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There
is an opportunity to get a huge reduction in production costs and a major
increase in equipment reliability that business has not yet fully recognized.
If
you had operators and maintainers that ran the plant as designed, who could
foresee equipment and process problems and fix them themselves - how much
better off would your organization be?
If your operators and maintainers were keen fully qualified
professional engineers with 10 years ‘hands-on’ experience with your
plant and equipment you would be somewhere close to that ideal.
If
your entire work force knew and understood what a keen professional engineer
with years of ‘hands-on’ practical experience knows about equipment,
plant operations and maintenance there would be a huge reduction in
production costs and a major increase in equipment reliability.
It would also cost you 2 or 3 times the current wages bill.
Though with the right people you would get that money back, and more.
Such people would develop more efficient and effective ways to run
the plant and in so doing would turn their salaries into profit for the organization.
This
is the mistaken trade-off many businesses make.
They hire low cost people to do a job and give up long term
profitability. There
is nothing wrong with hiring low cost people and training them to become
high value people.
But to hire low cost people and expect them to become high value
people without training will only lead to frustration and loss of profit.
Even
after years of experience on your plant, low-value, untrained people will
never be as profitable to the business as it would be if you had keen
engineering qualified persons.
Getting really high performance output from operating plant needs a
thorough understanding of how and why the plant, the process and the
equipment interact and perform as they do.
This is not possible unless people have studied the engineering and
physics that control plant operation and performance.
When people have intimate knowledge of a piece of plant they are in a
position to use it and modify it to achieve its very best performance.
The
best low-cost option for business is to hire people with the attributes and
attitudes they require and then put them onto a training program to develop
their engineering knowledge and understanding.
This should be the case for all operators and all maintainers.
There can be no exception.
Everyone must make learning about the engineering of their plant and
equipment part of the job.
The aim is to get to the ideal of everyone being a ‘keen, fully
qualified engineer’ with years of ‘hands-on’ experience on your
equipment and process.
The
important point to realize is we are talking about developing ‘engineering
experienced plant operators and maintainers’ and not engineers with a
four-year degree.
We want people that have worked the plant for years and have lived
with it day-in-and-day-out.
That have pulled it apart and rebuilt it many times.
They have thought about how it works and know the exact physics and
chemistry of what happens in the process.
Such people are truly valuable to the organization because they solve
problems and improve the business.
They cannot be easily replaced.
People that know your plant that well take years to educate and
develop. But
they will make the business lots of money and save people lots of time and
trouble.
The
experiences that make people worthwhile and valuable to you come at a cost.
You can either pay for their formal education to learn about the way
your plant operates or they can learn about your plant from making lots of
mistakes. These
mistakes cost you money but along the way they learn from them.
Either way, this cost of learning is a training expense.
If you put the same amount of money into educating them in the
engineering and chemistry of the plant as it costs to fix their mistakes,
you would get more versatile people that can do a larger variety of jobs and
have a wider view of the world.
This eventually translates into high performance across numerous
areas of your business and leads to huge increases in results throughout the
company.
This
opportunity awaits all businesses.
The opportunity to decide too purposely develop their operators and
maintainers into ‘engineers’ who can use that deeper knowledge along
with their plant skills to produce massive gains in production and plant
reliability.
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