RFID & Resin

I’m sitting at the FMEA-1 desk for the generator rewind at CR3 watching the winders apply resin, a bubble gum colored goop, to the exposed generator coils.

My teammate and I provide FME control for the zone; of the blue plastic bags used to protect coil ends and the hundreds of wipers (rags), not to mention boxes, tubes, Dacron, tools, totes, etc.  Resin is a sticky mess until it hardens, at which time it becomes a monolithic rock along with anything it touches.  There is some resin on the tools, totes, boxes… I can deal with that.  I inspect and record each item to insure it is intact upon exiting the zone, but the consumables?  That’s a bag of a different color.

I had hoped to post a picture of wipers and bags enshrined by resin, and still may if I get my hands on one.  Check back if you tire of watching the evening news.  Anyway, each bag, each wiper receives a number written in more than one location on the item to insure that the Access FME Accountability Tech still has a good chance of uniquely identifying that item.  The glob of 20-30 mixed consumables in front of me looks like a big wad of bubblegum chewed by a giant, except that he forgot to take the paper wrapper off before he began chewing.

Snapping on my rubber gloves like a gastrointestinal surgeon, I dive into a pink-blue-white wad which yields a high percentage of legible numbers which we clear from the accountability log.  However, the remaining resin ball refuses to be teased apart.  I can’t tell if this patient will live as I grunt and groan for another ten minutes or so.  By reverse osmosis we are finally able to accurately quantify the remaining items to balance our books, but not without trepidation due to a dearth of more exacting ID.

Flash forward a few months to the Access Solutions training and development center.  A similar wad of resin covered material is walked over to a table.  The undifferentiated wad is set on the table where a device lights-up and reads the RFID tags incorporated into each independent item.  Sixty wipers show on the screen, by number, showing the time that each was brought into the test “zone” and by whom…IN SIX SECONDS.

Six seconds.  I can’t even chew a stick of bubble gum in that amount of time.

NEXT TIME: FME vs FOD

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RFID FME ASAP… What?!

Life is coming at me pretty fast these days; seems like each year goes by faster than the one before it. 

I used to think that the pace of time was relative to the number of children I had, but at the end of child-rearing, time continued to accelerate, like being in bucket at the end of a rope being swung around in the air, only the rope keeps getting shorter.  From my conversations, I am not the only human being faced with this crisis of acceleration.

Everyone I talk to uses the “B” word.  You  know.  You ask someone how things are and they respond, “Busy.”  I am asked how my life is or why I haven’t emailed back or why I haven’t called my mother; “I’ve been busy.”  I need to get over it and quit empowering “busy” to have so much control over me.  Heck.  I’m even working at removing the word from my vocabulary.  We need a new paradigm that accepts the fact that life is and will continue to accelerate.  

Our technologies have provided a way for us to be more productive in this acceleration, giving us the fleeting illusion that we are making up time.  My wife and I occasionally muse, ‘What if we just got rid of the three computers in the office, the two PDAs, the smart phone (Gasp. NOT the Ipod!)?  Would life slow down?  Yeup, bummer.  It would take longer to do things (Duh. This is after all, the goal).  So in response we keep our technologies humming right along.

Within the scope of my job as an FME Accountability Technician, time is less important than accuracy – a welcome relief.  Sure the job gets bus… “eventful” as I manually record each person and item, check for proper PPE and removal of personal items, inspect condition and authorization status of tools.  I have longed for a way that I could decrease error potential, increase my efficiency and  reduce the callous on my writing finger.  Well, writing fingers rejoice!

If you aren’t already aware, RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification.  It’s the technology that in essence puts little license plates on things that can then be read automatically using radio frequencies which are then recorded in a computer.  Applied to FME, I can now allow the technology do the heavy lifting of recording things and concentrate my efforts on inspection.  Of course, not everything can get tagged.  RFID ”tagging” is the equivalent of a gang of hooligans spray painting their logo on the side of a building to mark their territory, only RFID goes farther by issuing a unique number to each circuit “tag” and it requires less paint remover.

With the right tagging and RFID system implemented,  the presence of people, tools and consumables are announced by my computer, but since not all things are tagged, I need only type the exceptions into the computer and at break-finger speed, the next person can be processed ASAP.  Higher accuracy and production, we save trees, we save ink and we replace the writing  callous with a typing callous.  Could the speed of life in FME be any better?

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Next post: more about RFID

Housekeeping Starts in My Garage

I walked into my garage the other day looking for a tool I desperately needed.  I couldn’t find it.

Contrary to what people who know me might suggest, I’m not an organizing fanatic who outlines each tool in its hanging place on the wall of my workshop.  In the course of daily business I do organize quite a bit (OK maybe MORE than just a bit), but at home in my shop I utilize a globally recognized and intricate standard known as ”The Pile” method.   Who gets credit for this method I’m not sure, though based on its efficiency, I would guess Gomer Pyle USMC; if you are younger than 40, check YouTube and you’ll understand.

It used to be I knew where every pile was and what was in each pile.  Unfortunately over the years, my number of piles and projects-in-progress (I’m also a “plate spinner” but we’ll leave that for another post) have grown exponentially and I remember less of just exactly what comprises each of those piles.

My workbench is the Mother Of All Piles (M.O.A.P.), an eclectic mixture of garden materials, hand tools for building fine furniture, a gopher trap or two, half a dozen pieces of exotic hardwood, maybe an interesting article clipped from an obscure technical magazine…you get the picture.  Getting back to my issue, time, age and events conspired against me and, against all powers of reason, I could not find sought after tool.

If you’ve made it this far, you may be asking yourself, “OK. (yawn) How does this apply to FME?”  In another post I’ve discussed the meaning of FME and the basic conceptual approach.  What I want to touch upon here is how FME is interrelated with other disciplines, in this case, housekeeping. 

So that I did not misplace a tool, I could hire a housekeeping-type person to clean and organize my workshop, but I wouldn’t do it.  Sure I could use the help, but it’s my little shop and it doesn’t affect anyone else.  Now put dozens of other people in this same space without each of us cleaning up after ourselves…chaos!  What happens when one person leaves an M.O.A.P. of rags, tools, containers, their safety harness, components, bolts, etc. in the work area?  How easy is it to lose something inadvertently?  How simple is it to accidentally kick something, sending it flying into oblivion?  Where is oblivion anyway?

What if it’s just a little ole’ bolt laying on the deck next to my tool bucket?  From projects I’ve worked, it is pretty simple math to see that if housekeeping awareness was a supported priority, some of the lost productivity surrounding tracking objects so that they do not become foreign material could be recaptured.  And if that bolt gets bumped into a machine opening?  Well that’s escalates my case to a whole another level. 

Does housekeeping eliminate foreign material issues?  No, but it’s a necesary base from which to start.  If it were better employed during FME we’d be more efficient and reduce object drops…and if used in my garage, I might not be whining about my misplaced tool.  What tool was it I needed anyway?  Talk about your lost productivity.

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Access Solutions and S3Edge Announce Partnership

This is really exciting.  Bring together the FME domain experts and the RFID - real time visibility and control system experts under one partnership and get ready for your world to rock!  Check out the announcement and look for my next post on automated FME processes.

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What is FME?

Increasingly the world is filled with acronyms, due in part to the unrelenting overflow of  information entering our noggins.  Certain industries are given to acronym utilization more than others.  When you combine the spheres of military and engineering, such as in the nuclear power generation industry, the acronyms take on meaning in and of themselves and many people eventually displace the original meanings.

Many of you who read this will already be acquainted with FME.  For you who are new to the terminology, I hope this gives you glimpse into the acronym and for everyone else, at least establish a common foundation of understanding.  FME seems pretty specific to me and I thought, “How many meanings could there be?”  Google FME and you will find many variants.  It can stand for a host of business and organizational names as well as many different meanings: Forensic Medical Examiner, Free Market Economy or Fugitive Methane Emissions (which sounds like a problem I occasionally encounter after eating burritos).

FME in my world means Foreign Material Exclusion: keeping stuff out of THERE that’s not supposed to be in THERE.  So this begs the question, “Where’s THERE?”  Within the context of power generation (the nuclear power industry reportedly coined the FME discipline) it means keeping stuff from entering critical equipment during maintenance cycles that is foreign to that equipment.  This is especially true of the fuel pool, condenser, generator, high pressure turbine, low pressure turbine, exciter, but also pumps, filters, valves, coolers, reservoirs, pipes and tubes.  What kind of “stuff” are we trying to keep out of these places?

Since at least 2008, the nuclear power industry has increased awareness, training and implementation of FME procedures to reduce unscheduled outage time and unplanned maintenance issues.  Ideally, the only time that a plant stops generating electricity is when the operators refuel.  Unfortunately, when foreign stuff (and this is just a fraction of all the ”stuff” that can become foreign material) like loose nuts, bolts, washers, wire, plastic, pens, shavings, dust, personal jewelery, broken components, tools and even the FME barriers themselves remain inside a machine after it is closed up, it can be extremely detrimental to the operation of that and other machines and have big, expensive consequences.

Therefore our purpose, our existence, our piercing focus as a business is to be sure that foreign materials are excluded from all critical areas which are under our control… we are FME.

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The Edge of FME

Greetings. 

Welcome to our topical space of All Things FME - the unique world of the Foreign Materials Exclusion discipline – and the opportunities, methodologies and implications that surround it.  I chose to engage in the blogosphere during both a challenging and promising time in history.  Some say we collectively stand at the edge of certain doom and others that we stand near great promise awaiting.  I guess it depends upon your perspective.  From the vantage of  history I’d say most people and businesses will be standing somewhere in between.  FME growth and technological advancement stands nearer the great promise, the surface of which we are currently scratching. 

Drilling into our little slice of the pie, we the merry band at Access Solutions (www.AccessSolutions.net) are doing our best to push the envelope and bring game-changing enhancements to FME procedures, processes, services, products, technologies….ok, all of FME.  We do this with the overarching goals of improving the FME control environment, efficiencies and ROI. Admittedly it’s a tough task, but with our years of practical experience and the advantage of world-class partners, combined with timely emergence of exciting new technologies, we are running at full stride in front of the pack.  A little conceited sounding?  No, we’re confident.  Check us out and determine for yourself.  Through news of our development, reports from our partners and words from our clientele, we’re confident that you’ll agree. 

Cheers until next time!

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