Reliability | Edwin Rodriguez on The Reliability Gap Between Service Providers and Sites

Summary

Factory Futures Podcast: Reliability | Edwin Rodriguez on The Reliability Gap Between Service Providers and Sites

Host: Jp
Guest: Edwin Rodriguez, Equipment Reliability Specialist at Chesterton
Date: May 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Factory Futures explores persistent reliability challenges in manufacturing, examining why downtime and equipment failures often continue despite robust maintenance programs and service contracts. Host Jp welcomes Edwin Rodriguez for a candid discussion focused on the “reliability gap” between service providers and sites, digging into organizational silos, culture, and the disconnect between sales and service teams. Edwin draws from years of hands-on and consultative experience to unpack real-world examples and actionable insights on bridging reliability gaps for manufacturing leaders.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Edwin’s Background and the Realities of Field Service

[00:54–02:29]

• Edwin introduces his role at Chesterton as an equipment reliability specialist, serving various manufacturing sectors.
• Previously a field technician, he’s “been everywhere, working on all kinds of industrial equipment with everybody from operations to sales engineers.”
• Emphasizes being a “liaison between all important functions” to keep equipment running.

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2. Why Does Unplanned Downtime Persist?

[03:33–07:14]

• Edwin often arrives at sites already deep in crisis—firefighting mode versus proactive work.
• “You walk into a multitude of challenges... It has to do with culture, with how everyone is working together, from maintenance personnel to leadership to operations.”
• Downtime persists due to a mix of:
  • Complacency and accountability gaps among regular staff.
  • Lack of root cause analysis: “Why does this keep happening even though I’m here again?”
  • Poor knowledge transfer and ownership of issues.
• Notable Quote:

  “If I’m showing up every week, we got to have real serious conversations... because the people you talk to are there every day, around this equipment every day.” (Edwin, 05:25)

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3. Common Causes of Equipment Failure in Managed Environments

[07:58–12:27]

• Failures are rarely about the hardware alone—often systemic:
  • Lack of proper training.
  • Poorly documented (or undocumented) procedures.
  • Siloed communication between operations, maintenance, reliability, and production.
• Real-world Example: At a petrochemical plant, an operator admitted, “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” about a critical system—a sign of poor training and documentation.
• Root Cause Example: False sensor readings led to repeated system shutdowns; “stepping back and looking at the system holistically” was key to diagnosing the issue.
• Notable Quote:

  “If you don’t know your own equipment... now we got a bigger problem.” (Edwin, 09:17)

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4. Fostering Ownership and Accountability Among Operators

[12:27–19:43]

• The challenge: Getting operators to “own” their equipment when many don’t feel empowered or trained to do so.
• Solution: Culture change starts at the top.
• Navy Example: On a ship, it takes every single crew member understanding their role and collaborating for mission success—transparency and cross-training are essential.
• Importance of inclusive, regular meetings:

  “Leadership shows they care by having meetings and including everyone, being open to feedback… Information has to be a two-way street.” (Edwin, 17:40)

• Contrast between sites: One falling apart is plagued by “not my job” attitudes; the other runs smoothly with open collaboration.

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5. Empowering Meetings and Team Collaboration

[19:43–22:50]

• Edwin’s observed meetings where “the most important people—operators and mechanics—didn’t say a word.”
• Effective meetings are transparent and empower frontline staff to voice concerns and suggestions.
• Quote:

  “As a leader, you have to listen and talk less—and that’s the way these meetings should go.” (Edwin, 20:53)

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6. Cultural Shifts: Turning Silos Into Teams

[21:32–22:50]

• Change is difficult, especially where “we’ve always done it this way” runs deep.
• It takes “buy-in from most people, from whole teams” and time to shift from a non-collaborative to a collaborative culture.

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7. The Reliability Gap: Disconnect Between Sales, Service Providers, and Sites

[22:50–34:41]

• Often-overlooked dimension of reliability: The quality of relationships and information flow between service providers (including sales/field engineers) and site teams.
• Disconnects can result in:
  • Incomplete or poor technical reporting, severing trust and hampering long-term solutions.
  • Service and sales teams working at cross-purposes, with blame, territorial attitudes (“without me, you can’t do this”), and poor follow-up.
• Notable Quotes:

  “The relationship between sales and service is so critical... service guys see the customer more... they need each other.” (Edwin, 33:03)
  “If I turn in a report that should be detailed and I return a report as one sentence, I am severing the relationship...” (Edwin, 30:31)

• Solution: Build strong collaborative relationships between all roles—“everyone needs each other to succeed.”

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8. Leadership Reflections: What Makes Reliability Work?

[34:41–38:17]

• Strong reliability leadership means ensuring everyone knows how to deliver solutions and communicate.
• Good leadership empowers staff and prioritizes customer needs:

  “If you’re taking care of the customer and their equipment and you know how to deliver and communicate effectively, then you’re good... listen more, talk less.” (Edwin, 36:15)

• Value of rigorous handovers: Passing down good information at shift changes is vital (“can’t be a ‘they can figure it out’ attitude”).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Time | Speaker | Quote | |---------|--------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 05:25 | Edwin | “If I’m showing up every week... we got to have real serious conversations...” | | 09:17 | Edwin | “If you don’t know your own equipment... we got a bigger problem.” | | 17:40 | Edwin | “Leadership shows that they care by having meetings and including everyone...” | | 20:53 | Edwin | “As a leader, you have to listen and talk less...” | | 30:31 | Edwin | “If I turn in a report that should be detailed and I return a report as one sentence, I am severing the relationship...” | | 33:03 | Edwin | “The relationship between sales and service is so critical... they need each other.” | | 36:15 | Edwin | “If you’re taking care of the customer and you know how to deliver and communicate effectively, you’re good... listen more, talk less.” | | 39:20 | Edwin | “Reliability is really about teamwork.” |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction & Guest Background: 00:37–02:29
• Why Downtime Persists: 03:33–07:14
• Common Causes of Failure: 07:58–12:27
• Operator Ownership & Culture Change: 12:27–19:43
• Meetings & Empowerment: 19:43–22:50
• Bridging Organizational Silos: 21:32–22:50
• Reliability Gap (Sales/Service Disconnect): 22:50–34:41
• Leadership Reflections: 34:41–38:17
• Quickfire Listener Q&A: 38:27–39:21

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Quickfire Round Highlights

[38:27–39:21]

• Most common root cause of unplanned downtime?
  “Lack of information.” (38:42)

• Which is more commonly executed poorly, PMs or Predictive Maintenance?
  “Predictive Maintenance.” (38:50)

• Sales teams should do more of…
  “Follow up.” (38:59)

• Service teams should stop…
  “Leaving too fast from a job site and not ensuring everything is running.” (39:07)

• Reliability is really about…
  “Teamwork.” (39:20)

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Conclusion

Edwin’s experiences reinforce that equipment reliability issues are rarely about tools or parts alone—they’re driven by culture, communication, ownership, and relationships. Leaders must nurture a collaborative, transparent environment at every level, break down silos, and bridge gaps between site teams and service providers. Ultimate success relies not on heroics or strict process, but on teamwork, shared ownership, and a commitment to continuous, open dialogue.

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For manufacturing leaders and reliability professionals, this episode is a reminder: stop thinking in silos, start thinking as a team.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Factory Futures podcast. Join us as we dive into the world of innovation and best practice in manufacturing. We sit down with industry leaders in reliability operations and production with a mission to uncover new technologies making a real impact, driving performance and enhancing profitability. Of your site, we explore the leadership journeys of our guests, learning from their challenges and gaining from their insights. Subscribe on your favorite app to stay ahead of the curve with our latest episodes. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Edwin, welcome to the show.

[B]

How you doing? I'm glad to be here.

[A]

Yeah, thank you. Well, the pleasure is mine. I'm glad, I'm glad that you're here. As you said prior to recording it, it's been a small journey to get you here, which was, which was also fun in itself. So I'm well. And thank you for being here. Can you please go ahead and introduce yourself?

[B]

Hello, everyone. How you doing? My name is Edwin Rodriguez and I work with a company called Chesterton. It's called Groveland Maps, Equipment reliability specialist. And I work with various manufacturing professionals and work with professionals with the equipment reliability challenges in various industries. So that's pretty much what I do all day, every day.

[A]

Nice. It's good that you're in this field all day, every day. And, and prior to that, I think you were, you, you were all like, still in, in similar roles but for different companies. What did you do prior to. So, working with Tristan.

[B]

So. Great question. So though I'm, though I'm a equipment reliability specialist now. I'm doing more of a consultative meetings and consultating on various equipment challenges. Before that, I was a field engineer, field technician. I worked on heavy industrial equipment every day on the ground, you know, collaborate and talking with, you know, everybody from operations to maintenance to maintenance managers, you know, sales engineers, everyone in between. Because, you know, our, you know, my job is so critical because basically I'm always in the middle and liaison between all the other important functions and departments as far as, you know, making sure equipment is running and, you know, I'm, you know, I could be in this industry in the afternoon, another different industry at night, you know, or, you know, and then something completely different in the morning because just really depend on what industry I was in and what equipment I was working on and really determine how the day was going to go.

[A]

Yeah, that's, that's awesome. So I think, you know, for listeners, we are really glad to have you because there's, there's a number of different dynamics we wanted to explore with you. And one of them is, is a classic, classic Place where everyone draws value from. One of the goals of this episode is to help reliability and maintenance leaders understand why downtime may continue to, despite having strong PM programs, despite having good service contracts with their providers. And then secondly to that, which I think is a unique dimension we can explore with you. We were quite keen to talk about the gap between sales, service and operations that sometimes undermine reliability, which I think is not something we've ever talked about before. And I'm really keen to explore it with you. Then first, before we get there, I think we should, we should set the stage and maybe talk about the reality of downtime. And I think it would be good to keep this quite vague and to really just ask you when, when you walk into a site today, as you said, you've, you've seen so many, you've been to so many different type of sites. What, what do you typically see when it comes to equipment reliability?

[B]

You know, it's a great, great question. Walk into a site, you know, you're walking into a multitude of challenges already right off the bat, you know, when someone is calling you to get on site, you know, they, they need your help, they're looking for a solution. You know, there's, you know, when it comes to equipment reliability, there's, there's a multitude of challenges that's impacting the overall operation as far as, you know, how this piece of equipment is going to work today versus tomorrow versus the next couple of weeks, months, you know, and it really has to do with everyone being in a team, has to do with culture, has to do with how everyone is working together to, you know, from, from maintenance personnel leadership to operations, you know, because, you know, show up on site with the solution is this is, is a solution going to be implemented? I don't know, you know, because that's not up to me. At the end of the day, that's up to everyone as a team to make that decision, you know, and, you know, I could come across equipment that's completely down and everybody is on firefighting mode, you know, so the whole goal is to, you know, minimize the reactive mindset to a proactive mindset.

[A]

Why do you think so many operations and sites struggle with, with unplanned downtime, like, over long periods of time?

[B]

You know, it's, it's, you know, a lot of it. When we talk about common reliability, it's, it's, it's, it could be so broad because it's being impacted by so many different areas. So, you know, you got, you know, if, if, if I'M let's take this from a field service standpoint, you know, like, forget about me being a consultant and, you know, if I'm trying to, if I'm talking to you about an engineering solution, that's different. But I'm there. If I'm there physically there with my wrenches, and I want to work on your equipment, and I've been there, you know, maybe five times within a month. And the equipment is not designed to, you know, I mean, the equipment should be good running and maybe a good piece of equipment should be looked at once every couple of months, depending on what type of equipment it is, how it's running, temperature and pressure wise, you know, what, what kind of equipment does the equipment is designed for? But, you know, in the gram, in the grand scheme of everything, if I'm showing up just one week after the other after the other after the other, at this point, you know, you have, you got to have come. We got to have real serious conversations because guess what? If I'm showing up, I'm here one time. The people that you talk to are there every day. They're around this piece of equipment every day. And, and you know, you know, you, you got to talk about complacency. You have to talk about accountability. You got to talk about, okay, why is, why does this keep happening even though I'm showing up? Okay, I want to sit there, I want to find out what's going on. We got to do a root cause analysis of what's going on. Why are we having this problem? What is it that I, you know, maybe I missed something the last time I was here that I don't know today. You know, let's, let's have a more deeper conversation about what's going on with this piece of equipment. Because everything, when it comes to criminal liability, everything is critical. Every piece of equipment is critical because there's, it's all made for something. But we can't, you know, no, no, no. Operation, production wants to, you know, they can't afford for key pieces of critical equipment to be down for that long. So the, the, you know, you want to maximize your time while you're there and find out what's going on. This is why, this is why you have these conversations, you know, and it could be lack of training, it could be lack of meetings, it could be, you know, culture issue where, you know, people have, you know, bad attitude towards equipment. You know, kind of like, hey, that's your job, or finger pointing. Not all, it's not all about that. At the End of the day.

[A]

Yeah, you're right. It's a good point. You know, it's. I think I totally agree with a lot that you said, particularly that, you know, equipment reliability is so complicated, it's affected by so many different factors that, yeah, it's easy to start playing, playing the blame game when it could be impacted by things that are not even within your thinking. And we wanted to draw more on why equipment fails in managed environments. And you mentioned a few things there that I'd love you to maybe talk about some more. And it could be like, lack of proper training, poor undocumented procedures or others. But yeah, I'd love your comment on a few of the. Why equipment fails. And even if you want to comment on what you see in terms of potential solutions for, for these areas.

[B]

Of course, of course. No, that's, that's great. This requires a little bit, you know, digging, digging deeper. Right. So. And I'm going to give some, some examples. Right. I was at a major chemical, major petrochemical plant a few months back, and now I'm in the ground level talking to not only operations, but I'm talking to maintenance personnel. So you got to understand operations, maintenance, reliability, production, they all talk different languages. And I don't mean like a whole different language. I'm talking about everyone is in a different silo. Everyone's communicating on this silo, that silo. And sometimes information gets lost and critical information gets lost in translate and translation. So, you know, I was, I was talking to an operator. Now, this is the operator. It's not the maintenance guy. The, the maintenance guy that called me. They're the ones that called me to come on site to look at the equipment. The operations guy looks at me and says, I don't know what I'm looking at. He's talking about his own equipment. Now this is critical equipment, piping, downstream equipment. First thing that comes out of my. I don't know what I'm looking at now. Okay, if you don't know what you're looking at now, now, now, now we got, now we got another problem here. You want to look at a piece of equipment, I need to know where, what you know, the equipment is down already, but it's also impacting other operations downstream, upstream. And so now we got to talk about. Now if you don't know your own equipment, we got a bigger problem because your maintenance guy is relying on you. You, you're the one that's directing him to call me out. And then we gotta, we gotta collaborate, me and the Maintenance guy gotta collaborate to look at this piece of equipment together. But if you're telling me that if I cannot properly lock and tag out this piece of equipment because you don't know your own system, then we got another problem. So, and, and there's no, you know, the, the whole idea is not to finger point, nothing like that. It's to, is to, you know, when, when, when equipment is failing all the time, it's a bigger, it's a bigger problem behind those failures is built up over time. You know, it was ignored or it wasn't properly documented or, you know, this person didn't know about this piece of, this part of the operation because they're not too familiar with this or they lack training on this piece of equipment. You know, these, these are highly complex, highly complex organizations with operations that, you know, could be so complex to the point that, yeah, yeah, you could get inundated with a lot of information. You know, it's my job to bridge those gaps between different personnel, different groups so that we can all communicate as one team. Because the problem is in a lot of, in a lot of high impact operations that people are not communicating the way they should. So when you're telling me that, you know, if I'm looking at a piece of equipment and I'm telling you that, hey, the inlet pressure is 90 psi, I'm physically seeing here, and I'm calling you in the radio and you're across the plant in the operations center looking at your screen, and your screen is telling you that you only have 50 psi. Now we have a, now we have a problem. I actually came across a troubleshooting piece of equipment where the equipment was actually working fine. But the people in operations was like, no, it's not work, it's not running fine at all. This thing is not running fine. Automatically. It was shutting the equipment down. Well, it was shutting the whole system down because they was getting false readings. So I dig deeper. Now. This is the root cause analysis part of what I'm doing. Okay, so now I'm looking at the bigger picture here. Okay? Now I'm not looking at the piece of equipment no more. Now I'm looking at the things outside of the piece of equipment, all the associated stuff, you know, what ended up happening. It was a gauge. There was a sensor behind the gauge, a pressure transducer sensor that was giving false readings that was causing the entire system to shut down. So once we figure that out, well, guess what it took me to see that. And it took weeks for people to figure out what was going on. So, you know, like, it's either you just step back, take a breather, look at the overall picture of the operation, because, you know, this is where we talk about reactionary mindset versus proactive mindset. If you take a. If you study your system, you walk your system, you look around, you see how many things are failing before they actually cause the bigger problem of a big piece of equipment that's down. The big pieces of equipment are designed to run efficiently, but they could be down just for something simple as a sensor. So you're telling me you're like three miles away in the operation center, and you're telling me something completely different, and now we're going to figure out what's going on. So I hope that answers your question. It does.

[A]

These are really good examples you're providing because they're not unique. There's a version of that example in every site in the world going on. Oh, if I had a penny for every time a sensor was misreading and was causing a headache, I'd love to ask. Follow up on this because we related to the first example you gave because we. We recorded a podcast. It was one of our most recent ones with a site leader at Moz. It was an excellent conversation where he, he talked about, you know, his, his key to reliability is it's just getting operators to own their equipment and to really have a sense of accountability and deep ownership and therefore deep knowledge of how their equipment works. And we know with the. It's nothing new, I would suggest, but it's certainly, certainly a philosophy that if you can get it and if it does work, it will help people a lot. But then the pushback that I've seen and have heard from my listeners since is that that is fantastic, but they don't have that far away from having ownership from their operators, and they don't feel like their operators are skilled to that extent. And as a bigger problem, they feel like the operators don't really have that mentality where they want to own their equipment in the first place. Now, this wasn't planned as a question, so I hope I'm not catching you off guard here, but if you sense that this is true of a site that you see, perhaps that was the case with the first example you gave. How do you suggest a site goes about to bring about that ownership mindset in their operators so that they don't tell you that statement of I don't know what I'm looking at here when, when there's something clearly wrong with the equipment they own. If you have any comments on that, would love to hear them from.

[B]

Definitely, of course. I mean, that's, that's, that's one of my favorite topics there. So, you know, I, I try to tackle this in a few different. In a few different ways. I'll go back to the person, the operator that made a comment to me, right? So maybe he didn't want to take ownership of his equipment, or maybe he was trying to take ownership and just didn't have time or the training to get to know the equipment. Right. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of variables. Let's take it to. Let's take it another angle. I've had another. I've had a mechanic tell me that's not my job. That's operations. My job is just to turn this wrench this direction, and that's it. Everybody's in their own little mindset when it comes to the overall reliability of the equipment. Now to, you know, to fix this, you have to start at the top. Culture shift and the culture change starts at the top. If you know, okay, great example. I want to go right back to the Navy. I was in the Navy for eight years and I was part of engineering department. Now in the, in the naval vessel, there's a couple thousand people on the ship, and it takes every person, 200, whatever it is, or 3,000, 5,000, but it takes every person on that ship to make that ship run efficiently. It's a piece of engineering model, but it takes everyone and everyone to know their job to run that ship. And the only way it happens is that people collaborate. People have meetings, people talk. Information is not transactional. It's transparent. You know, you cannot have. You know, it's the, the operation of a naval vessel is so critical that any weak link, which is like in this example, a weak team or weak department, will cause a chain reaction of failures. Communication wise, you know, collaborative. It needs to be collaborative. If you have, you have good team meetings all the time. I used to, I used to work for a company that had good meetings once a week. You know, it was a team meeting. Everyone all together. Sales, service, operations, it doesn't matter. Everyone needs to be in the same team because you cannot take care the end user without everyone being in the same page. And, you know, so back, back to the example. You know how you change them? It starts at the top. You got to change this. If, if operators, mechanics, everyone in the ground level, everyone in the middle, where, you know, they're handling all A lot of critical operations behind their desk. And then you got leadership. Everyone is collaborating, everyone's having meetings, and everyone and all this information is trickling to the right people. And it just goes where it needs to go to. It's going to be good. It's going to be, you know, you're going to have nothing but good results. Everyone is going to take ownership because when leadership shows that they care and they can, and the reason and the way the leadership could show that, that they care is that they have meanings. And not only have meetings, they include everyone and they are open to feedback from everyone. That guy, that operator, that mechanic may have a good suggestion, a good advice that could help a production manager, a maintenance manager, all the way up to the plant manager. It needs to be a two way street, you know, yes, the culture shift starts on the top, but then once it goes down, it needs to keep coming back up and down, up and down. Once you have that, you know, you know, things should start getting better. Where the culture will shift from a reactionary mindset to a proactive mindset because you have to take ownership. If you don't take ownership of all your equipment, you're going to have broke equipment all the time. I'm going to finish like this. Why is it that I could walk into a major chemical facility and everything is falling apart, everything's on fire, everything is broken. And I could walk one down the mile walk to this plant. Everything is running smoothly, everything is clean, everything is operating as it should. Everyone's collaborative, everyone knows what they. Everyone knows their role. Why is that? Okay, Exactly. It goes right back to what I said. It starts with culture and the mindset, the attitude. No, you're gonna, you know, for the site that, where everything is broken, everyone's like either finger, everyone's pointing the fingers, everyone is, it's not my job attitude or this that you go to the other side. No, you know what? We're gonna own up to that. We're gonna work together as a team. If Phil, we're gonna have a team meeting and talk about why it fails so that we can all help each other out, you know, because, Navy, everyone is trained to do everyone's job point blank. Okay, I'm not here to do your job, like all the way, but I want to know a little bit about your job so you can know a little bit about my job so that if anything happens, maybe I can help you out. Or maybe, you never know, I might be to catch something that you missed because you was busy looking at Other things. So it's a great question.

[A]

An excellent answer as well. I didn't expect such a good example from the Navy, but it's so, so relevant. And I do love that last principle that you said where I think if only that, if only that as a small but super powerful example of great culture, people could remember the idea of trying to learn more about other people's jobs. Really. I'm sure there's presence of this in most sites, but then I suspect the idea is to build on this daily. When you have that daily meeting. I like that you're highlighting the importance of those meetings and the power that they have within them. I think that it's probably also a good idea to continue to enable yourself on, on the other roles that are happening outside. So, yeah, thank you for such a good answer.

[B]

I was going to ask the meetings part. I've sat in meetings where the most important people, which is your operators, mechanics, did not say one word, one word at all. Nada. I mean you're talking about like an hour, two hour meeting and you never said nothing. And I'm talking about you having a meeting with 30 plus people. Not a word in the air is being said coming from the most important people, which is the people working and looking and inspecting and monitoring all your equipment. Right. The only people talking are the ones that are not in the front lines. Right. And that might be a culture where, where, where empowerment is not encouraged. We're giving those people the, the empowerment to actually voice their concerns. Hey, can we do this this way instead of that way? Can we start doing this so that we can minimize this? I've been in meetings, I've been in both type of meetings where nobody's saying nothing. And I've been in meetings where everybody's collaborating. And let me tell you something, people don't realize that when you have a team where that's collaborating, the ideas that come out of those collaborative meetings are second to nothing. You know, you, you, you are able to accomplish everything and have an efficient, you know, smooth selling operation. When you have a collaborative team where both leadership are just, you know, as a leader, you have to listen and listen and talk less and that's the way these meetings should go. You know, but unfortunately it's not like that everywhere. And, and, and I would just add to that as far as the meetings and collaboration and just how information should be transparent versus transactional.

[A]

Yeah, that's a good point. That's such a good point. And to get to that, then, you know, if you are there and you want to change to the more collaborative is as simple as practicing things like getting everyone to voice their opinion is or are you, is it a bigger thing that you suggest to do?

[B]

Great one. I will say that it's never easy for that type of shift to occur because you know, you do have various levels of professionals that are setting in their ways and you know like the whole we've always done it this way attitude man, that runs deep in a lot of places and believe it or not, it hinders relationships, hinders operations. It hinders where information is, is, is hoarded, is hoarded at. You got great information that might be stuck somewhere that nobody's looking at. Well, not even looking for it, but this person needs it. So you know, I think that you go, you going from a non collaborative team to a fully collaborative team, that takes time, that takes unfortunately I'm going to say it takes buy in from most people, most teams, it takes entire buy ins from teams to actually you go to some of these places and nobody's talking to nobody. Everybody just want to finish their 12 hour shift and go home, you know and then I could go somewhere and they're motivated, you know, they're, they're trying to fix that equipment, they're trying to like, you know, get it done and you know, and see what can be done before they move on to the next piece of equipment and make sure that runs better. I got a ton of examples right up here.

[A]

Yeah, well you've shared a few which are all very good and I'm definitely keen for you to talk some more. I think this next segment will be one that will be, it will be really good to get examples from you. We wanted to, as mentioned at the beginning of this episode, drive to the disconnect between sales and service. I mean there is so much of reliability that has to do with the relationships you have with the people that service and provide parts equipment to your site. I mean that's such an important dynamic of this and it's not something we really ever, ever talk about. So I'm really keen to explore this with you. You have mentioned to me in our exchanges before that there's often a disconnect here that happens between, between the providers of equipment and services and the site themselves. Can you talk to me some more about like what, what you observe in that disconnect? What, what are the common reasons why.

[B]

Well, you know, the most important, the most important thing for a sales, sales representative, sales engineer is to help cultivate and build that relationship with the end User, the end user is your plan manager, your plant superintendent, your mechanics, your operators. Those are, those are, those are all the relationships that you have to maintain. You know, the disconnect with that is that, you know, just like, just like you have people, just like you have a, you know, if a mechanic has a bad habit of being reactive and not be proactive on equipment reliability overall, you have the same issues with, with, with sales as well. You have people that go into these places and they're just there to, you know, maybe have a decent good pitch but not talk about selling a, not forget about selling, presenting and talking about challenges that we could help solve. It's about solving challenges about me understanding what your challenge is so that we could better help. And you know, that's where a lot of disconnect comes. You know, I've, I've had, I've had end users telling me, well, well, you know, we stuck with this. We never really got this type of great feedback you're giving us now. And we've been dealing with them for a long time. So let's just take a major manufacturing facility and they have hundreds of pieces of critical equipment. All right? In this manufacturing facility you have a maintenance manager that's responsible for a team of maintenance guys. Let's just say a team of 20. His team is responsible for maintaining all the equipment. But it's basic maintenance. They still have to rely on the service providers to come out to these manufacturing facilities to actually do more critical type of maintenance, more in depth maintenance or just critical troubleshooting that they have to come out because a maintenance person is inundated with so much other tasks that you know, they're not going to have the time to know everything about one piece of equipment versus, you know, on top of the managing a couple dozen or more than does a piece of equipment. And so I'll take, I take this from a 2, 2 prong approach from a field service perspective and a sales service perspective. I saw with the field service, if I show up on site and you're the maintenance guy, so you know, obviously you know, you know, you're busy, you know everything. I checked in with you, you told me what's going on. My job is to figure out more deeper what's going on with that piece of equipment, then we collaborate later on, what will happen? Well, how are we going to move forward? Right? So that's the field side of me doing that part. So now we figured it out, you know, now, you know, now is, let's just say we did all that, so right now we're looking good. Everybody's looking good, everybody's happy. The equipment is about to be repaired, right? Then you have, you know, it's my job as a, as a, as a, as a field engineer to follow up with our sales division, to follow back up with the customer to provide that overall solution that I helped put together. Now if the sales professional fails at delivering or just doesn't give the right information of this, that then everything just went out the window. That's a, that's a small example. But if you multiply that in a lot of different ways and all in various different sites and is happening here and there and all over the place. You know, part of reliability is ensuring that the right information is in the right hands and the right repair materials in the right hands and actually the relationship is intact. Because when those, when those three things are not, if one, if one of those three things is missing, then the overall solution itself, providing the solution is going to be hampered. It's just going to disappear altogether. I think you know that, that whatever's going on in the plant, whatever, you know, whatever relationships you have with your service providers, that has to be good too because you're relying on them to give you what you need and then, and then your maintenance manager is allowing you to have what you need so that you could finish the job. So it's a, I think, I think, I think it's a very complicated circle of trust that that's easily, easily be broken in a lot of ways. And as is more common than, is definitely more common than you think when it comes to the overall grand scheme of things, when it comes to ensuring that this piece of equipment is, is reliable, you know, and I give you a great example on that. So I had a, so I was very well known in my industry for technical report writing. Just technical reports altogether is probably one of the most important things in the field. In a field service perspective. You, you have to know how to write a technical report because that travels everywhere with the piece of equipment. And this is one of the most important things that reliability engineers use for data. So for example, right, we had this. There was one instance where a piece of equipment was worked on for eight hours. Wasn't just, it wasn't just critical, it was, it was very in depth root cause. NASA's critical maintenance. Eight hours. Eight hours. So in eight hours you submit a report and it has one sentence for eight hours worth of work. Now we know that if you're going to write a report, you know, you Keep it simple. You know, you definitely want to write a paragraph you want to write. You know, you got to start something. Intro, body, conclusion, you know, all that stuff. It has to be technical though. You got to know how to write this stuff up. And I was good at writing. I would train guys how to write technical reports day in and day out. They'll show me their reports and I'd be like, no, no, no, we are not going to submit that. We're going to redo this report. Because let me tell you how many people read that report. Those service, the customer. It was kept in the room and it was kept in the records. And you know what, it's a report that they go back to three or four or five years later. You cannot have a busy day where you're conducting critical maintenance with so many details attached to it and then submit a one sentence report. It is probably the worst thing you could do as far as customer service is concerned. We've had entire relationships severed because of that. And it's probably one of the worst things you could do. You could do because not only, not only do you sever the relationship with the end user, but you sever the relationships with service sales and everybody else. The flip side, I've had entire accounts, you know, amazing results from good reports because maintenance guy wasn't there with you for eight hours. You was repairing that thing by yourself for eight hours. And they're relying on you for a decent good report. I mean, it's got to have everything on there. What you did, who you checked with, who you checked in with, why you're here, what is it that you did in, you know, in a couple sentences, exactly what you did. You just gotta have pressure. Information's gotta, all the data of the equipment, pressure, temperature, everything else. You, you, you basically want to make sure that thing is, is good to go. And believe it or not, if, if I turn in a report that should be detailed and I return a report as one sentence, I am in severing the relationship between the salesperson and the customer themselves. And then now I have to now that, now the sales guy's going to come to me. So this goes right to the next, to the next, you know, area of relationships when it comes to sales of service. Now you have sales of service. These two, these two. In every service organization, these are the people that go into these, all these critical manufacturing facilities in every industry that help the end users keep their equipment running. The most important part of every sales organ, every service organization is that there's a Strong relationship between sales and service. Believe it or not, there's a lot of places where that is broken. Nobody knows how to talk to each other. Same thing. Let's just say you have a rock star sales engineer who knows how to sell, who knows how to properly provide end user a great engineer solution to a really difficult challenge that customers have. So let's just say, let's just say the seller representative did their part, they did their thing, it put the packets together. Now service has to execute it. Now service gets on server, gets on site. They failed execution. They didn't execute nothing. Right. They didn't communicate correctly, didn't. They didn't follow up, they didn't close any notes down. They did everything wrong. Same thing. You know, there's so many ways to sever this or the, you know, the circle that I'm describing just because they don't communicate. Just like, just like, just like I described before, where inside these, inside these manufacturing facilities, everyone's got to have a good collaborative relationship. But these service companies got to have the same thing too. And they also have to work on how they have meetings and teaming. And you'd be surprised. I've heard, you know, you hear things like this. It goes just like this. Sales don't talk to service, and service don't talk to sales. And then you got other organizations where those guys go to lunch together because they help each other. They need each other. They know they need each other. If one or the other doesn't work and help each other out, one is always going to suffer, you know, so it's the attitude that go like this, well, if I don't sell nothing, you don't got a job. Well, guess what, if I, if I'm not here to fix them, you're not going to be able to sell nothing. That needs to all go out the window. I hate when I hear that. That's like the worst attitude for teams to have, for service teams to have. Come on, really, you know, if anything, we should be going out. We should all be going out to have a good meeting. Talk about what challenges are you having. Good sales and service meeting is a meeting where everyone is collaborative. Hey, this sales guy is going to be like, hey, oh, what can we do to help that customer out? You know, and the service, the service guy is the one that sees the customer more. See, this is saying in the industry is that service guys got a wonderful relationship and sales guys are so busy, they don't get to see the end user that much. Not as much as the Service guy. So this is why the relationship between sales and service is so critical. So critical. So it's always important for a service professional, a sales professional, to build a good relationship with service, and it's also good, vice versa. And never understood why those two have a hard time getting along with each other, you know, in various organizations. It just happens. It's just, you know, it's like, come on, you know, we don't need to get into the whole thing of, well, without me, you can't do this. Well, without me, you can't do this. No, no, no, forget about it.

[A]

Yeah, that's. These are great comments there. Thank you so much for, for all that. I think to like, tie this, this segment up, it would be good to get your thoughts on one of the things we had there, which was about leadership reflections. Earlier in this piece, you said so much of this ties back to like, it starts from the top. And I imagine that you probably have the opinion that this is also true when it comes to sales and service, that within an organization itself, if leadership is there to drive great relationships between teams, then that helps. So, yeah, love to ask you a few quick questions here. Zooming out without this time going back to the site, but what does strong reliability leadership look like in your opinion?

[B]

And from that, that from the sales and service standpoint, you have to know how to deliver. You have to know how to deliver the solution, whether it's the sales side or the service side. And like anywhere else, it starts with good leadership. I fortunately work for a great organization that prize itself in an open, collaborative environment where everyone feels empowered to get their, get their opinions out there for the betterment of not only the organization, but for the customer themselves and their equipment. Because at the end of the day, there will not be no service organization without the customer. This is simple as that. And if, and if you're taking care of the customer and their equipment and you know how to deliver and you know how to communicate effectively, then you're good. Because as a leader, you should know how to actively listen to everyone that's trying to make the overall organization successful. So, you know, I'm a firm believer of listen more, talk less. And, and there's, there's a lot of that great example here where I work at. You know, you know, obviously every challenge is difficult. You know, we can't make everyone happy. That's everywhere, no matter how good you are. But for the most part, for the most part, we truly care about what we do. We truly care about how we take care of customers. How you know, we follow up, say hey, so how's that piece of equipment is doing? How you know everything's working out? If not hey, let me know please follow back up with me. We'll find you some other solutions or anything like that. It's not about getting a solution for you cutting and running and then forgetting about you. That the attitude I just described, that applies everywhere anyway. It doesn't matter if it's cell service. Doesn't matter if it's inside chemical plant. Because that's no different than the mechanic in a chemical plant saying that's not my job. Or he could do that. Hey. Oh, this is my favorite one. I had a night. You got, I'm leaving or does that or you know, we call this pass down. Passing down critical information. You know, if y' all work the 12 hour shift, I want to spend the last hour of my 20 hour shift making sure my report is good so that we could do a proper turnover to the next shift, to the next team. Okay. It can't be the attitude of well, they could figure it out. Do you know how you have to realize how entire operations has been impacted, how equipment has failed because of that? Just one little attitude alone where like I've been in places, walked inside of places where, where the, where the mechanic will say I don't have any information. I don't even know what happened to this thing last night. And I'm looking at a piece of equipment that was like burnt. No, it happens. It's bad. Yeah.

[A]

There's a lot of stories there, isn't there? So we have one last segment which is always a listener favorite if you're ready for it. This is the quick fire round. So ready to go there?

[B]

Yeah. Where did it go?

[A]

Fantastic. Sounds good. So ask your question. Say the first thing that comes to mind. Don't worry about being perfect. What is the most common root cause of unplanned downtime that nobody wants to admit?

[B]

Lack of information. Perfect.

[A]

PMs or predictive. Which one is more commonly executed poorly.

[B]

Predictive Maintenance.

[A]

Excellent. Sales teams should do more of what Follow up, presumably. You mean after the so yeah sell has been done.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yes. Okay. Perfect. I like that. And then service teams should stop doing what should stop.

[B]

Should definitely stop leaving too fast from a job site and not ensuring that everything is good and running. Okay.

[A]

That's good. Excellent. And to tie it all up in one sentence, reliability is really about fill the blank.

[B]

Teamwork.

[A]

That's good. That's excellent. Ties very well to your story. Before about the Navy. So. Well, you've completed everything. Edwin answered with, with great, great answers and certainly amazing examples. Thank you so much. It was, it was a true pleasure to have you on and I really appreciate the effort that you've gone through to make the time zones and our, our ability to record the world possible.

[B]

Look, I am honored for you for reaching out to me. I'm honored to be in, in this podcast to talk about some of the most important things that keep us running every day. And I mean, I'm definitely, definitely happy that we was able to get together and talk about this stuff.

[A]

Well, thank you. Thanks so much for that. I really appreciate it. Hopefully there'll be a take do at some point in the future after you've done maybe another marathon and completed another 20amazing things.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So, yeah. Thank you again, Edwin.

[B]

No problem, sir. You have a good one.

[A]

And that's it for this week's episode, folks. Thank you so much for listening in and tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode and think it would be valuable to anyone else, feel free to give it a share on LinkedIn and feel free to subscribe as well on your favorite app. Enjoy the rest of your week.