What can I wish you for 2017?

Prosperous in the sense of happy and fortunate, but also in the sense of 'without setbacks'. Especially in our field of maintenance, reliability and management of technical assets, we can really do without setbacks. After all, setbacks mean breakdowns and failing equipment, with all the possible undesirable consequences: high repair costs, dissatisfied customers or users, or possibly even danger to the environment or accidents with injuries. Adversity is to be avoided. That is why I wished you good luck just now.

But is setback avoidable?

Adversity is an unfavourable, unfavourable chance. If, as a technician, you start thinking philosophically about what can go wrong in our machines and installations, you would almost think that it is more of a coincidence that everything works as it should. And of course we all know Murphy's Law. Edward A. Murphy (1918-1990) was an aerospace engineer by profession who worked on safety-critical systems.  I quote from Wikipedia: Murphy's Law is "if there's any way they can do it wrong, they will" or "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong". By the way, did you know that his law is often confused with the law of deceit or Finagle's law: "if something can go wrong, it will go wrong at the worst possible moment"?  With his statement, however, Murphy illustrated the disadvantageous side of the law of large numbers. Even if the chance of a serious error is very small, if the risk is run often enough, sooner or later it will go wrong.

In fact, as maintenance people, we are engaged in a continuous struggle with the risks of things going wrong.  Although we can never completely eliminate them, we have learned that we can greatly reduce risks. So all preventive maintenance interventions, all inspections, all reliability studies, are all efforts to prevent the future possibility of a "setback" - in our world, failing equipment. And the word 'efforts' is not unjustified here. Reliable assets without failures are the result of hard work.  So when I wished you a prosperous 2017 just now, I was in fact wishing you a whole pile of work.  Sorry about that ;-)

Wim Van Cauwenberghe