TABLE OF CONTENTS Author: V. Narayan
The school of hard knocks taught me most of the really useful things I learned about reliability and maintenance. I worked with many talented people during my career in industry, who were my best teachers. My co-author Mahen Das and I are both mechanical engineers and worked in a small petroleum refinery in the early stages of our careers. This company had a "can-do" attitude and dynamic culture. We could make occasional mistakes without fear of reprisal. Innovative ideas and creativity thrived at every level. Mahen and I took full advantage of this wonderful social laboratory. But, as the saying goes, all good things eventually come to an end. When this happened, we left the company within a week of each other and went our separate ways.
A few years later both of us happened to rejoin the parent company of this refinery in Europe. Some years later, both of us began working in their corporate headquarters. That was when we met Jim Wardhaugh, the third author of this book. Jim is an electrical engineer who worked in the power generation and distribution industry before coming to the oil and gas industry. The three of us got along brilliantly, and were members of the maintenance and reliability advisory team in the parent company.
The parent company had global operations in the upstream and downstream oil and gas business. It had responsibility...
