watch the movie, watch the maintenance. You just may learn something and improve your operations.
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Seems like a simple question, but it is often missed. How do you determine what to maintain? It starts with what you intend to keep. How do you determine what to keep?
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“Maintenance Again” is pronounced in many mills with a slight groan and downward inflection in the voice. In many CFO offices, the words “Maintenance Again” are recognized about as easily as any phrase in Klingon. By the way, you can translate “Maintenance Again” to Klingon—it is “leH jatlhqa” so don’t let the person holding the checkbook in your mill get by with feigning ignorance of the necessity of maintenance, no matter what language you use. I have been writing this column for over eighteen years and I have railed against the cheap maintenance managers for nearly fifty years. It is absolutely criminal to not do prescribed maintenance.
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Whether truck, rail, air or jitney, transportation companies often have a public relations problem.
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Throughout my career, I have seen lots of goods moved within many facilities' sites...
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Expecting a column on transportation here in February, you may have been slightly startled by this week's column title. This is the way cancer strikes, you are going along, minding your own business, planning what you'll do next and cancer rears its ugly head.
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We last visited transportation in February of 2019. What's new?
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I have seen few project engineers successfully transfer their skills between the two extremes of the paper industry. On the front end, we find incoming long wood, chippers, chip piles and so forth. At the other end of the business, we find printing and packaging lines with the daintiest of doodads, which must nevertheless work properly and flawlessly for long periods of time.
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If you have the corporate foresight to do so, leveraged buying can provide tremendous savings for the procurer and savings for the supplier as well.
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When you are in the trenches looking up, it is often easy to see the perceived capriciousness of capital budgets. Hence, as the project manager overseeing the actual project implementation, it is sometimes easy to be lackadaisical about the funding. Do this at your own peril.
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I have been around long enough to remember when retail interest rates were in the +20% range. At the time, corporations were not usually being charged at these levels, but they did reach into the mid-teens. The usual reaction at that point was not to do capital projects, but to wait. Even if corporations were self-funding, they often waited because they could make larger and safer returns with their money at interest in the bank. Today, interest rates are trivial, even for construction loans. Gone are the days when there was a sharp focus on construction interest costs.
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As we wrap up December's Power & Energy Emphasis, I want to offer a caution or two.
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I have admonished readers a number of times over the years not to demolish their fossil fuel-powered assets. Although they may be out of favor at the moment, history indicates nothing is ever permanent in the energy sector.
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Hydroelectric power has been a significant component in pulp and paper mills for over 120 years. Early modern paper mills quickly adopted electric power produced by streams near their facilities. It was a natural--the pulp and paper mills needed water and when the ability to generate hydroelectric power came along they quickly built dams and harnessed this renewable power.
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Solar cells are continuing to improve in efficiency. My best source tells me that within a few years, we will likely be seeing solar arrays of multiple layers, each layer tuned to a particular wavelength emitted by the sun. Why is this important now?
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I largely look at energy on a cost avoidance basis. Yes, we all want clean air (low emissions) but let's not go crazy following ideas that are not well proven scientifically (don't send me surveys on what scientists believe about energy consumption--people's opinions are not science). Nevertheless, when looking at places where energy is dear makes me realize we still have a long way to go to make our industry as efficient as possible.
If the problems with Innovation and Strategy are that we can never be certain as to how they will turn out, Creativity, the mortar that holds the other two together, suffers this fate in an even larger measure.
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There is the old children's story of the blind men describing an elephant. As the story goes each one of them walks around the elephant and feels different parts of it. As they do so, each has a different impression of what an elephant might be, based on the parts they touch. Some companies operate as the blind men did when it comes to setting a future course--their strategy. They are so lost in their myopic view of the world they miss the big picture.
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Many years ago, when I purchased a motorcycle, I wanted the equivalent of a "cruise control" for it. I shopped around and found this clever little mechanical device that fits on the right handlebar and gently locks the accelerator into position. With the flick of a handy little lever, you could turn it off. My cousin, a machinist, saw this and said, "I can copy that." I didn't let him. I think inventions should belong to the originator in perpetuity (I think we should still be paying royalties to the descendants of the inventor of tables and chairs--marvelous inventions in and of themselves). At least that is the way I used to think...
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