Einstein is reputed to have defined insanity as doing the same thing the same way over and over and expecting different results. Having served on a number od standards committees mostly populated with manufacturer representatives over the more recent years, and having dealt with manufacturers to get things done at the pointy end of the stick throughout my career, I’m perplexed by so many sticking to a “Why can’t we all just get along?” strategy.

My experience has been and remains that it is far too often like pulling teeth to get manufacturers to provide information we request. You have to love the closing lines of this article “By the end of the meeting, the group had created a list of prospective actions it agreed might improve the situation. But it also concluded there was more work to be done.” This could be appended to a s report from just about every one of the joint efforts I’ve been connected with over my almost 37 years in the field.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: The nature of providers’ relationship with manufacturers is supposed to be adversarial as well as collegial. That we should work together on standards efforts and in meetings focused on shared objectives doesn’t mean we do not have conflicting objectives. We do. That’s how and why the system is supposed to work. And that begs the question whether or not there is ANYTHING that provider-based practitioners will step up and defend as fundamental, that they will tell manufacturers is not acceptable to not address to the provider community’s satisfaction. I would hope that would be safety-related, but right now anything would do.

I opened this message with the teaser that there might be something new in this list; that would be the investigation of reliability centered maintenance as an approach to a rather stagnant perspective on the field’s bread and butter work. If it’s new to this community, it’s hardly new to the world. It’s a good sign that some in the field are looking outside the proverbial box, and it’s good to be looking for things that have worked elsewhere. I would only caution to approach RCM (or anything else) not as the Next Great Thing but rather as another potential tool for practitioners’ tool boxes. Its investigation in the current context a practical research opportunity that hopefully will be picked up by the young folks. Ditto any other new ideas, new or old, that may be out there.

“Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow”
– The Grateful Dead