What’s up with these last 17 tags?

Managing Components that were NOT Monitored Part III

Technicians are supposed to monitor components. Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way we had planned. You load 350 components in her handheld from your LDAR database. She works all day and turns in the handheld with 17 components unmonitored.

What are you to do?

You could ask her “What’s up with these last 17 tags?” Beyond the most obvious (that she just ran out of time) each of the possible reasons could have important implications for the health of your LDAR Program. In each case, you can either sweep the issue under the rug and live to monitor another day, OR you can capture the opportunity to invest in the process and achieve measurable improvement.

For instance, the next most important thing is that either this tech or another tech is going to go out and try to locate this component again. (Long gone, please God, are the days when we just re-classified these components as inactive just because the first tech couldn’t find them.) (Hold up, we HAVE given that up for good, haven’t we?)

If and when you do assign these components to another technician, wouldn’t it be helpful if the second tech had the benefit of knowing why the first technicians hadn’t monitored them?  Such as:

1. Unable to locate
2. Removed from Service and Gone
3. Removed from Service, in place, purged and open to atmosphere
4. Unsure how to monitor complicated emission seam
5. Component requires special PPE
6. Component was unsafe due to a particular hazard

And then, wouldn’t it be even more helpful  if the second technician was prompted, after finding and monitoring the component, to give an assessment of why the first tech had not monitored the component.  Such as:

1. Bad location description. I fixed it.
2. Safety issue resolved
3. Component back in service
4. Climbing required isolated incident
5. Climbing required – multiple times
6. I had the proper PPE with me.
7. Other: [                      ]

In each circumstance, a little feedback can go a long way toward making the NEXT monitoring pass more valuable than ever!

In other news, LDARtools is selling phx21’s like crazy! An yes- 15 brand new phx21s will fit in Erica’s Fiat. Now you can say you have seen a $250,000 Fiat 500!