You probably have long suspected this: Some companies can be their own worst enemies. I offer the following examples, from my perspective as book author/technical writer, of how some companies earn a bad name, while others earn a good one (and good things that come with it). There is, in turn, a connection to how today’s reliability and maintenance managers ultimately spend their time at work.
EXAMPLE 1
Contact with a well-known manufacturer of ANSI pump couplings proved puzzling. Although the standard exterior view image that I requested from this OEM did not even disclose the company’s name, our phoned-in permissions request was referred to the assistant corporate counsel, who then asked me to put the request in writing.
After receiving my written request, the assistant corporate counsel sent an email advising me not to use any representation of the coupling in question until the company’s engineering department had commented on and approved my request. At that point, I thanked him for his message, immediately withdrew my burdensome request, and apologized for taking up his time.
Interestingly, within the same week, I attended a pump conference, where I approached the national sales manager of a firm that manufactures disc pack couplings for use in ANSI and ISO-compliant pumps throughout the world. This gentleman quickly scrolled through his phone and asked me to choose any image. He then sent my choice off to my gmail.com mailbox, where it arrived almost instantaneously. No fuss, no muss, no bother—just lots of common sense
Some time later, I called the chief engineer-owner of a company that custom-designs and markets API-compliant turbomachinery couplings. He immediately invited me to visit his spotless and well-equipped facility not far from my home. Following my tour of his design and manufacturing operation, my host handed me a thumb drive with several suitable images. I now had the high-performance-coupling representations that I needed.
EXAMPLE 2
Even now, I remember how unimpressed I was by a pump OEM’s response to a rather straightforward request several years ago. I had wanted to include one of this company’s widely used, standard advertising images in a new edition of one of my books. I was advised, however, that the company needed to pre-approve whatever narrative I might craft near the pump image and told to anticipate a many-tiered approval process of unknowable duration.
Given that type of drawn-out timeframe, I ended up selecting an image that had been given to me by one of this OEM’s competitors 10 years earlier, and included it in my book’s updated edition. After all, as a productive individual, I could ill afford to wait for delayed multi-tiered approval of the simple wording that would probably surround an equally simple image of a product that was being manufactured by the thousands each year.
BOTTOM LINE
While the above information is based on my personal experience as a book author/technical writer, I consider its underlying message to have relevance, albeit from a different angle, for reliability and maintenance managers who are dealing with OEMs and/or vendors of any type of plant-equipment system or component. In fact, I’ve emphasized this message repeatedly over the years, in print and in person: Once you find competent providers, keep cultivating them. Try not to waste time on the ones that steal your time.TRR
REFERENCE
Bloch, Heinz P., Petrochemical Machinery Insights, (2016) Elsevier Publishing Co., Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, ISBN 978-0-12-809272-9, 724 pages.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heinz Bloch’s long professional career included assignments as Exxon Chemical’s Regional Machinery Specialist for the United States. A recognized subject-matter-expert on plant equipment and failure avoidance, he is the author of numerous books and articles, and continues to present at technical conferences around the world. Bloch holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and is an ASME Life Fellow. These days, he’s based near Houston, TX. Email him directly at [email protected].
