Midterm Project: MARCON conference

André Mitsuo Ravazzi

UTID: 000437123 / NETID: aravazzi

The UT-RMC’s MARCON is a yearly conference that presents what is the current status
quo of maintainability and reliability on engineering and management applications. This year,
there were about 4 keynote addresses, 11 workshops and 27 paper presentations. One of those
papers was called Large Manufacturing Site Utilities Risk Assessment, presented by Douglas
Stroud, from Eastman Chemical Company, and David Campbell, from ABS Consulting. The
Eastman Company is the largest Tennessee chemical company with around 10 thousand
employees and collaborators, running about 80 shops around its plant. In June 2014 they had a
power outage on the plant. Although there was no significant damages or environmental impact,
it took about one week to clean and safely restart the production. After this event, it was applied
root cause analysis to find out physical, human and latent causes. Such as the Utility Assessment
implemented back in 1990 due to another power outage, it resulted in large capital investments to
improve dependability and reliability of the infrastructure and development of new strategies for
managing risk. The 2015 Utility Assessment was divided in 3 phases: identification and evaluation
the risk, identification of corrective actions to reduce the risk and implementation of corrective
actions. It leaded to a development of a more reliable and precise event tree for failure and a more
accurate failure mode effects chart. Therefore, Eastman could map a plethora of latent risks and
implement mitigation techniques. A position of Risk Reduction Manager was implemented, in
view to coordinate a team of experts for each utility system aiming to improve the probability of
branch success and to reduce the errors frequency and consequences.
Also, there were about 35 exhibitors bringing their innovation and technologies on
maintainability and reliability. One of those exhibitors was Eruditio LLC, a company specialized
in education and training. Its relation to maintainability and reliability relies on training and
educating human resources to improve their knowledge about those subjects. On the fair, it was
presented an augmented reality model of an electric motor with educational purpose. As a folder
is scanned with a smartphone with proper application, it shows the model unassembled, rich in
details and information. As it was said by the exhibitor, “it is a brand new step into maintenance
education”. Another exhibitor was GTI Predictive Technology. One of its main products is a
vibration analyzer developed to work together an iPad and a specific application. It features the
fact of being very convenient and portable, since the device is a small accelerometer that connects
through Bluetooth to the tablet. It just needs to touch the equipment to be analyzed and using an
algorithm, all the data is generated on the iPad application. A third company, Emerson Process Co.
was presenting some cases of reliability solutions implemented on customer’s plants worldwide.
One of these cases was an implementation of a system control software for a hydropower plant in
Brazil. It helped modernizing the entire plant control system and protecting the turbines against
overspeed conditions, making it easy the maintenance and improving the reliability of the process.