By Paul V. Arnold, editor-in-chief, Noria Publishing

This past Christmas, I received one of the greatest gifts ever from Santa Claus - a global positioning system (GPS). This high-tech navigation tool mounts to the dashboard of my car and serves to guide and instruct me when I’m behind the wheel. It informs me about:

• Where I am
• Where I’m going
• The best way to get there
• The pace at which I’m going
• When I should expect to “get there”
• Resources available along the way
• Past journeys (have I been down this road before?)

By networking with satellites and accessing volumes of files that pertain to my path, it lets me know how to proceed to the next point and raises a red flag when I’ve taken a wrong turn.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a GPS available to guide and instruct you in your career as a maintenance and reliability professional?

Fortunately for all of us, such a solution is available. It’s the professional conference.
Attending a professional conference – such as Noria Corporation’s RELIABLE PLANT 2009 conference September 1-3 in Columbus, Ohio - does everything that an onboard navigation system does … and then some.

Attending a conference lets you know “where I am.”
Is what you are doing today “good enough”, especially in these economically sensitive times? Is what you are doing today “up to industry expectations”, “better than the plant down the road”, “better than the competition”, “best in class”, “as good as Toyota would do it” or “world class”? Or, is it quite the opposite? How would you know?

On the GPS, “where I am” is easy to spot. It’s the brightly colored digital car image. That’s you.
In the professional world? Well, conferences bring together a multitude of speakers who have a wide range of experiences and insights on the state of their industry. (Industrial professionals from around the world will lead 101 sessions at RELIABLE PLANT 2009; these sessions will be found in five concurrent sub-conferences: Reliability World, Lubrication Excellence, Lean Manufacturing, Plant Energy/Sustainability and Plant Safety.) Through case studies and industry reports, through snapshots and stone-cold data, they give you a true understanding of the real world – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Measure yourself up to the companies featured and referenced in the conference sessions. You will get a clear view of where you, your organization and your company stand today.

Attending a conference lets you know “where I’m going.”
Your boss wants you to play a lead role in reducing organizational costs by (fill in the blank) percent by the end of this year. Your company is expecting an equally challenging (and completely measurable) increase in productivity and performance over the same time period.

What do you do? You can go crazy. You can go beat your head against a wall. Or, you can go to a conference, where – through exposure to a wide range of informational resources – you can get a handle on where you need to go in order to achieve those deliverables.

At RELIABLE PLANT 2009, the conference, exhibition and workshops may very well point you in the direction you need to go. “If I applied lean techniques to my tool cribs, I could identify wasteful/redundant spending and eliminate all that time looking for parts.” “If I could improve safety, I could improve morale, and that would have an impact on productivity and absenteeism.” “If I applied root cause failure analysis after a mechanical event, I could eliminate fixing the same problems over and over, saving me time and money.” “We’ve never had much of a strategy for machinery lubrication. With some focus, we could probably really reduce what we spend on lubricants and increase the performance of the equipment.”

Attending a conference lets you know the best way to get there.
You now have a general idea of where you want to go. For your car trip, you may want to go to Des Moines, Iowa. The GPS maps out the best way to get you from Point A to Des Moines, Iowa. For your professional journey, you may want to pursue lean techniques or lubrication best practices or a reduction in energy usage. Attending a conference helps you map out the best way there.

Take lubrication strategy. At RELIABLE PLANT 2009, spending three days in educational sessions and on the exhibit floor, it hits you that you need to follow these four steps as soon as you get back to the plant:

1. Throw out the milk jugs, coffee cans and Coke bottles that we’ve used to store and pour oil. They’re the cause of contamination and probably a reason why bearings keep failing. Buy storage containers that are made for industrial lubricants, and are dedicated and labeled to hold only specific lubes.
2. Convert my calendar-based oil changes to ones based on condition. The calendar-based oil changes are wasting time and money (labor, product and disposal).
3. Work more closely with my lubricant supplier and have the relationship based on applications, strategy and total cost instead of just transactions.
4. Read the new book that I bought in the Noria bookstore booth on lubrication requirements and testing methods.

The next 50 or so steps will come after you re-examine your notes, go through all of the presentations from the conference CD, receive the packets of catalogs and guides that you requested from exhibitors, have several chat sessions with your colleagues from your company’s sister plants, and take that benchmarking tour that you arranged with the session speaker after his presentation.

Attending a conference lets you know the pace at which you’re going.
The GPS gives you a readout of your current speed – 45 mph, 70 mph, whatever. In the professional world, it can be hard to decipher whether you’re going too fast or too slow or on pace with the established norm.

For instance, you’re bent on changing the culture of maintenance at your plant from reactive to proactive. You work at a 100-employee facility in the Northeast part of the United States. The site has been around since 1953. The workforce is non-union. And, the average age of the 24-man maintenance crew is 58. What kind of timeframe are you looking at? One year? Three years? Five years? Fifty years?

In a big conference setting, through exposure to a variety of case studies, industry reports and conversations with fellow attendees, you should be able to find facts and figures from others who are in the same boat as you. The hundreds upon hundreds of attendees at RELIABLE PLANT 2009 come from a wide range of backgrounds. Among them will undoubtedly be representatives from medium-sized plants in the Northeast that have been around for more than 50 years and whose non-union maintenance workforce has an average age of more than 55. After the conference, you may realize that the average pace is 3.5 years for a conversion from reactive to proactive.

Attending a conference lets you know when you should expect to “get there”.
The GPS lets you know that at your current rate of speed, you should arrive in Des Moines, Iowa, at 6:18 p.m.

With knowledge on your pace from the previous section (obtained at the conference), you should know that if you can officially launch your push toward proactive maintenance in November 2009, you should arrive at your stated destination in May 2013.

Attending a conference gives you access to resources available along the way.
The GPS can let you know that a McDonald’s, a Chevron station and an antique mall are located 2.6 miles from your current location.

A conference such as RELIABLE PLANT 2009 will let you know about and expose you to a slew of educational materials that are available to attendees. This could include a report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on ways to reduce energy consumption, white papers on the topic of Reliability-Centered Maintenance, a Webinar a company is holding next month on best practices for kaizen – the list goes on and on.

Attending a conference makes you cognizant of past journeys.
A GPS does this by giving you a backlog of recent addresses that you’ve plugged in.
The same road that has been traveled the same way for 20 years will only take you so far. New times call for new roads and new frontiers. Conferences like RELIABLE PLANT 2009 show you those paths.
This conference is for you.

On September 1-3, all paths lead to Columbus, Ohio, for Noria Corporation’s RELIABLE PLANT 2009 conference. We welcome you and your co-workers to check out this year’s packed lineup of educational sessions, workshops, exhibitions and certification examinations. You will find that this event will serve as a guide to will help get you where you want to go.