Faulty business strategies (or their poor implementation) are often identified as the cause of a business organization not achieving its goals. But it’s really the people behind those strategies and their implementation that make or break the strategy.

The success of any organization depends on how well its members function as a team. Are the members passionate about what the organization does? Are they willing to “play the game” as a team? Organizational alignment is not accidental. Creating it requires open, multi-directional communication. It needs leaders to set clear goals for themselves and others. It requires leaders to give honest and timely feedback with the objective of enabling individuals to raise their own performance levels.

Management literature is over-flowing with leadership theories, models and styles. At the practical level, however, leadership is all about getting people to do what they need to in the best interests of the organization. Leaders must paint a picture of a more desirable future (the vision), and get people charged up and convinced that this future is worth the effort (buy-in) so that everyone in the organization constantly thinks about how best to get to the destination (alignment that drives innovation, service, etc.).

This discussion will outline the process followed that aligned an organization to achieve reliability excellence and that delivered superior results to its stakeholders.

Paul Dufresne has been president and CEO of Reliability Playbook since 2017, following 28 years of experience in maintenance and reliability roles in the U.S. Military and at Georgia Pacific, Trico Corporation and Koch Industries. As an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army, Paul served six years of active duty and four years of National Guard duty. After completing his college education, Paul received his commission and served an additional four years of active duty as an officer in the Army’s Armor Branch. He spent the next several years in the corporate world helping design and implement predictive maintenance programs and serving in a variety of roles in training, maintenance management and reliability leadership. In 2013, he received the Senior VP Award for Reliability from GP.

Incorporating knowledge from his military and business careers, Paul uses a hands-on approach to help customers across the country and internationally develop and implement world class maintenance and reliability programs. Paul has experienced successful results throughout his career, including:

• Achieving and maintaining maintenance readiness of over 95 percent in his battalion while serving as maintenance officer.
• Rebuilding the lubrication and predictive maintenance program at a Georgia Pacific mill, achieving world class reliability standards and increasing uptime by 5 percent annually across all five paper machines within 18 months of starting.
• Writing GP’s lubrication standards in 2010 that are still in corporate-wide use today.
• Breaking every production record in the history of the business during his three years as corporate reliability and engineering manager in GP’s oriented strand board business.
• Creating and strengthening maintenance and reliability programs – achieving world class results – at Fortune 500 companies in nearly every industry from biopharmaceutical
plants to steel mills, refineries to paper mills, etc.
• Rebuilding a team and instituting process improvements at a corporate facility that led to a $60 million improvement in production.

Paul serves as chairman of the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals Best Practices Committee. He is a member of the Society of Tribologist and Lubrication Engineers and the Industry Council for Machinery Lubrication. He holds credentials through STLE as Certified Lubrication Specialist (CLS); through SMRP as Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) and Technician (CMRT); through the Association for Facilities Engineering as Certified Plant Maintenance Manager (CPMM); and through the Association of Asset Management Professionals as Certified Reliability Leader (CRL). Paul is certified in predictive maintenance technologies such as vibration analysis and thermography. He has written several articles and technical white papers and is a frequent presenter at industry conferences.

Paul is a Distinguished Military Graduate and has a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in military science from the University of Central Florida. He and his wife, April, have four children.