Clark spent the week in Honolulu for the Annual Reliability & Maintenance, RCM 2007 Conference with a group of over 400 representatives from all over the world.

After many emails with long time sponsors of the Reliability and Maintenance conference, Terry O’Hanlon and Jim Hall, it was time to meet them face to face.  Was my trip to Honolulu and the conference worth ones time?  The answer is a resounding yes! 

I have been involved in maintenance, planning, operations, design for ease of maintenance, for my whole career and have been upgrading of many basic or standard designed systems.  Maybe a little better wording would be that systems are designed to be at the cutting edge of the cost curve.  Many times not for long term operation or to be for the ease of the maintenance needed.  The weak point could be a inexpensive belt, but to change it the entire plant must be shut down and half of the equipment and safety devices taken apart to get to it. 

Many times a simple reversal of the layout can solve this and change the maintenance to minutes instead of hours or a simple upgrade of the drive can change the time to perform the maintenance from 6 months to 3 years.  These things I have dealt with for many years.  It was interesting that I herd the same story repeatedly, at the conference.  Funny how many of these problems fail to get to the upper management who have always been tasked to just look at the bottom line, not the total cost of project, based on operation and maintenance.  It all depends on who's pocket the project is coming out of and in the end, operations and maintenance become one and the profit and loss tells the whole story. 

This is where I have the background and experience to work with a design team, which includes the operations, maintenance and safety departments to make a plant or project even better and reduce downtime.  Reliability and Maintenance do go hand in hand with the right program to give you the information you are looking for.