Dears,

I read that when the 3M worker who invented masking tape decades ago had his idea initially rejected, he refused to give up.Staying within his $100 authorization limit, he signed a series of $99 purchase orders to pay for critical equipment needed to produce the first batch. His perseverance paid off, and 3M has reaped billions of dollars in cumulative profits.

Must be many of our forum members have such real stories of their professional lives, which they can share with all of us to support the camaraderie within this forum!

Out of us, today many can work 20 hours a day, many can kill by unetheical low quality/low cost competition. It requires something more to build the people.

Just like the tales on the lives of Jesus Christ & many such Holy people show us the way to live, we believe the unique experiences of our veterans can inspire all in a healthy way of professional life. No doubt, it will help the organizations & societies we all belong too.

regards,

sam

You don't understand I could've had class, I coulda been a contender, I could've been somebody... instead of a bum which is what I am.

Dear T.J.N,

It's you who wrote:

'Its not what you do, but how you
Are perceived to do it that counts'.

Are you really having any need to write the above? It's true for every one of us.

Our society is awash in discourses on wants & problems. For a change, I thought let's talk about sweet memories of solutions we arrived at in the past, overcoming various hurdles.

We all have many reasons of hatred & anger; religion & prayer make ourselves tolerant to others & strong against these internal enemies. Let this holiday season make each of us more flexible in our daily actions. This is the best Christmas gift we can give to ourselves.

Happy Christmas to All

from Sam

When none has still volunteered, I am sharing one of mine, to start.

I was worshipper of looking at the big picture ignoring the finer details in the start of my career.In those days of initial learning, I was part of a design team of twin 500 MW unit coal based power plant, where we were designing the boiler feed booster pump suction piping. I had as-built isometric of a 660 MW unit reference plant piping available. I followed all the items I could understand from that & copied in my analysis, but made an error in reading vendor info - 25 kg weight of the suction strainer element, and ignored the fabricated body weight of the suction strainer! This resulted in under sizing of spring hanger in the piping & led to violent vibration at start-up. Afterwards, it got rectified in trouble-shooting wasting 15 days of so many people & much needed electricity production.

I learnt by the bitter way why we should need passion in routine work we perform & should get input & results fully checked by niche peers & seniors to attach the needed stamp of quality & reliability in our work.

Let us have fun, passion & thrill in any low-skill work we do so that we can ensure satifaction, delight & plesant surprise of our end user.

regards,

sam

Sounds like you were dumped on big time unless of there was another real error in your calc. A weight variation equal to the strainer element weight in any system will not cause failure or the slightest indication of failure - period. A couple of sets of flange bolts probably weighs more.

Best Regards

Dear Andrew,

Perhaps I couldn't communicate you correctly; from the 400 NB welded body strainer assembly drawing, I had taken only the strainer element weight of 25 kg as the weight of the whole strainer assembly. So, the error was not that small! Moreover, this is a real event of 1986,
Occurring very near to our Holy Shrine of Kashi Viswanath in India!

Anyway I admire your straightforward approach.
Please don't believe what others tell - ask, when in doubt.

But, my point in the message was that we all make errors in work; sometimes we get caught, sometimes not; if we correct the same, when detected even by self, we don't become cheap or small, at least in our own conscience.

regards,
sam

Sam,

I offer the following horror story from the many I have witnessed over the years:

We designed a plant that had three, nearly-identical units. The units were to be built in sequence. Unit 1 was to be built and put into service. Unit 2 was to be constructed a year-or-so later, and Unit 3 was to follow a year after Unit 2. Each unit contained a hot line connected at each end to equipment nozzles. I don’t remember the temperature details but I recall that the line was a special alloy about 24” diameter. Analysis was performed for the line on Unit 1. For reasons that were never determined the analysis did not appear to have been checked.

By the time the equipment for Unit 2 was procured the design of some of the equipment had changed necessitating a minor alteration to the line in question. A second engineer made appropriate adjustments to the initial analysis and in doing so uncovered a major error: The nozzle moment allowables given by one of the equipment vendors had been given in inch-pounds; the analyst had taken these to be foot-pounds. The result, of course, was that the nozzle on Unit 1 was seriously overloaded. The engineering company had to confess the error to the client and, at its own expense, redo the line for Unit 1 and replace it during a shutdown.

Unit 3 turned out to be identical to Unit 2 so the line was constructed and installed per the Unit 2 design. The construction manager wanted approval to buy the spring hangers. Due to the confusion associated with the previous analyses and some dubious record keeping there was some doubt as to what springs were required. A third engineer was asked to review the earlier work and determine the appropriate hangers. In doing so he noticed an additional error: The vendor allowables for the second nozzle were resultant values. Both the previous analyses had assumed that these values were actual allowables for each degree of freedom. (To clarify: The vendor had provided maximum values of FR and MR; the analyses had assumed that the value of FR was the max allowable for FX, FY and FZ and the value of MR was the max for MX, MY and MZ.)

It was never determined how the original analysts made such a blatant mistake. In part the problem may be attributed to the modern trend to get the maximum amount of work from the minimum number of staff. Certainly, the engineering company in question had enlisted personnel from at least four different offices during the course of the various analyses. In fact, after the last error was discovered, the line was sent to yet another office for re-analysis! Another cause may have been late acquisition of vendor data or some confusion in the transmit ion of the information. There was some evidence that the first engineer (possibly, “engineers!” since it was unclear whether the initial work had been started and finished by the same person) had sent more than one email and a few phone calls requesting the nozzle allowables. The final result, however, was that the engineering company had to go back to the client a second time and replace both the Unit 1 and Unit 2 piping with a third design, incorporating new springs and expansion joints.

I conclusion I think the following lessons-learned can be drawn from this story:

(1) Inadequate staffing caused work overload and consequent errors.

(2) Record keeping was inadequate possibly due to the work overloads.

(3) Proper checking must always be performed before the work is approved for construction.

(4) The checking package should be retained along with any vendor information used.

(5) On critical systems a second check should be considered.

(6) Checkers should be appropriately trained and experienced individuals and the results of the check should be communicated to the original analysts.

Ouch... but do you know what the rest of the story is???
The managers who brow beat the people doing the work with a constant stream of "are you done yet?" Received promotions and bonuses while the poor people being beaten got a blackeye! Moral of the story... as Shakespeare says in one of his works "To thine ownself thou must be true!"

I can add that...If any project goes off well without any incident, nobody bothers to give any credit to the stress engineer, but if anything goes wrong,( be it a critical or non-critical line) like a line vibrating or support lifting off, the first person to be caught is the stress engineer.
Today's project managers feel that pipe stressing is like photocopying, just put the iso in the machine and results are out in a jiffy !!
I remember in one of my earlier projects, the project manager asked me if we can buy the spring supports in advance ! I was shocked at his statement. He might be thinking that Piping spring supports are like ball-point pen springs, just buy it in wholesale and use it whenever you want.
It is high time that project managers and engineers and lead engineers are educated on the cycle of stress analysis and importance of all activities in pipe-stressing.
Regards,
John Wright

Please don't consider it as a problem; it is really an opportunity! We need to adapt ourselves to the current situation where many problems will develop like Ricardo's one(or two) due to the mad rush of decision makers with inexperienced hands.

If after the completion of each project, orgaizations hold a nameless, rankless debrief and each stakeholder, without fear of reprimand, rehashes what worked, what did not work and why both the good events and the bad ones happened. We then take the key Lessons Learned from the debrief and apply them to the next projects.

When not in a decision making role, our role is like the responsible opposition in a democracy ?
Let us keenly observe the people in action; but, if customer suffers & organization brand image is in stake, please volunteer.

regards,

sam

You mean not all spring supports are the same???? WOW --- LOL!

Ben Franklin was quite right when he said haste makes waste.

When I try too juggle to many balls at once I usually drop one of them myself.

Luf-Sir,

Let haste make waste & mistake; after all it teaches us too not to repeat the same again.

On 4th Jan '06, I was reading the latest Thomas Friedman's article in NYT regarding his opinion why baby bloomers should prefer world dominance to their own health care for World Peace. Many times people in power don't realize that commoners understand their priority. If some makes mistake, He has to pay for it, anyway.
This is true for us all!

regards,

sam

Many of our forum-members may think, I might have discussed politics while referring to Friedman. But, my reason of bringing that topic was to talk about thinking without any bias.

When Science magazine talks about 'evolution in action' as the greatest scientific breakthrough of 2005, it never opposes the excellent principles of Bible. We all know that HIV, coronary heart disease, chronic viral hepatitis and many other diseases do not affect chimpanzees. By understanding how we evolved from chimpanzees we can find out why we are susceptible to these diseases. This is an important step towards finding cures for these diseases. Let mythologies inspire us to be honest, benevolent & good in nature, but not prevent us to explore the unknown.

Just like reality bust in Japan & recently in China teaches us to be cautious reality investors,
by knowing our past mistakes in any field & getting over the same, we can proceed in the right direction without any bias.

regards,
sam