I don't care who you are or what you do, you simply must read Seth Godin's blog. He is the pied piper of a new age of communication and business building. I was inspired by him to write this post.

Isn't it strange how the promise of future glory tends to be overcome by the reality of past failures?

Preventing financial, environmental and safety related business losses caused by critical assets is undoubtedly the central role of reliability engineers, maintenance practitioners and the discipline of physical asset management.

The majority of posts you read on condition monitoring are all about detecting the onset of failure. Using condition monitioring in this way could also be described as the traditional approach to CBM.

The principles are pretty straightforward.

1st - Define the failure mode you are looking for and work out what signs it exhibits that it is starting to fail. (Be careful not to confuse cause and symptom, of course.)

2nd - Determine the time between detection and functional failure.

I have been on Twitter now for about a year or so. At first I didn't get it, and it was actually pretty annoying. But, much to my surprise, today I really enjoy it. I check through my tweets pretty regularly and use it to keep in touch with people from all over the world. Fantastic little medium. Anyway, I have recently figured out that I am not the only reliability professional using Twitter! So now I can keep up with part of my asset management network on Twitter.

Sooner or later, most companies that are serious about asset performance end up looking at the option of building a reliability department. My personal view is that ultimately, reliability should be like safety. It is everyone's job, it is threaded throughout the business, and there should be no need for a central policeman setting policy or doing the work for you. But ... that is a little bit utopian, I know.

I have ranted and raved about the curse of criticality here several times in the past. While criticality is very good for separating clients and their money, it's use for implementing reliability is somewhere between severly limiting and a fatal flaw..depending on the urgency your company has.

The recesion is like an outgoing tide, uncovering lots of ship wrecks in its wake. 

Half finished projects, cost overruns that were easily able to be hidden, and atrocious practices that were exceptionally useful when it was all about getting product out the gate - but they are suddenly a liability now that we are all focused inwards on cost control and shrinking profit margins.

It's easy to panic. Heck it is  a natural human reaction to panic and blame anyone near you who isn't panicking! At the very least it is hard to k now exactly where to start.

The continual debates and semantical posturing over the difference between maintenance and reliability engineering is one of the most astoundingly ridiculous debates to emerge in physical asset management in the last 10 years. 

Some people feel compelled to cut and paste role descriptions when we talk about this stuff, but it can be defined quite simply. Maintenance Engineering is about efficiency while Reliability Engineering is about effectiveness.

For an industry that routinely generates large volumes of documentation, it is shocking to see just how bad many of them are. A lot of it is pseudo-intellectual garbage that is often written by ivory tower engineers.

From my narrow viewpoint, these are a few tips that should help you to recognize when a document is valid and worth reading, or if it is just another piece of corporate litter.

1. They dont reference, in whole or in part, any internationally accepted standards.

John Moubray's article speaking out against streamlined RCM approaches was a watershed article. For the first time, Moubray spoke about the coming age of accountability for those charged with managing assets, and the need for defensibility in decision-making.

He was slammed by many at the time as a scaremonger, however, the reality has proved to be far more frightening than anything any of us could have imagined.