New Day For Asset Performance Management

Bentley’s Acquisition of Ivara Redefines Asset Performance Management: Integrating OPEX with CAPEX!

Uniquely Enables Owner-Operators to Improve the Performance, Reliability, and Safety of Infrastructure Assets Through Information Mobility Between Engineering and Operations

EXTON, Pa., U.S.A. – Sept. 18, 2012 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced that it has acquired Ontario, Canada-based Ivara Corporation, a leading provider of asset performance management (APM) software solutions for organizations in asset-intensive industries, including mining and metals, power generation and utilities, oil and gas, and petrochemical. 

The IvaraEXP solution – a core system mission critical to operations and maintenance, combined with a proven implementation methodology and the Aladon Network’s seasoned reliability practitioners – helps owner-operators to obtain the best performance, reliability, and safety from their assets. APM software supplements and leverages value in transaction-oriented enterprise asset management systems such as IBM Maximo and SAP EAM by helping to build and implement asset-specific reliability strategies.Ivara is an IBM Member-Level Partner with Certified Ready for Tivoli integration as well as an SAP Software Solution Partner with SAP Certified - Powered by NetWeaver integration.

Business benefits of Ivara EXP include maximized availability and utilization; reduced operational costs; extended asset life; structured compliance with safety, environmental, and other regulations; and the systematic capture and application of asset performance knowledge and industry best practices.Ivara EXP also provides dashboards for asset health monitoring, allows organizations to understand and manage the risks associated with equipment failures, and turns the volumes of operational data into actionable information, enabling timely and accurate maintenance decisions.

With this acquisition, Bentley uniquely extends its AssetWise asset lifecycle information management software and services to comprehensively improve asset performance, providing new value-adding opportunities not only for owner-operators, but also for the engineering/procurement/construction firms who design, build, and commission their infrastructure. The compelling ROI driver of enhanced performance for existing assets is underscored by the Bentley Infrastructure 500 tabulation of Top Owners – whose net infrastructure investment is cumulatively valued at over 14 trillion dollars!

Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said, “When I first visited Ivara and, of course, took notice of the “Work Smart” logo in their offices, I soon realized that this was not just words and graphics, but a touchstone of the company culture – consistent with Ivara’s heritage, since 1996, of growth and success. Now all of us as colleagues are enthusiastic to share our Bentley Systems’ objective of ‘Working Smarter, Together’ – with each other, our users, and with innovative technologies – to enable infrastructure to perform better and more safely for constituents, now especially through operational excellence and reliability.”

This marks Bentley’s second acquisition in the operations arena this year, the first being InspectTechfor transportation asset management. InspectTech software-as-a-service, the market leader in inspection and bridge safety, helps owner-operators to plan, collect, and manage inspection results, and to meet asset management mandates.

Greg Bentley continued, “The Ivara acquisition may be our most significant in years, because it creates an unprecedented opportunity for us to leverage information mobility – not only within but between CAPEX and OPEX, by way of our ProjectWise and now-expanded AssetWise platforms, with shared services for asset lifecycle information management. Although increasing proportions of owners’ expenditures have been applied towards respectively accumulating engineering, and operations, information, to date this investment has yielded limited returns due to what we might call ‘information mortality’: data stranded in place until it becomes useless. But with Ivara and our resulting APM focus we are today accelerating information mobility – in terms of the amounts and types of information productively reused – by software innovations ranging from interactive inspections to health modeling, which apply consumer-driven technology advances to ‘industrialized’ projects and environments.

“The asset performance management opportunities created by information mobility pertain equally tointegrated-project engineers whose information modeling deliverables and expertise can contribute in new and innovative ways to operating reliability and safety – as also to teams in operations and maintenance, where lifecycle reliability experience data, such as failure modes and effects analysis, can be structured to drive better designs. Working smarter, together, we can now make the world more productive and safer by ensuring with integrity that the right information is securely accessible at the right time, for the right purpose, throughout the design, construction, operations, and maintenance ofintelligent infrastructure.”

Paul Marshall, formerly CEO of Ivara and now Bentley vice president, asset performance, said, “All of us at Ivara look forward to working with our new colleagues at Bentley to redefine the scope of asset performance management. Through Ivara EXP, AssetWise will now be able to uniquely link as-designed, as-built, and as-operated information models. Advantages to owners will include new capabilities to transform engineering data into actionable reliability strategies that better control and operate equipment as intended and as learned, and to take full advantage of information mobility through immersive and interactive 3D models in safer training, inspections, and maintenance. EPCs will benefit by virtue of more valuably leveraged ‘hands-on’ commissioning deliverables, and ultimately through the feedback of APM operations intelligence, in turn.

“Ivara users and prospects will benefit in particular because Bentley’s unmatched global coverage and resources include access to in-country experts to facilitate worldwide implementation of our unique APM solutions. Finally, Bentley’s broad reach to owners across all domains of infrastructure can now bring the best practices of APM from owner-operators of the largest and most mission critical plants to all types of infrastructure assets of every scale, for new levels of operational excellence.”

Andy Chatha, president and CEO, ARC Advisory Group, said, “In today’s increasingly competitive landscape, owner-operators are faced with a number of complex challenges. Chief among them are improving performance and reducing costs while preserving the environment and plant safety under constrained financial and human resources. Bentley’s acquisition of Ivara is a very positive step towards enhancing owner-operators’ returns on their investments and further incentivizing them to make additional investments in infrastructure to help sustain long-term economic growth around the world.”

Paula Hollywood, senior analyst, ARC Advisory Group, said, “Asset performance management has many dimensions including proactive maintenance, risk mitigation, environmental, health and safety concerns, and reliability. Achieving these goals requires a collaborative information exchange in order to manage critical issues and constraints while simultaneously improving asset availability and utilization. To be effective, they need an asset information management system that can deliver complete, accurate, timely, and most importantly actionable information for all APM stakeholders, internal or external to the organization. The acquisition of Ivara, a leading APM vendor, by Bentley Systems demonstrates that Bentley fully understands the challenges facing the infrastructure community at large. Moreover, it uniquely positions Bentley to deliver solutions that enable owners of capital-intensive assets to design reliability into systems.”

Redefining APM: Representative Opportunities

Among many application areas that will be catalyzed by information mobility spanning engineering and operations/maintenance, initial priorities for AssetWise APM software development include:

• (beyond inspection): “interactive inspection” – to revolutionize labor and information productivity in this essential activity, where to date IT hasn’t progressed much beyond capturing in “blobs” the same unsearchable text that static paper workflows required, resulting in the same wasteful “information mortality.” Rather, each interactive inspection assignment can and should be APM-guided to efficiently identify salient and structured observations specific to the location, recent and historical conditions, knowledge of failure modes, and risk assessment of each unique instance of equipment and structure. Interactive inspection will increasingly take advantage of immersive information mobility technologies combining, as appropriate, smart mobile devices; dynamic forms; as-maintained 3D “hypermodels” to navigate via interactive callouts in context for design and construction drawings, specifications and maintenance instructions, safety animations, and more; and convenient capture of 3D point-cloud imagery for trend differencing. Intrinsic “hands-on” positioning and authentication technologies will assure efficient routing and safe access, confirm accurate tag and location identification, and dynamically index inspection observations to the correct asset lifecycle information records – for compliance reporting and configuration management.

• (beyond asset health monitoring): “health modeling” – to enable design engineers to participate in prescribing and interpreting the otherwise often overwhelming extent of “real-time” asset health monitoring data streams. To dramatically expand upon a current Ivara EXP use case of vulnerable process piping configurations – where corrosion and wear unpredictably change not only flow characteristics but also structural strength – the pipe stress analysis from design can, to start with, be used by engineers to recommend the most effective sensor locations. Then the resulting regularly sampled observations – of, for example, sectional deflections and strains – can be compared within the design engineers’ pipe stress analysis model to “inversely” solve for the re-calibrated as-operated (deteriorated) structural parameters of each pipe section. Finally, the design engineers can regularly re-analyze the as-calibrated parameters, again reusing their design model, to assure that safety margins are never compromised.

What Users and Industry Experts Are Saying

Marius Basson, vice president, Global Reliability Services, CH2M HILL, said, “As a reliability practitioner, my goal is to optimize performance of assets and mitigate the risk of consequence of failure. To be able to instantly trace back to a failure mode in Ivara EXP and further back to the design in Bentley’s information modeling software means I can make fast and accurate decisions that affect the bottom line – and I will have the data I need for regulatory compliance to demonstrate we are doing all the right things.”

Gino Palarchio, general manager, Manufacturing Services, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, said, “I am pleased to see that Ivara EXP asset performance management is now part of the Bentley Systems software portfolio. With the acquisition of Ivara, Bentley can ensure continued innovation of critical software systems we use to manage important assets throughout the entire lifecycle, helping us ensure our sustainability.”

Jim Porter, formerly chief engineer and vice president of engineering and operations for DuPont, currently founder and president, Sustainable Operations Solutions, LLC, and member of the National Academy of Engineering, said, “I regard reliability-centered maintenance as a key strategy for those cases in which I’ve helped investigate industrial losses and incidents. It was very clear to me that having a systematic asset performance management approach, such as that provided by Ivara EXP, would have been a very good investment. I’ve said many times, investments by manufacturers in safety are wise financial decisions. As I’m now familiar with Bentley’s AssetWise offering, I think this is going to be a tremendous and unique enabler for plant operators to proactively improve their safe operations.”

About Ivara EXP

Ivara EXP provides a cohesive and integrated approach to develop, implement, and manage a living equipment reliability program. It’s the complete end-to-end solution for operational excellence that eliminates unexpected downtime, reduces operational costs, increases availability and asset utilization, ensures compliance with industry regulations and guidelines, meets safety, quality and operational targets, and eliminates islands of data.

For additional information about Bentley’s AssetWise asset lifecycle information management offerings, visit www.bentley.com/AssetWise. For additional information about Bentley’s new IvaraEXP asset performance management solution, visit www.bentley.com/Ivara.

About Bentley Systems, Incorporated

Bentley is the global leader dedicated to providing architects, engineers, geospatial professionals, constructors, and owner-operators with comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure. Bentley Systems applies information mobility to improve asset performance by leveraging information modeling through integrated projects for intelligent infrastructure. Its solutions encompass theMicroStation platform for infrastructure design and modeling, the ProjectWise platform for infrastructure project team collaboration and work sharing, and the AssetWise platform for infrastructure asset operations – all supporting a broad portfolio of interoperable applications and complemented by worldwide professional services. Founded in 1984, Bentley has grown to nearly 3,000 colleagues in more than 45 countries and over $500 million in annual revenues. Since 2003, the company has invested more than $1 billion in research, development, and acquisitions.

Additional information about Bentley is available at www.bentley.com and in Bentley’s annual report. For Bentley news as it happens, subscribe to an RSS feed of Bentley press releases and news alerts. Toview a searchable collection of innovative infrastructure projects from the annual Be Inspired Awards, access Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure publications. To access a professional networking site that enables members of the infrastructure community to connect, communicate, and learn from each other, visit Be Communities.

To download the Bentley Infrastructure 500 Top Owners ranking, a unique global compendium of the top public- and private-sector owners of infrastructure based on the value of their cumulative infrastructure investments, visit www.bentley.com/500.

Want a better maintenance reliability process? Stop annual performance reviews.

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

Here is bucket of cold water that I hope will wake you up.  If you prefer coffee – here is a hot Starbucks Café Latte Grande to shake you out of the dream you live in and work in.

I urge you to STOP performing annual reviews for team members if you want an improved maintenance reliability process.

How many of you have I lost at this point?  I can actually see those gears actually turning in your head at this point:  Stop annual reviews?  How can we tell if someone did a good job or a bad job? 

I did some research on the group that reads my articles and I discovered something that totally surprised me.

Half of my readers are above average and the other half is below average.

Smile.  :-) 

Maintenance expert Cliff Williams calls it “The Trouble With Averages”.

These results are going to be the case for any group – including your own maintenance reliability team.

Effective leaders guide and direct team members to contribute using the unique strengths that each individual has. 

Results come from the processes that the company employees – not from the people that the company employees. 

If the result is based on the people – the process is not stable.

Performance reviews should be conducted on your processes – not your people.

Annual reviews that include any aspect of individual performance naturally sub-optimize a team.  Why sacrifice for the team when I may get ahead if I am viewed as “more productive” than my co-worker?  Why sacrifice my individual performance for a better process result when I am not credited for process results?

Can anyone provide me with data that showed how these annual performance reviews, which are based on the individuals’ results, improve the process that the individual is working in?

If you want improved results from your maintenance reliability process – focus on improving the process.

The result comes from the process.

Your process is perfectly designed to deliver the results you are currently getting.

If you want a novel idea that may improve your processes or at least make the work environment much better – how about allowing each team member to review the process they work in (and provide at least 3 ideas to improve it) and allow them to rate their leaders in a safe and consequence-free way?

Maintenance Program Performance – It Is Just A Phase You Are Going Through

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

You may have your own idea of the phases that an organization goes through as they drive reliability improvements and you may not know mine yet, but you will if you keep reading.

The point is not what my vision of high-performance maintenance phases are; the point is for you to recognize your own organization and to keep moving to the highest level.

Babies to children to teenagers to adults to senior citizens is just one of the phases we can describe to relate to the human condition.  Phase identification allows us to create a better understanding by generalizing various descriptions attached to each category.

No one is born knowing how to create high-performance maintenance programs.   The good news is that there are volumes of maintenance books written, a few high-quality, professionally managed maintenance conferences and trainings to attend, excellent maintenance magazines to subscribe to and a world of maintenance oriented web sites to learn from.

Some useful things I think I have discovered as I became familiar with hundreds of maintenance programs over the past 30 years are:

• The tactics and tools of high-performance maintenance are documented and well known
•  The strategies for reaching high-performance in maintenance are documented and well known
•  Once you have deployed basic tools, tactics and strategies there is another critical element that will determine the performance level of the maintenance program

Maintenance Program Development Phases

Although I agree with the traditional maintenance program phase description of reactive to preventive to predictive to reliability-based to asset health management, I want to look at things from a slightly different angle.

Survival Phase
With no investment in tools, tactics or training many organizations find themselves in “Survival Mode”.  There is not a master plan or formal movement toward creating a more reliable operating environment.  These programs are highly reactive and everything revolves around ensuring operations gets back to production mode as quickly as possible after the inevitable breakdowns occur.  Many “repairs” do not last long, however no one is formally tracking failures so repeat problems will be accepted as “what’s so”.    Maintenance leaders and team members simply work to survive each shift and understand that the plant manager and operations managers set the priorities and are the masters they must serve; regardless of lack of vision they demonstrate toward increasing performance.  In this phase maintenance is often held responsible (blamed) for most of the breakdowns.  In the Survival phase it is every man/woman for them selves.

Common Sense Phase

Often times organizations will luck into adding a maintenance leader to the team who can apply enough common sense to find ways to avoid the worst repetitive failures in spite of the lack of tools, technologies or a master strategy.   The Plant Manager and Operations Manager do no embrace this common sense approach, they simply adapt their expectations to the new normal.  If there is a measurable result from the common sense approach, it is usually claimed by operations.  Common sense maintenance leaders tend to prefer to avoid the spotlight anyway.  Common sense maintenance leaders are greatly admired by the other maintenance team members who are happy to be out of Survival Mode.

Tools and Tactics Phase

When a Sales Representative brings in an Ultrasonic Detector for a demonstration, jaws drop and hearts skip a beat.   The team is excited and can see the value in expanding their senses to detect potential problems way before they could by using human senses alone.  The same holds true for vibration analysis, electric motor testing, oil analysis and infrared thermal imaging.

The problem I sometimes see is that many organizations simply add these “predictive” tools and the inspections tasks associated with them, on top of a reactive or preventive maintenance program.  They do not have a failure prevention or defect elimination strategy so a shot gun approach is taken and with enough low-hanging fruit to pick, everyone soon falls in love with the new reactive “Predictive” maintenance program. 

The same holds true for adding maintenance planning and scheduling.  I have seen many organizations that were very effective at planning the wrong work.  They could plan work but that work did not prevent or detect failures and some times that planned work even caused additional failures.

Last but not least, a pet peeve of mine are maintenance programs that substitute FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) for RCM (Reliability-Centered Maintenance) or PM Optimization (PMO) for maintenance task analysis.  Per my friend and Reliability Centered Maintenance Using RCM Blitz book author Doug Plucknette, FMEA falls short because:

• Failure Modes are assessed at a higher level
• It does not use a formal decision process to determine the correct tasks
• It does not consider what should be done if there is no applicable or effective task

FMEA is a tool and does not a strategy make!

Tools and tactics are needed for high-performance maintenance, however having them and aiming them are two different things.

Maintenance leaders and team members in the Tools and Tactics phase know or at least sense that there are positive ways forward.  Many times they begin to see the possibilities that come from a high-performance maintenance programs.  Other programs languish in this area and I believe it comes from maintenance leaders who have become comfortable and are often highly acknowledged by top company leadership for picking the low hanging fruit and creating (temporary) results.  These leaders are unable or unwilling to formally adopt the high-performance maintenance strategies that are already so well documented and proven. 

Strategies Phase
Since 1978, the concept of Reliability-centered Maintenance (RCM) has been spreading as a dominant strategy for almost all high-performance maintenance programs.  In summary, RCM shifted efforts from maintenance as “fixing things” to maintenance as “ensuring that things functioned” as the asset owner requested.  Using a disciplined analysis techniques, failure causes and consequences were identified and intervention and prevention strategies were developed.

Living programs and Root Cause analysis allow the strategy to be continuously improved and Reliability Engineering methods like Weibull Analysis provide even more resources for performance.

The strategy phase is much harder to create and fully implement than the tactics and tools phase.  Think about your top management when they hear that their top talent is locked away in rooms – sometimes for weeks at a time, talking about failure that “might” occur.    Executives who lack vision often see very little value in this approach and only support a small fraction of the resources that are needed to fully implement and apply this strategy.  If that is not bad enough, almost everyone else in the company will not only resist this new strategy, some will actively work to undermine it because of the change it represents to them.  Undermining a strategy is much easier than successfully implementing one.

Culture Of Engagement

Please understand that I am a big fan of the tool, tactics, technologies and strategies that are well-documented and proven effective for high performance maintenance programs.  The problem I have seen is that too many programs that were tool, tactic and strategy focused failed to deliver sustainable business results and often fall back into early cycle phases that repeat every decade or so.

I call it the Vicious Cycle Of Maintenance Improvements and it results when the past improvement efforts fail to engage the other members of the organization.  When universal engagement is lacking, improvement programs are at risk from funding reduction, manpower reduction, key personnel changes and many other short-term decisions that come from above.

In order to create a culture of engagement, everyone involved in making the journey to high-performance must see how that journey relates to him or her.  They must know that they are respected as people, that their ideas are heard, that they have some ability to impact the performance and that this new and different performance level benefits them in some way.   That takes much more than telling them about it once or twice.

In order to ensure that your maintenance program reaches and sustains a high-performance level, you must ensure that you get the tools, tactics and strategies right enough to generate consistent business results.  You must also make those results highly visible to everyone in the organization.

As made abundantly clear by Winston Ledet’s Heroic Change series of books, what works in one culture may not work in another.  As William Shakespeare so eloquently writes in Hamlet “therin lies the rub” meaning having the answer is no answer at all.  Knowing the people you work with and what makes them tick is as important if not more important than knowing the right tools, tactics and strategies for improved equipment reliability.

  

Listen and learn more than you speak and teach if you want to remain in the top phase of high-performance maintenance.  Engage everyone in your organization in high-performance maintenance if you want to sustain the results.

Reliability Enlightenment

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

Don’t alter what your management knows about reliability, alter the way they know it

Over the years I have heard many maintenance reliability professionals lament that their leadership does not understand or appreciate the concept of reliability.  I could not disagree more regardless of what level of ignorance is demonstrated by the decision that they make.

I have a news flash for the complainers: your leadership already knows reliability!

I can assure you that your organizations’ top leadership has an expectation of reliability.  The KNOW they want and need a certain level of reliable operation to meet profit goals or to accomplish a mission.

They may also wonder why you are not delivering it.  They provide tools like vibration analysis data collectors, infrared thermal imaging cameras and other condition monitoring technologies.  They provide software like computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and asset health management systems (AHM).  They provide manpower through direct employees and service contractors.    What else can they do?

Although these resources are useful when an organization seeks higher levels of reliability, the most powerful thing leadership can provide is leadership. 

Leadership creates and communicates the mission and vision of the organization.  The mission and vision set the goals and the goals set the tasks.  Leadership does not have to know the specific tactics required to enhance reliability, however it is very useful for them to understand the philosophies and strategies that can improve reliability.

The organization and its people will by nature provide as much or more resistance to reliability improvements than will the simple physics of failure prevention.  To overcome those hurdles, leadership must guide the team for a sustained effort even when results are not present on the immediate horizon.

Not many people were born with all of the instinct and intellect, experience and knowledge required to create high-performance reliability.  The industrial revolution began in 1712 however the concept of Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) did not appear until 266 years later in 1978.  

As I stated, top leadership in your organization already knows reliability.    They wonder why you don’t.

Your job as a maintenance reliability leader is to transfer what top leadership already knows, which is probably based on out-of-context memories, more than one bad experience and false assumptions about the way things fail (i.e. bathtub curve). 

You must find ways to move them to the actual truth about “why and how” things fail, what the effects of those failures are in order of priority and what will be done to ensure these most critical failures will not occur in the future.  

This includes teaching and doing.

Failure Patterns

(Image courtesy Allied Reliability)

Although training and briefings are useful, nothing supports “knowing” more than forcing false memories and faulty assumptions to be replaced with a “real” experience.  What your leadership understood about reliability will evaporate like a cloud on a hot, dry summer day and be replaced by an “ah-hah” moment of reliability enlightenment.  A leader who has experienced reliability enlightenment will be your biggest and best resource.

Start with a small pilot reliability project on a critical system and set time and resources expectations in the beginning.  Unless you have prior experience it is a good idea to bring in a qualified consultant that can guide the project.

As humans, we have the capability of creating some level of “concept” even when we have not experienced something directly.  If someone describes a new meal recipe to you, your mind can begin to anticipate and “know” the flavor.  Likewise if someone described walking on hot coals with bare-feet, your mind allows you to “imagine” that experience as well.  Imagining and experiencing are two different things.  As for the yummy meal, I want to experience that and I want to avoid the hot coals (sorry Tony Robbins) even though I have read of the wonderful sense of mind-over-matter that is reported from prior hotfooted participants.

We can think we “know” things without experience however without experience we run the danger of allowing our associated memories; that may or may not be accurate, to define things. 

So Grasshopper, your only limits are in your mind.  Many before you have traveled the path forward.  Reliability Enlightenment awaits anyone who is willing to gain it.

Using Reliability Centered Maintenance and Condition Monitoring to drive Reliability Improvement

A 40 minute video from the International Maintenance Conference (IMC-211) delivered by Keith Berriman, P.Eng., CMRP, Director of Engineering and Reliability, Agrium Inc.

Timely identification of equipment failure allows for planned and scheduled repairs.  This in turn minimizes the impact of actual failure events on production and maintenance costs.  Agrium, like many asset intensive companies, have been using Preventive/Predictive Maintenance techniques to detect impending signs of failure in their equipment.  This has resulted in cost and availability improvements at many sites.  In addition they have worked to leverage RCM techniques to improve their PM/PdM program. However, strengthening market conditions are providing strong impetus for further improvement in availability and production.  To this end Agrium has launched a Reliability Improvement Program centered around Asset Health Monitoring based on RCM methodology.

See how Agrium has combined an asset health management solution with their SAP EAM to integrate operator rounds, vibration and other technologies to drive improvements in plant availability and production.   With this approach redundant PM work has been reduced and the frequency of plant trips has been improved.  In addition the program has driven the standardization of various plant software solutions and equipment hierarchies.  The goal of the program is to be doing the right work on the right equipment at the right time.

Note: A high definition DVD of IMC Keynotes and Presentations is available at the MRO-Zone.com e-Store

25 Twitter Accounts That Will Make Your Maintenance More Reliable

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

How could 140 character messages have any value?  If you are reading my writing, you probably do not belong to Gen X, Gen Y or even a Gen Z.  Tweeter me this and twitter me that – it all seems like nonsense right?

If you do not understand the value of some of the new media networks, have some patience and try this quick 5-minute, 10-step Twitter Tutorial.

If you do not immediately agree that this is a GREAT way to get focused information in a quick easy-to-read format, then you never have to visit Twitter ever again.

Step 1)  Visit Twitter at http://www.twitter.com

Step 2) Create a FREE Twitter account by entering your name, email and a unique password

Step 3) Check your email and click the confirm link so Twitter knows you are a real Human Being

Step 4)  Log into your new Twitter account.

Step 5) Skip your profile set up.  We are not going to bother setting up your profile for now – because you may never visit Twitter again unless you find GREAT value quickly so let's get straight to it.  You can always set up your profile; add your location and a profile picture later.  Skip all that for now.

Step 6) Click the Home link on the top of the page to ensure you are on the home page

Step 7) Copy and Paste each on the following Twitter accounts into the search box at the top of the home page and click the search icon

Step 8) A small twitter icon that matches that @ Twitter account name will appear in the upper left under the word People

Step 9) Click the small icon under People and a small screen will pop up with the past few tweets and a Blue “Follow” button. Click it.

Step 10) Once you have “followed” these top maintenance reliability Tweeters (people who post Tweets) – you will have your own personalized “flow” of quick, easy maintenance reliability resources.

You can also download free Twitter apps for your smartphone/iPhone and iPad/Tablet for mobile access.

If you are on a path to learn new things and discover new ideas related to maintenance reliability, I guarantee you have just struck pure gold.

In addition, you Wife/Husband, your Kids and your Co-Workers will all be amazed you have joined the 21^st century and adopted the latest technology!

You never have to post a Tweet of your own and you will quickly discover other Tweeters that you will want to follow.  You can un-follow anyone at anytime by clicking on their icon and then clicking on the Un-Follow button.  They will never even know you stopped following them!

@reliability

@MaintenanceTips

@UptimeMagazine

@CMMSCity

@RickySmithCMRP

@MaintenancePro

@maintenanceconf

@fms95032

@ShonIsenhour

@JeffShiver

@HeroicChange

@MaintNews

@DPlucky

@HearMore

@tammipickett

@bofiliosj

@ModPumpMag

@Ivara

@IVCTechnologies

@Marshall_Inst

@ReliabilityWork

@ecmweb

@PumpsSystemsMag

@LudecaInc

@UE_Systems

Additions by request (starting with #26):

@thesnellgroup

@MaintOnLine

@oilanalyst

@PumpingTweets

@bjarniisl

@VibrAlign

Let me know what you think and what other Twitter accounts I should add to this list.

Welcome to the 21^st century.