Founder and CEO of Noria Corporation, he was present at the 7th World Congress in Maintenance and Asset Management, where he expressed his interest in working continuously on behalf of sharing knowledge and training professionals towards a world class quality industry.

“Steps to Build a Condition Monitoring Integrated Program to Detect Early Failures and Optimize Reliability” was the main idea at the lecture given by Jim Fitch during the 7th Maintenance Congress in Colombia, held last May 2015. Fitch is founder and CEO at Noria Corporation, a consulting and training organization specialized in machinery lubrication and Reliability, with headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma USA. Fitch is one of the world authorities in asset management, and his firm holds important annual events, congresses, and publishes the Machinery Lubrication magazine. This firm has extended its activities to Latin America through Noria Latin America, which is lead by Gerardo Trujillo, president of AMGA. Jim Fitch has received multiple awards throughout his career, besides being a well-known writer of technical books and articles. As Director of the International Council for Machinery Lubrication (ICML), Fitch is a reference in Tribology, and from Noria Corporation he has given special emphasis on training under a high quality focus, with specialized services in consulting and education regarding Lubrication Excellence and Lube Analysis. This congress in Cartagena was the right opportunity to talk with Fitch about his impressions on the event as well as Noria’s plans for the near future.

Predictiva21: What is your impression on the congress?

Jim Fitch: This is my first time at the World Maintenance Congress. I’ve never been to Cartagena – Colombia before, so it was quite a treat. I was expecting something quite a bit less than what I found. I arrived yesterday, as we understand that we are close to a thousand, and fifty to sixty exhibitors in their range, it’s a very impressive capability for South America, with the size and scale of a congress in the United States or Europe. So, I was very impressed with the quality of the people here. They all represent big companies, in association with vendors and some academia association schools and so forth. I’m told that there are 70 to 80% user organization practitioners. In events like this, is typical for people to leave their plants and mine sites to come and spend time to a congress like this. Regarding the papers, sadly I don’t speak Spanish, so it’s difficult for me to attend. It can be a little bit difficult, but what I’m hearing from people that are attending is that they’re all well done, conferences seem to have good administration, they are working as planned, and hopefully we will be able to come back, maybe in two years in Europe, so we look forward to that.

P21: Which are your plans for Noria this year?

JF: Noria has itself a large conference, larger than this one. It’s around a hundred exhibitors and over a thousand delegates. This year is in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s a very successful, high quality event. We’ve been doing this for a long time since 1997, this is our 17th Conference, and it’s a sign of our interest in this field and the need of our users in particular for information knowledge from subject matter experts. So, in April 2016 in Kentucky, we’d love to have people from Latin America attend that. We usually have a group of people from here. Noria trains thousands of people every year in 40 different countries in different languages, including Spanish. So we are quite busy training people in three different levels. Each year we have more and more people wanting to understand how to do things the right way and we are there trying to help them. Noria is also in the services business, so we have people who have been to training and realize that there is a lot of work that need to be done in our organization. They also realize that they may also not have the time or understanding to figure it out themselves, so they need help. Noria has a well-structured program to do that, to deliver information to them about lubrication and how they can optimize with precision for maximum benefit using our program.

P21: What do you think is the added value from these events regarding the Noria users?

JF: I think that, in general, the users of the organization benefit a lot because they rub shoulders with other users, who have been trying to do the same thing, or perhaps these users have figures ahead of them since they started their transformation a few years ago, so they have some experience to share. Also, they have the opportunity to rub shoulders with vendors to offer unique products and services. Finally, subject matter experts who actually know how to do things at a world class level. Therefore, we have the opportunity to draw the line from our current state to the optimal stage. That is what we have seen here today.

Text: Alimey Díaz M
Photos/ Correspondent: Miguel A. Guzmán
Translation/ transcription: Richard Skinner