Maintenance Technology September 2017 - 18

VOICE FROM THE FIELD

Parada and his team visit Cargill's salt facility in Timpie, UT, to develop a Salt Reliability Strategy to share within the business. Left to right: Elizabeth Kokesh, Dave
Teece, both Sr. M&R Professionals; Ed Stern, Electrical SME; George Parada.

effort or has a solution that you can
learn from."
Providing the right tools is also
essential.
"It's important to do the right work
right," Parada said. "This applies not
only to how we perform maintenance
but also with how we manage
change, develop our teams, run our
plants-doing the right work right
applies to everything we do within our
businesses."
Cargill produces salt for the food
and industrial industries. With more
than 14,000 uses for salt, including
food processing, de-icing, and water
conditioning, the Newark facility
processes more than a half-million
tons annually. Parada oversees the
maintenance and reliability efforts
throughout the company's 19 U.S.
locations.
His focus is to ensure that there are
robust maintenance and reliability
programs in place.
"Salt is a very corrosive product, and
you can just imagine what it does to
our equipment," Parada explained. "We
really need to be on the leading edge

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MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY

of proactive maintenance. When you
think about how failures occur, there
is a vast opportunity for us to address
these things before they impact our
customers, safety, and the operation of
our plants."

Targeted reliabilityimprovement programs
Each program that Parada develops
and implements begins with identifying the gaps.
"I have a passion for ensuring that
people have a good skills-development
process in place so that they can effectively do their jobs," he said. "What we
found is that we had several gaps in
several areas that we needed to beef up
to maintain our facility effectively. We
could see some gaps in maintaining
key equipment and other areas of PM.
So we started with gap assessments.
Then we followed up with training for
the crafts."
This led to the development of an
effective apprenticeship program in
Parada's previous role as maintenance
manager. "We partnered with one of
the local community colleges here

in Oakland," he explained. "We put
a couple of employees through the
program, too. Some were operators
within the plant who didn't have
maintenance experience but had that
mechanical aptitude and desire to join
maintenance."
The program was launched and then
the concepts were shared with other
facilities. The same concepts were
considered and applied when Parada
came into his current role as reliability
leader. "It really took off when we put
together a program, not just for our
maintenance people but for our new
engineers and supervisors across the
facilities. We wanted to make sure
they understood several aspects of
reliability, operations, engineering, and
maintenance."
The participants experienced a fiveday boot camp that covered all aspects.
It also included hands-on classes. With
an added layer of sustainability goals,
Parada wanted to ensure that future
plant leaders would have enough technical knowledge to effectively make
decisions and learn techniques to drive
accountability in the plant. (George
Parada talks about the boot-camp
program in our Mainstream 2017
video series at maintenancetechnology.
com/mainstream2017.)
Another program being developed
by Parada's team was conceived when
they identified preventive-maintenance
inconsistencies across plants. "When
you think about an effective reliability
program, it really needs to be right
sized so that you are not spending too
much on maintenance costs but you
are also not spending too little. This
must all be in relation to production
losses and plant productivity," he
stated.
The team is working on developing
a standard for all facilities that
determines the right amount of
maintenance spending as it pertains
to frequencies and types of preventive
tools, such as infrared, ultrasound,
and vibration analysis. "This really
gives solid guidance for how to do
the right work right and not come up
short," Parada explained. "You must
SEPTEMBER 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology September 2017