Management Topics Page

• Browse:
• Articles (936)
• White Papers (176)
• News (514)
• Products (360)

Recent Articles

4 steps to defining maintenance roles

David Berger explains how well-defined roles and responsibilities can help to get the most from your CMMS software.

3 ways to upgrade your CMMS for 79 cents

Use this bargain-basement approach to enhance complex systems and improve maintenance operations.

West Fertilizer Plant explosion leaves community devastated

Death toll mounts, but suspects remain at large.

Make indoor air quality part of your plant's health and safety program

Mike Bacidore says indoor air quality is important, even if you can't see it.

More Articles »

White Papers: In Depth Research

Proving the value of safety: Justification and ROI of safety programs and machine safety investments
Posted: 09/06/2011
Each year, six million workers suffer from non-fatal workplace injuries, resulting in an annual cost of more than $125 billion to United States businesses. Outside the primary objective of reducing injuries to people or property, proving the value of a safety system is an ongoing challenge for safety professionals and risk managers. Many find it difficult to financially justify discretionary investments in safety-related assets and training intended to reduce work-related injuries and insurance premiums.

The ISA S88 standard: A roadmap for automation — A powerful management tool
Posted: 08/29/2011
This paper explains the purpose and benefits of ISA's S88 standard and its role as both an engineering guideline and an often overlooked management tool. Because detailed description of the standard's underlying technology frequently obscures the intrinsic value of the standard itself, this paper is not intended to be a tutorial on S88 technology. Rather, the intent is to help the reader understand what S88 is and where it is useful or, perhaps, essential. The focus is on how it can be used to reduce cost and improve the way a manufacturing process operates. Why S88 is important is emphasized along with how it can serve as a common language for better communication about automation opportunities and manufacturing requirements. It includes ways this modular and internally consistent standard can help reduce engineering cost and serve as a management tool, ways it can be used to help control capital expenditure, enable more precise definition of operational requirements, identify what should and should not be automated and aid in definition of optimum levels of automation.

Stuxnet and security dos and don'ts revisited
Posted: 07/18/2011
In all of the panic and anxiety caused by Stuxnet, there's been lots of highly technical discussions of how the latest technology (e.g., application whitelisting, data diodes, etc.) might have been able to contain it. But all of this focus on what could have been done potentially distracts us from what is really at issue. There is no silver bullet. No matter what system you buy or what program you put in place, there is always going to be a way around or a possible/plausible threat. Your product may block what we see today, but what is on the horizon? What gets lost in all of this distraction is the importance of security fundamentals and of having proper expectations of your security program: provide a program or tools that minimize your exposure and maximize your ability to contain and recover from an event when it happens — and it will.

Early warning: Matrikon partners with Meridian Energy to develop the Predictive Asset Management (PAM) system
Posted: 07/11/2011
Like many other power companies worldwide, Meridian Energy of New Zealand faced the challenge of how to effectively manage their aging fleet of transformers so that they would perform for the remainder of their design life of forty to fifty years, and perhaps beyond.

Meridian needed a way to reliably determine the optimal time to refurbish or replace their assets. Over-maintaining wastes time and resources, while under-maintaining increases the risk of asset failure, which could lead to significant — if not catastrophic — safety, environmental and financial consequences for the business. The key to optimizing maintenance is early detection of changes in asset condition.

More White Papers »