"Plant engineers and maintenance managers know from experience: All manufacturing equipment will break down, often at the worst possible moment. To survive in today's lean-and-mean manufacturing environment, companies must head off these breakdowns with a preventive-maintenance management program that is both systematic and flexible -- and geared toward minimizing downtime and maximizing equipment life.

"Fundamentals of Preventive Maintenance" provides readers with an easy-to-follow, economically sensible maintenance and workorder management program. This results-driven guidebook outlines a 7-step process for designing and implementing the program, describing what needs to be done -- and why. Designed to transform an often unwieldy program into one that can be effectively managed, it provides hands-on techniques for:

* Establishing critical scheduling protocols

* Managing the daily workorder schedule

* Developing and issuing preventive maintenance workorders

* Monitoring the program and making improvements"

"From tragic accidents to public relations fiascos, we live in an increasingly crisis-ridden society. In fact, half of the major industrial accidents of the past century occurred in the last 20 years. Incidents such as Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez have become embedded in our consciousness, cultural icons of the worst sort. Other crises, less devastating but with serious impact on their businesses, occur almost daily. Why is this--and what can be done to reverse this disturbing trend? According to Ian Mitroff, one of the world's leading experts on crisis management, the rise in the crisis rate is due to an ingrained ""it-can't happen-to-us"" mentality--which, in turn, leads to a total lack of preparedness for crises. His solution? Find out in Managing Crises Before They Happen. This fascinating book provides readers with a powerful framework that will help them: * Recognize the early warning signals that almost always precede a crisis * Focus on the big picture, not just the details * Avoid becoming either the victim or the villain in a crisis situation * Understand the importance of personal character, corporate culture, and thinking outside the box to effective crisis management * Learn from one crisis things that can prevent or ameliorate the next."

Traditionally, organizational risk managers focused on cost containment, aiming to attain the highest level of protection at the lowest possible cost. More recently, the growing embrace of enterprise risk management is prompting organizations to look at risk management as a source of value creation and competitive advantage. The leading enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks - ISO 31000 and COSO - present compelling rationale but leave the "how-to" operational questions largely unanswered. Building on the idea of "risk profiling," Banasiewicz presents his vision for how the promise of ERM can be turned into an operational reality by thoughtfully leveraging quantitative & qualitative, numeric & text data. He outlines a step-by-step process for transforming readily available and informationally-rich, though not always well-utilized data into objective estimates of downside and upside risks. The overall focus of Risk Profiling of Organizations is on showing how otherwise diverse organizational exposures can be looked at as different parts of a single whole.