Venue: Engineering House, 21 Bedford Street, North Melbourne
Date: 19th April, 5:30pm for 6pm start
Contact: ken.robertson@mesa.org.au
The guest speaker for Melbourne Chapter’s April meeting is Bill Holmes from SIRF Roundtables. Bill is a mechanical engineer with experience in reliability, planning and scheduling, plant engineering and production management through employment in manufacturing plants, power stations and in oil and gas processing plants. Bill joined the Strategic Industry Research Foundation (SIRF) in 1994. He has helped in the development of the Industrial Maintenance Roundtable and in the development of SIRF Roundtables which now provides learning networks across Australia and New Zealand through its four “Roundtable” networks;
• The Industrial Maintenance Roundtable for maintenance and reliability practitioners,
• The Manufacturing Excellence Roundtable focused on manufacturing practices,
• The Lean Roundtable which brings together Universities, TAFE’s and RTO’s engaged in the Competitive Manufacturing Initiative, and
• The Knowledge Management Roundtable which brings together a broad variety of sectors ranging from banks, airlines, legal firms, through to SIRF Rt’s traditional areas of maintenance and manufacturing.
Bill has enjoyed the opportunity to see maintenance practices in many different organizations and has participated in more than 100 formal benchmarking studies of maintenance organizations across five continents using the DuPont benchmarking methodology.
These studies and the many activities hosted by SIRF Rt have shown the critical importance of “defect elimination” in delivering highly reliable plant. This realization and the observation that many companies fail to address the root cause of failure led SIRF Rt to develop a process targeted at Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
SIRF’s process is called RCA Rt. The process is designed to telescope from simple “5 Whys” through to the most complex investigation. The process provides a common language and framework for people at all levels. It is intended that it be used routinely, hands on, on the shop floor but also has the capacity to be integrated into a computer based incident/action management system if required.
Bill will provide an overview of the process and of the development path.
