In his opening message for African Fusion this month, SAIW President and Eskom’s chief welding engineer, Morris Maroga urges against taking hasty and expedient decisions. Short term thinking doesn’t help anyone and yields only short term gains, but if we succeed in putting the economy back on track, everyone will gain for the foreseeable future, he says, before urging fabricators and manufacturers to focus on developing properly skilled young people for the future: “Without skilled people, it is impossible to realise an African continent with thriving economies, peace and prosperity – and there is no better time to upskill employees than now.”
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Slow economic growth seems to have become the new normal. Estimates from an Economic Research Letter put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggest the ‘normal’ pace for long-term US GDP growth will remains between 1.5 and 1.75%, despite higher 2018 to 2019 averages of 2.7%. And while the reasons for South Africa’s current malaise may be more complex, it is hard to see a scenario where we will ever return to pre-2008 growth rates.
‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was a ‘motivational’ message developed in preparation for World War II to raise the morale of the British public. At the time, the poster was rarely displayed and it was only rediscovered at the start of the 20th century at a bookshop in Alnwick, North of Newcastle. It has since become a very well-known phrase that encapsulates British doggedness.
I don’t find its 1939 ‘failure’ surprising. It is a call to endure rather than to motivate, and more than endurance was needed at that time. In hard times, however, endurance has always been a survival necessity. When it comes to ‘new normals’, though, there is an additional need to make permanent and long-term adaptations so that the hard times themselves do not remain normal.
For plant equipment and its long-term health, ‘keeping calm and carrying on’ is exactly what operators need. Nobody wants the drama and panic associated with plant break downs. We prefer plant equipment that continues to function, preferably forever and without any fuss. Reliability is the panacea.
It is unachievable, however, without effort, long-term commitment, skills and investment. Procedures and systems have to be put into place, monitoring equipment installed and suitably trained people employed to manage reliability programmes.
In our Maintenance and reliability management feature for this issue, Martec asset reliability specialist, Arveen Gobind, describes the difference between reliability engineering and maintenance engineering: “A reliability engineer’s skill set is diverse, driving business strategies to achieve goals through a well-structured path utilising vast amounts of data, while the maintenance engineer’s skills are used for day-to-day fire-fighting activities to ensure assets that have failed are brought back into service in the shortest amount of time,” he says.
Like Maroga, Gobind identifies skill-sets as key to implementing reliability strategies and maintenance programmes. The reliability journey begins with a risk-based perspective, he says, identifying how to manage and mitigate against failure risks and then evaluating the direct impacts of the implemented procedures and continuous monitoring programmes.
He goes on to describe some basic techniques and data analysis that can make overall plant effectiveness sustainable. Over time, the data quality will incrementally be improved, which will result in improved information quality and reliable decision making, Govind notes.
In this month’s cover story, Mixtec is celebrating 35 years of doing business, having supplied more than 35 000 agitators in that time. The company has, according to Rudi Swanepoel, “evolved a sophisticated after sales service offering that continuously seeks to reduce downtime and improve mixing efficiency.”
Raising supplier service levels to better support the reliability of installed plant equipment has become a critical survival strategy for original equipment manufacturers. Plant operators remain reluctant to invest in new technologies, preferring to ‘nurse’ their existing fleets to endure the hard times.
In response, Mixtec has adopted a highly cost effective approach to plant up-grade projects. “With EPCs and project houses, we have successfully and cost effectively upgraded systems in Zambia, Ghana and DRC, retrofitting pre-existing mixers to improve mixing efficiencies while ensuring we can match production increases, improve reliability and reduce downtime,” explains Swanepoel.
As a nation arguably facing near-crisis conditions, all South Africans need to doggedly endure, keep calm and carry on. In addition however, as individuals, company’s, state institutions, voters and politicians, we need to think long-term, seeking new and better ways of working and living so that ‘crisis-mode’ does not remain normal for us.
The benefit of all must become the priority for all and, as Maroga suggests, what better place to start than by advancing the skills of our youth so that our plants can be made more reliable, efficient and productive and our lives more sustainable.
