The 2008 Winter MRC Members' Meeting was held February 20-21 in Albuquerque, NM, hosted by our MRC members from Sandia National Laboratories. The meeting was held at the Rio Grande Best Western, adjacent to Albuquerque's Old Town and Plaza, allowing attendees a chance to visit these historic areas during their limited free time. While attendance was down somewhat from normal, those that were there were treated to an excellent meeting of best practices, networking, and various tours and events.

The meeting kicked off Wednesday morning with several best practice presentations by Sandia personnel about many of their programs. After an introduction and welcome by Jeff Quintenz, Lynnwood Dukes presented the Sandia Change Management approach espoused by Michael Hammer. Shelley Whitener then reviewed the reliability optimizing strategies that she and her team were using to improve the performance. Ed Williams and Shelley then presented their maintenance planning and scheduling system.

Wednesday afternoon, Tom Byerley reported on the status of programs from the MRC including MARCON 2008, the Intern Program, and Monash University.

Kevin Stewart shared what the Alcoa Primary Products Business Unit was doing in the way of a global reliability strategy, including things that worked well and lessons learned through the process. Al Weber of Ivara then shared perspectives on Culture Change and how being able to change is essential to long-term survival.

The day was finished off by a terrific tour, reception and dinner at the near-by National Atomic Museum. Gary Hoe and Wes Mozley of Sandia proved to be excellent hosts and Gary also proved to be an outstanding docent, recounting fact after fact and story after story about the exhibits throughout the museum. In addition to the exhibits and education within the museum, we had an wonderful buffet of New Mexico cuisine and experienced some terrific networking among the attendees.

The Thursday morning session brought a first-hand look into several other Sandia programs such as Roof Management, Energy Programs, and LEEDS attainment in existing buildings. James Byrd of member company BWXT-Y12 made an excellent presentation about the progress of utilizing RCM in the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge. Then we heard from Bob Cranwell about Sandia's Center for Systems Reliability (heavy stuff).

After a brief discussion about our upcoming tour of Sandia and lunch, the group boarded a bus and spent the afternoon touring part of Sandia National Laboratories. First, it must be said that we could only see a part of the laboratories' facilities. For one thing, much of the lab is behind classified boundaries. For another thing, it is HUGE and would take days to see it. Gary Hoe and Wes Mozley, along with a couple of their colleagues, led the touring and conveyed a tremendous amount of information as we visited such far flung areas as the 'Rings of Saturn' Accelerator (the Saturn accelerator is a modular, high power, variable spectrum, X-ray simulation source), the National Solar Thermal Test Facility, the Rocket Sled Test Track, and the power plant.