ABRAMAN spotlights equipment reliability at the Sobratema Congress

The Sobratema Congress began its series of talks addressing the importance of equipment reliability, with the theme “Capacitação do Profissional de Manutenção: Fator de Confiabilidade e Produtividade” (Qualification of Maintenance Professionals: a Factor of Reliability and Productivity). ABRAMAN director Célio Cunha de Almeida Prado, of the association’s branch for São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul, made his presentation and pointed out that the surveys conducted recently revealed that there are about 600,000 maintenance area workers who are unemployed, and that one of the reasons Brazil ranks 6th among the world’s economies is the shortage of manpower. "We have to implement the methodologies of reliability in our companies to achieve the highest level of excellence in our equipment," says Célio.

According to him, the goal is to analyze the equipment before its failure, the future failure and the consequences of that failure. It is necessary that the professionals who are involved in the work are trained and have specialization and graduate degree courses. It is worth remembering that most maintenance professionals in large companies are engineers. "It’s not enough to know how. Professionals also have to want to know how, and want to do," says the director.

Professionals must learn teamwork, take the initiative, innovate their areas of activity, be agile, monitor and have complete control of their equipment.

The director further cites, in giving examples, that accidents like the one involving personal watercraft (a Jet Ski) that hit and killed a child, the failure of a ride at the ‘Hopi Hari’ amusement park that caused a casualty, and constant breakdowns in the Metro are due to failures in maintenance.

The presentation brought together dozens of professionals who also discussed the difficulties they face in their day-to-day work in their companies.