Diminishing Returns

The industrial coatings industry has come a long way over the past 20 years.  The methods we use to protect steel structures from the environment (both natural and man-made) are MUCH more effective, if not a lot more expensive than the days of picks and blast pots.  The choices of protective coating materials and complex methods of structure access, and personnel and environmental protection have morphed job specifications into documents with a lot of engineering behind them.

All of this progress is laudable and should continue to be refined to make our new better, safer, more efficient practices standard so that the baseline expected performance for a new paint job is raised across the board.  But my sense is that in several key areas, we, as a community, have hit the point of diminishing returns for our well-intended efforts.

Coating materials are certainly better and more consistent overall as reformulation to meet environmental and job efficiency goals have resulted in clever formulations which go on with little to no wasted solvent volume, dry faster and perform better long term in the harsh environment.  Containments and ventilation of work spaces has created mobile workareas which are safer for workers, more accessible and visible – resulting in quality benefits.

And, not to be forgotten, the industry has embraced a more aggressive stance toward jobsite quality assurance, conducted by independent and well-trained experts so that quality and consistency are valued job to job. 

But in all of these areas, there have been few, if any, real revolutionary innovations over the past 10 years.  Achieving quality has been a long, incremental journey – one worth taking – but one based on arguments of “life cycle cost savings” and blind faith in accelerated test data and consensus certification programs.  All of these efforts are “righteous” but none of them have a big upside to revolutionizing the way we do business or the results we obtain in terms of performance.

To get “there” we are going to have to change our thinking, and the thinking of the managers and owners of our structures.  We need to adopt an approach that treats the protective coating system on a structure as a manufacturing process – design, standard (or even mechanize) manufacturing process, and institutionalize quality checks.  Our brethren in the coating of OEM products (washing machines, automobiles) have embraced this philosophy years ago and now coating failure and breakdown are NEVER an issue that affects the lifecycle of one of their products.