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376 Chapter 11

Box 11.3
A vignette: Corporate amnesia

A large mining company was examining its predictive maintenance procedures. This form
of maintenance relies upon scheduled parts changes and “ tune-ups ” that take place accord-
ing to expected useful life spans of the various types of equipment used, as opposed to
waiting until something fails and brings the whole operation to a costly stop. In the case
of one particular type of valve used in the refi nery, technological advances had resulted
in the use of a new type of polymer that was just now available. The question was: could
this new polymer be used to cap the valves? Could it withstand the high temperatures
that the valve would be subjected to during operations? At fi rst, this seemed to be an easy,
almost trivial question. Engineers began looking for the equipment specifi cation docu-
ments. These proved, however, more elusive than expected. When, after about six weeks,
they were found, they were located not within the company, but within the archives of
a design fi rm that had been subcontracted to design that particular piece of equipment —
roughly twenty-fi ve years previously. Unfortunately, nothing in the specifi cations helped
answer the question. The use of a polymer would represent a signifi cant cost savings, but
the team was reluctant to move forward. The conventional wisdom said, “ a slow dime is
worth more than a fast penny, ” or in other words, we may save a few pennies now but if
the polymer melts under the high temperatures, the whole refi nery will have to be shut
down, costing many, many, more dollars to the company. Finally, after about six months
of searching, the HR department of the design company tracked down the original design
engineer who had worked on the equipment. He was happily retired and playing golf in
Florida but was still receiving a pension and that is how they found an address for him.
Luckily for the mining company, this engineer was a bit of a pack rat and/or nostalgic:
he had kept his original hand-drawn specifi cations with his own annotations. It was by
checking these annotations that he was able to confi dently answer “ No — the polymer
would not be a safe alternative — metal should continue to be used. ” The next question
posed by the mining team was: now, where can we write down this valuable information
down? Where is the company “ book ” where they can look this up when the next fi ve-year
cycle comes up?