30 in 30 Podcast

Over the years we have seen many experienced leaders, maintenance managers, senior engineers, general managers and experienced tradespeople leave our industry, taking with them the knowledge and experience that they have gained over their 30 plus year careers. As the quote says above it is necessary to have understanding in order to simplify, and experience is essential for us to develop that understanding.

I wish I realised earlier that I should have asked the guys at the end of their career more questions in order to deeply understand how they came to their conclusions. I remember one guy in particular saying that one of the initiatives I was implementing would not succeed. I thought he was just being negative but I realised later that he knew and could see something that I could not. The initiative was going to be implemented either way, but had I asked him more questions and drilled into his concerns I would have been able to take his experience on board and improve the possibility of the initiative achieving significant positive outcomes for the business. It would have also meant that I would not have to learn from my own mistakes the same way as they did.

I believe it is essential to capture the knowledge of the most senior people in our industry and take from their experiences what we want and what we can relate to. This podcast enables us to take snippets of experience and learning developed through many years working in the front line and to apply whatever makes sense for us.

I want to thank all of the guests for their time and for sharing so openly about their successful projects where they were able to work with reliable assets and their worst experiences where the assets were far from producing great business outcomes. I also want to thank the mining companies in our industry who have for many years and are still today creating opportunities for people to learn and grow. I hope the experience shared here can help mining maintenance professionals to fast track their equipment reliability improvements and assist the mining companies for which they work to “Get more from assets!”

Mining equipment reliability comes from all of the people working as one team with mutual accountability for how they are going to achieve the required outcomes. Reliability improvement projects can lead to rapid improvement when people focus on the area that matters most which is the execution of the work in a quality manner.