Posts by Paul McNamara

When I coached my children’s sports team I was always after getting my players to talk with each other more…or at all…during their games.  We even practiced talking to each other in drills. Businesses have the same problem. What I found over time is the best teams and best players generally talked the most. On…

The mistake so many people make when installing solutions in their business is not to consider whether the environment is ordered versus complex. In ordered environments, cause and effect can be understood with varying levels of skill. If the environment is complex, the ordered or simple solutions that often seek to “control” will never scale…

Covid-19 has accelerated transformation efforts across many industries. With the use of tools like Zoom and MS Teams making it possible to work effectively and satisfactorily from home, many enterprises are electing to redesign and consolidate their facilities. It is ironic that these moves, made possible by technology, may initially be thwarted by technology, particularly…

Plans are only as good as your ability to execute them. Equipment plans or budgets are more than lists of equipment, they help fulfill intentions in a larger plan to bring products to market faster and increase margins, profitability, and growth. When plans are not designed and executed with these intentions in mind they can’t…

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) was widely popularized in Eli Goldratt’s best selling book, “The Goal.” In our work in test, we’ve leveraged these principles to produce award-winning asset management capabilities and results. 400% increases to asset utilization 25% to 75% reduction in operating capital requirements 25% to 50% improvements to process speed Increased Investments…

One of the big keys to moving products to market with velocity is swift and effective decision making. It is the key to winning any race. In a rapidly changing competitive landscape, we must be agile and effective in our planning, decision-making, and execution processes. Our practices described below help our customers improve their competitive…

Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management (aEAM) is an award-winning software and services suite used by companies with complex, asset-intensive operations and demanding competitive requirements for better than incremental improvements to speed, agility, and cost-effectiveness. The same old solutions won’t work. This is where Scireo aEAM comes in! The Operating Environment The assets requiring management we write…

New competitive requirements for speed and efficiency are driving companies to rethink the way they operate to avoid existential threats. In a moment of similar significance, the Oakland A’s baseball team needed a new, more competitive, and transformative strategy. The strategy they invented, dubbed “Moneyball”, succeeded wildly outperforming traditional management approaches.  Using it the A’s…

The competitive landscape is changing fast.  It is an exciting and dangerous time.  New competitive requirements for speed and efficiency – doubling speed and reducing costs in half – cannot be achieved with historical approaches focused only on myopic views of asset performance, e.g. asset downtime, MTBF, OEE. While still important, rather than ends in…

According to the dictionary, when you grind something you use force to wear down, crush, or pulverize it. When we use “grind” to describe our work the characterization is stark. The “grind” produces moods of resignation, distrust, cynicism, and fatigue that are as unrelenting as the forces producing them. We don’t have to work in…