Once more, we have come to this special time of the year. We have set up the Christmas tree at the office and at home. For me, Christmas always brings back childhood memories of family members reunited on snowy days.

People often ask me who my competitors are. Truth is, our single biggest competitor is “doing nothing”. The single biggest obstacle to our business, with multinationals, is “but we don’t do it that way back home”. With Chinese companies, it is more like “your approach so different from all your competitors”.

Those who have been in the maintenance industry in China for a long time (not that there are many of us!) often complain that we keep dealing with the same issues over and over again, mostly in relation to preventive maintenance…

For the second time our “Maintenance in China” newsletter is distributed at the Annual Process Industry Engineering & Maintenance Congress, held in Shanghai on September 5 & 6. I am also speaking at the event on the ambitious topic of “Technology-enabled technicians vs. the intelligent plant: the Chinese view”: behind the fancy title, I will simply share our real-life experience dealing with maintenance improvement in the Chinese market.

As some of our readers know, while I first came to China in the late 90s to work on a paper mill project in Suzhou, the rest of my career (after I moved here permanently in 1999, until the end of 2004, when we started the Siveco business) was dedicated to power utilities.

This month, our newsletter has strong green overtones! Last month’s Reliability article on “Saving the forest” drew a lot more attention that expected, partly thanks to its environment-friendly approach (although the article was really about using mobile solutions to manage the inspection process, with only marginal savings in paper consumption).