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Operational Half Measures
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You’ve been there, I’ve been there. You attempt to do maintenance on a piece of equipment and once you really start to dig in you start to notice the whole thing is going to be a lot bigger than originally anticipated. You notice all the half measures that were taken to hastily complete the project or save money. And now… something that someone skimped on five or ten years ago is your problem. This has been the case at every single plant I’ve ever worked, and I’ve worked quite a few. Really, it’s just a human problem to want to get work down as easily and quickly as possible. It’s an unfortunate thing that people take very little pride in their and often do what is expedient. Case in point, we recently had to fix a PVC line in our aeration tank. What we thought was going to be one line turned into four lines that needed work, and turned into a lot bigger deal than we thought. Why? Because to save money during the most recent upgrade only the stone heads were replaced with flexible membranes. That’s a good improvement. However, that was the only thing addressed in these tanks. Not the original PVC or braces. Supposedly they were checked and in good condition. This type of half measure rarely works in the long run. Now I’ll have to pay to get the parts and fix this myself. This is just one example of a half measure that comes back to bite you in the long run. I’m not immune to this either as I was actively thinking of ways to make this whole project easier and faster. As we were mulling over the options with my team, I realized that we were just perpetuating the cycle of half measures that will only cost us or someone else in down the line.

Nothing will make you want to skimp on a job more than cleaning out tanks and fixing PVC on something that should have already been fixed.
So instead, we are going to take the time, gather all the correct parts and do the job correctly.
Another example of this endemic problem was our admin building cast iron piping. Half of the building got a full upgrade to PVC and the other half was left as is to save money during the most recent upgrade. The problem is the original cast iron is narrow, pitted, and it could break or back up at any time. I’ve had multiple plumbers out and the general consensus is it should have been replaced. Duh. But now that would require busting up the floor of half of my newly renovated admin building to replace something that could have been replaced in the project and been good to go for years to come. That’s the way of the world though, as we are constantly constrained by time and money and often times we think a partial upgrade is better than nothing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
The list goes on and on of examples of this and I’m sure you’ve encountered this as well at your plant. Process control and general operations is another spot people try and shortcut all the time. Maybe you don’t feed a certain chemical as much because you’re trying to save cost for whatever it is you’re trying to control. Maybe you don’t feel like analyzing the data and just want to operate off the good ol’ observation and “feel” of the plant. All of those are half measures that will cost you in the long run. For as many times as those things work, there will be an equal number of times that they do not. The more you operate the more you’ll see how this applies to to anything people get involved with. We have all worked with someone who does a job only to leave the tools and equipment lying around, thinking the job is done. It’s not. In my opinion, the job isn’t done until the area is clean of tools and equipment. This may seem like a personal pet peeve, but it’s not. Leaving tools around is a safety issue and a efficiency issue. If you’re using tools and just leaving them lying around, other operators aren’t going to be able to find them when they need them, and it creates a huge inefficient mess all around. All because people want to take shortcuts and not finish the job completely. It’ll continue and make the entire operation suffer. Half measures never accomplish full results.
These were only a few examples of things I’ve seen over the years. Some of them are way more egregious than these examples that maybe I’ll tell another day. It can be overwhelming as an operator and manager trying to keep up with things that should have been done correctly the first time, but the only way we can stop it is to do things correctly as we find them. I felt that way this week, and as I stared into my aeration tank with multiple broken anchors and pipe, the quote from Mike of Breaking Bad came to mind. No more half measures, Walter.
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