FALL 2015

24 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S

24 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK Joe Greenslade Director of Engineering Technology INDUSTRIAL FASTENERS INSTITUTE 636 Oak Tree Blvd., Independence, OH 44131 TEL 216-241-1482 FAX 216-241-5901 EMAIL jgreenslade@indfast.org WEB www.indfast.org EVER THINK ABOUT HOW THE 80/20 RULE MIGHT APPLY TO FASTENER KNOWLEDGE? In life I have learned many interesting concepts and facts. One of the most interesting and useful concepts I have learned is the 80/20 rule. Wikipedia Explains It This Way: The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper "Cours d'économie politique." Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients." Mathematically, the 80–20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution. I have learned the benefits of using this concept in most aspects of business, engineering, and life in general. Over my 45 years in the fastener industry I have learned many, many facts and details about fasteners, and have answered literally thousands of questions. As I have been thinking about my retirement scheduled for December 31, 2015 I thought about some of the few loose ends I would like to tie up for the fastener industry. When I thought about all of the questions I have answered over the years I realized that a few have been repeated over and over again. These repeated questions and their associated answers make up 20% or less of all of the facts about fasteners I have accumulated over these many years. That realization resulted in two recent IFI publications that I sincerely feel every member of the fastener industry should be familiar with and should definitely have in their technical resource library. These two publications are the TORQUE Book for Fasteners and The Critical Fastener Facts Every Fastener Supplier and User Should Know. The TORQUE Book for Fasteners is 26 pages long and explains everything a fastener supplier or user should know about determining tightening values for all types of inch and metric fasteners. If someone can read and understand simple instructions, look up values in three tables in the book, and use a calculator they can be as good as any fastener expert in existence at answering the question, “What torque should I apply to this particular fastener?” The Critical Fastener Facts Every Fastener Supplier and User Should Know publication is a small booklet containing 91 questions and answers that will answer more than 80% of all the questions most fastener suppliers will be asked during their fastener career. This book is a real short cut to the accumulation of a wealth of fastener knowledge. If you have not heard of it before I suggest you learn about the 80/20 rule and how to effectively apply it in lots of circumstances. These two books are among my final contributions to the fastener industry. I hope many industry members will get these, absorb their content, and benefit to their 80/20 approach to fastener knowledge. These are both available in the IFI online store in the Reference Book section at www.indfast.org/shop/. TECHNICAL ARTICLE JOE GREENSLADE | INDUSTRIAL FASTENERS INSTITUTE