← Factory Futures
Factory Futures
Reliability | Jim Wilson's Guide to Effective Troubleshooting and PM Discipline
00:48:21
Loading summary
Transcript79 lines
- [00:00]
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. We had a great guest today with someone that lives and breathes what reliability actually looks like on the ground. Jim Wilson is a Maintenance manager at Highland Dairy. He is a lean Six Sigma black belt and also an industrial electrical instructor. I loved it because he sits right at that intersection of execution systems and really people development starting from from a very young age and I think that that explains how he thinks about reliability and a lot of things stood out for me in terms of how we think. I thought this was a fantastic episode and I'm sure everyone will get a lot from it. The episode is mostly split into three areas about for roughly about the first 15 minutes we talk about reliability as risk reduction, why unplanned downtime goes much further than than just the repair cost. We talk about areas like food safety compliance, brand risk, and we talk about disciplined PM documentation as well. The second area, from roughly 15 minutes onwards to 30, is where we get into why most, well, why many reliability programs fail. We talk here about the gap between having a good CMMS and what using it properly looks like. We talk about the hidden cost of troubleshooting when that's not done correctly. And we start to talk about what it looks like to build accountability and follow through in your maintenance team. And the last part of this, which is roughly 30 minutes onwards, is spent talking about developing skilled technician. We talk about high compliance environments but also totally relatable to other environments that are not high compliance. We talk about good troubleshooting before, well in the right sequence of things, not memo, not memorization. We talk about how training, mentorship and structure is going to really help transform that that culture of performance and retention. So I thought this one was really strong because it was very practical. Everything he says I think one should be able to look at implementing is certainly far from being theoretical and so that's why I think it's going to be one that listeners will get a lot from. Thank you very much for listening. Jim. It is great to have you here. Welcome to the show.
- [02:45]
B
Thank you jp, Appreciate it. Glad to be here.
- [02:47]
A
Well good a pleas as I Said before, recording is ours. It was, it was very good. I was very happy when you accepted to come on because I had seen your profile and how much experience you have. So I'm very confident that I and others will learn a lot from you. And before we dive in, I'm very keen to help people understand the goal of this episode and all. But I'd love you to introduce yourself for those that are not familiar with you. So why don't you do that, please?
- [03:10]
B
Yeah, I'm, you know, of course, Jim Wilson. I'm an industrial maintenance manager and dairy production. I started my journey back in 1990 in industrial maintenance, actually. 1990. I started out as what we call sanitation worker in a meat packing plant. And that's just a glorified name for a dishwasher is what that is. I see maintenance men, they're working and I was always interested in what they were doing. So I kind of started befriending a couple of those guys. And about a year and a half later, and as it happened, they had an opening come up for oil and lube technician. And they asked me if I'd be interested and I said absolutely. And I got into maintenance as an oil and lube technician. And What I found, J.P. was I just, I fell in love with all the trades of industrial maintenance, from electricity to fabrication, mechanical troubleshooting. Every bit of it fascinated me. And I just was very hungry to learn when I first started. I didn't realize what I didn't know when I first got into industrial maintenance. And then when it kind of hits you and you realize you got a long learning curve ahead of you, you have to make a decision, either commit to it or not. And I committed to it because I was just so in love with, again with all the trades. So I started going to trade schools, studying and just kept running with learning just as much learning as I could get. And also just as important was the on the job experience that I got jp with all the more experienced maintenance people that I was working around. I was very fortunate have men in the factory that really worked with me, took me under their wings. And some were electricians, some were more mechanical people, some are fabricators, some are just really good troubleshooters. But I was fortunate enough to be able to work with and kind of under them. And then I went to, through all the progression, if you will, electrical, mechanical guy on the floor, troubleshooting equipment. And I was promoted to a foreman and then promoted to a supervisor. And then unfortunately, the place I was working at that time JP I kind of knew they were probably going to go out of business within a matter of time. So you just out of the blue, I got a phone call from Highland Dairy, wanting to know if I'd be interested in becoming a maintenance manager. It was in the same town, so I accepted that position and I went from meatpacking to the dairy industry. I was in the meatpacking world for 17 years, and I've been in the dairy industry now for 19 years. You know, people wonder about education sometimes. You know, I myself, I dropped out of school when I was 17, went on, got my GED. Now in my early 30s, I went and got associate's degree in electronics. In my mid-40s, I took online classes and got my bachelor's degree in business administration. And then kind of along the way, I became a lean Six Sigma black belt, a licensed journeyman electrician. So I've always had a desire to learn, and I think that's one thing you need to have if you want to experience any kind of a modicum of success in this field.
- [06:11]
A
Very impressive. Super impressive. And, like, I really like that you would have done this, like, through. Through time. Like, you know, a lot of people see their. Their formal education anyway, as a. You do it until you're 28 and then it kind of stops there, you know, whereas it's. It's less. It's less popular to have this journey where you would go back and then, you know, do your lean black belt and then. And then do your. Is it an MBA that you. That you did? If you did, is that the certification that you had?
- [06:39]
B
Bachelor of Science.
- [06:40]
A
Bachelor of Science. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Similar. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Speaks a lot to. To that desire for continuous improvement in education that you say is necessary. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for this great introduction. As we spoke prior to the show, you know, I think the way that I see the theme and the idea of this episode is to try to make a statement for reliability as risk management and as something where you do to build disciplined system and skilled staff, skilled teams. So a lot of the topics we want to address today are along that route, which I'm very keen to do with you. And the first one was the idea that reliability is there to be risk reduction, not just maintenance. And so I'm really keen to get your perspective on why you think that unplanned downtime is potentially a business risk issue, not just a maintenance cost. Like, why is it that you see it this way and others might need to do that too?
- [07:36]
B
You know, unplanned downtime has so many negatives to it. You want to minimize it just as much as you can. But one of the things that can happen if you're not careful now, depending on the manufacturing plant you're working in, you know, if you're producing charcoal briquettes at your plant, if that's where you work, you know the quality of that product, one thing. But if you work in a food production environment where your customers literally consume in their body the products that you make, the. The risks are at another level. So when you think about unplanned downtime, well, what can go wrong with unplanned downtime? Well, you can assume your technicians know exactly what to do and are going to take all the right steps, but then you're assuming they're not going to make repairs that compromise the quality of the product that might be in the area. And then, then it could slip through the cracks and that product could get packed and shipped out anyways to the consumer. So there you have an opportunity for your brand to be damaged. Okay. Also, unplanned downtime means typically your operators are just standing and waiting and they're either going to have to work overtime or people junior them going to work overtime to catch up. You're probably going to have truck drivers waiting at a loading dock that can't get that product. So you're going to have potentially a massive amount of overtime, people working hours that didn't plan to work. You may damage product if you're not careful. And the repair itself, because it's probably being done in a rush, may not be a quality repair. Okay. So there's, and that's just a small window of sample of what can go wrong in an emergency repair. You want to avoid him like the plague if you can.
- [09:19]
A
Yes. Yeah. And a lot of the things you said there, they, they're hard to put a number on. So people tend to like to stack rank them lower. But it is very true, isn't it? Brand damage is when a company would try to do reliability initiative and think about like the cost of unplanned downtime. Brand damage is often mentioned, but not really put in the numbers because it's really hard to do. And same thing for the last point that you mentioned there about the repair in a rush is we all know as human beings, everything we do, urgency and pressure, we never do as well as if we have allocated time for it.
- [09:51]
B
That's right. Your technicians, mechanics, they may have the best intentions and really trying to do as good as they can. But in a rush, they know they're cutting corners too. To get the prop. To get the.
- [10:02]
A
Absolutely, yeah. When the operators, they're going, how much longer? How much longer? How much longer? Not a fun place. Definitely hear you there. So beyond the actual cost of unplanned downtime comes your product safety, your audit exposure, your lost production, your brand damage. Do you think these are already what you've commented on? That's already see how, how leadership underestimates unplanned downtime? Or you think when it comes to leadership there are other ways that, that they tend to like miss the, the risk of unplanned downtime.
- [10:32]
B
You know, I, I think for the mo. Well, I can speak from my experience. The leadership group that I work with understands the negatives of unplanned downtime. I'm very fortunate to have a very good group of leaders that I work with. Good boss, a good plan manager. You have a great relationship and really much employees are great too. The culture is what it needs to be where I work to support minimizing unplanned downtime just as much as we can. That really starts at the top with leadership and the culture that they live within themselves. And that emanates down to the mid level managers, the supervisors and to the employees working on the floor, whether it's mechanics or production workers. And it emanates through the quality control department too. You know, when they see upper leadership taking the initiative and not just talking about the importance of quality and reducing or limiting unplanned downtime and safety, but living it themselves, it makes it easier for everybody to live that way at work.
- [11:37]
A
Yeah, it's a good, definitely a good point there on culture where, you know, if you have everyone on the same page, the difference that that makes. Yeah, thanks a little.
- [11:47]
B
It's just almost everything the culture is.
- [11:50]
A
Yes. And I know that's something we intend to talk about soon. You know, why don't we don't mention it now. You, I think brought the idea of talking about shifting the, you know, the classic topic, shifting from reactive to a more structured reliability culture. It seems like this is something you've already achieved from what you've mentioned there. Can you talk about that a little bit? If that was achieved and that's something you have, how is that possible and done?
- [12:19]
B
Yeah, I, I view that as a job, a race that's ran, that's never finished. There is no finish line to it. Okay. I would say it's still a work in progress because you still, we still find opportunities that are reactive, that we thought we had under control and. And were more planned. Okay. So to me, it's important to understand that as part of a continuous improvement initiative, always understand that there is no finish line. You're always looking for ways to move unplanned downtime over to a structured program that can be followed and understood and reduce the opportunity for unstructured downtime, if you will.
- [13:10]
A
Yes, and what are the big. Then what would you say are the big pieces that are necessary to get to that. That culture? You know, if someone's listening to this and they feel like they're. They're mostly reactive, what are the right big things to get right in order to try to move towards a more reliability culture?
- [13:27]
B
I think one of the things is if you look at your people that work for you, like I work in the. I'm the manager of the maintenance department, so I have employees that are maintenance people. If you look at kind of the macro level from a helicopter view, 20,000ft, what. What type of training do you expose those people to? What documents do you provide them? Are they updated? That reflects the current system that you operate within the plant and the machines. And you have to be able to help your technicians, the people that work for you, know what to do, when to do it, and why they do it. And you can't just assume that just because you send them the training or some schools that they pick it up. You need to quiz your people, ask them questions, and get a feel for what they really do know and do not know, and get that feedback and keep improving them, keep giving them opportunities to improve, you know.
- [14:22]
A
Yeah, that's a good point. And how. How do you. I think one thing that can be tricky with situations like that, if you're saying, you know, ask them questions to understand what they know and don't know is, is doing that the right way, not not doing it. Like, someone feels like they're getting tested and they're, you know, they sense a little bit of like, is this a gotcha question? Or is this, you know, is this you trying to. And in your experience, how have you found that can be done? Well, is it by putting an upfront statement where you say, hey, I just want to test a few things that you've learned? Is it by doing that, or is it something completely different?
- [14:55]
B
I think you have to develop relationships with the people that work for you. We can call them working relationships. They have to really get to a point where they understand that what you're really doing is trying to help them you're trying to make their job easier and better and they're more qualified and equipped to do the job. And that takes time. Like, you can't just walk into a place new and expect people to think that's what you're going to do. And it don't happen on day one either. So, you know, the relationship aspect with your employees goes a long way towards that. When they understand the reason you're asking them questions and kind of, you know, really trying to find out what they do know and what they don't know and if they know the right things or not is solely for the reason that you can help them improve.
- [15:44]
A
Yeah, that's, that's, that's very true, I think, and I think it's a very good point. And if you found that there is, because you said there that this doesn't happen on day one, how do you find that? Like, people, whether that's people that work for you and executives get confidence in a team over time. How have you been able to do that in your teams to help that culture change for the better?
- [16:08]
B
Yeah, I think that, you know, they have to see it evidence. They have to see your intent. They have to see that there needs to be some history established, you know, over time. You have to be willing, like a person in a management position, whether it's maintenance or production or plant manager or what have you. You have to be willing to be the person, you know, the guy or the woman. You know, it's just this isn't just a man's club, you know, there's plenty of ladies that are in management too. You have to be willing to put in the extra work to make sure that you're training all your people. And you're also takes, you know, take some time to go out there and be with them while they're working on the equipment or doing their tasks and take every opportunity to help them improve. Whether you're doing things like on pressure gauges, maybe you're marking the gauge at where the pressure should be so they don't have to guess about it. You're making sure The P and IDs are all updated. But again, I think it comes back to, you have to show the people above you and the people below you by example and just by leadership and commitment that you hold the production, the production and the quality of the production at the highest regard and you, and you respect the people that help you produce that quality product. You have to do that day in and day out. And you're not going to be Perfect. No one's going to be perfect. You're going to have days where you make mistakes and then own it. When you make a mistake, just say, I didn't know that ain't going to happen again. And, you know, use that as an opportunity to improve yourself. So just be human about it. Be willing to let some time go by while you're putting in the quality work yourself. And people will see it when you're doing that.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, that's great. Very good answer. The next thing we wanted to discuss, which some of the things you mentioned there kind of associate themselves to, this is the idea of the PM discipline that you have, the documentation you do, how you perform against audits. What do you think? Because I think that was also something that you were bringing up before we chatted here is what's the connection between PM discipline and audit outcomes? Yeah, how do you see that one?
- [18:26]
B
Yeah. Like where I work, an auditor, when they come in, they will want to see records of preventive maintenance. Okay. And they're looking for a few things on there. There's a few items on the preventive maintenance work. Orders that pertain to food safety and making sure all the parts and supplies are picked up, making sure you properly hand off that area back to production. Make sure you notify production of all the repairs that have been made when the repairs are taking place, ensuring all proper lockout tagout procedures were performed and signed off on. So an auditor will look at your PM documentation and make sure they want to see if you're following all the food safety protocols and all the employee safety protocols and if you cannot produce those documents. And when I say documents, you know, the manager, like me signed off on them, technician signed off on them. Dated, it's all readable. And every task was initialed by the technician. All the. Every task on the PM procedure for the equipment and every task below the procedures for the equipment for food safety and personal protective safety was initial. If you cannot provide those documents, you can expect a lower audit score.
- [19:43]
A
And do you guys. Because this touches on, like, quality as well. Do you carry this process fully in your CMMs, or does it translate into other system? Yeah, fully done in your CMMs. Yeah. And over there, do you find. Are. Are you guys in a state where this is like, digitally very easy to do and that helps you, or do you have a different process? Because this is a type of, like, tactical thing that I think people get stuck on because it's actually going to help you or hinder you. How do you guys go about this?
- [20:12]
B
1 well, so we use our CMMs to create both preventive maintenance documents and work order documents. Yep. And you, you know, most CMS programs have the ability to track parts inventory, machine metrics, employee metrics and things like that. And I think it's something you want to discuss a little further down the road here. But so how fully do you use your cms? Your cmms rather do you use it to its full capability or not? There are CMS program we use, some of it is not applicable to the industry that I work in, but most of it is now what is applicable to the industry I work in. We certainly do use it. Emergency work orders are something that's a little different. An emergency work order is a document that basically call that unplanned downtime. Okay. But that is a document that you produce to an auditor also because they expect you to have some unplanned downtime here and there.
- [21:11]
A
Yeah.
- [21:12]
B
And they want that documented as well. And that's what emergency. That's why you have what's called an emergency work order. So it will have the same safety as far as food and personnel safety protocols on it, but on the bottom that's initialed off on. But above that this really what was the emergency? What did you do parts and did you restore the machine back to a safe operating condition?
- [21:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. I was like these are like the building blocks of doing that well. Yeah. So thanks for your comment there. Next thing we wanted to go to is talk about why a lot of reliability programs fail. That's also a topic that, you know, listeners love to love to get comments on, love to hear about because I suspect that the majority of our listeners have had some of their programs fail. So that part that we just were going into now, the CMMS versus actually using it correctly is. Is part of some reliability programs that fail where upgrading your CMS is probably one of the common common reliability program. You are started to comment on the difference between having a CMMS and using it correctly. Is there more to it in your opinion than what you've discussed or do you think the comments you made there are actually a good enough start to it?
- [22:24]
B
I think that the cmms, it depends on which one you're running. There's a lot of different CMMS programs out there that offer different arrays of both complexity and options to use. Yes, I think that one of the main things is whatever CMMs you're using, two things. One, know everything about it that you can get training on it and two, evaluate if it's Applicable for your work environment or not. Start right, start right there with those two things and if it's not as applicable for your work environment, make it, recommend a change at least and go to something that is.
- [23:01]
A
Yes. Yep. Now, fair enough. And you also made some comments about this, but I'd love to hear you say a bit more. What to you, what does good PM quality look like?
- [23:11]
B
You know, good PM quality starts with the documentation is complete. You don't have to go back to the maintenance person and ask for a signature or date or check off did you do these tasks? You know, so go ahead and check off on them. So that, that's number one. It also comes back to the training. Did you ensure that the person you sent out to do this PM task was qualified to do it? Okay. And then also at least occasional inspections of the work. Go out and inspect their work and don't inspect it with the intent to bust them. Inspect it with the intent. Just to be able to say, you know, hey, I noticed you didn't change this rod in right now and it looks pretty worn. Is there a reason you didn't change it? And you know, have those conversations and find out the answer and go from there. But I think quality PM start with the documentation is complete. The technician is trained on how to properly do the job and someone needs to go and verify. You know that old saying, trust, verify. Go out there every now and then and verify that it's actually being done at the level that it needs to be done at parts. You need to make sure the parts are always going to be available. You expect them to have to change some parts. So then that gets back to parts inventory. You want to keep a minimum level. You want to have a range of a minimum and maximum level of your most important parts and you want to operate within that range. You want to always have them on the shelf so a person doesn't have to ask himself, I don't know if we even have this part or not. If we do, I'll put it on. But we probably don't. You don't want your technician to be in that position.
- [24:44]
A
Yeah, that's a lot of good points there. So, yeah, trust would verify. Yeah, we've heard that one before. Also inspect what you expect another one along these lines. But yeah, I like that especially that you make this about a coaching and a learning moment for sure. And you mentioned parse there. I feel like this is an area where a lot of sites struggle. They know what you said. They know that like you should have mins and Macs and you should stay within the range. I feel like the theory is there, but the execution often isn't. Where they kind of get in their own way, where the stores are like mislabeled and the CMMS says that they have the part, they can't find it. How have you guys, how have you guys managed to do that? Well, and is there any lessons that learned about parts control and stores management there?
- [25:29]
B
Hire the best parts inventory person you can find and train them. Your parts inventory person can make or break the operation of your company if they do not have the right parts on stock, on hand. If you, if you have a inventory person that orders ingredients for food manufacturing, for example, and they forget to order some ingredients and now you can't run this product, what does that do? So it's the same thing with maintenance parts. You want to hire someone that is able to establish relationships with the vendors that they call and email and message so that the vendors respect your parts person and will get your parts person the parts they need when they need it, or will communicate if they can't. And then you always need to have backup vendors. If you rely just on one vendor for particular parts, whether it's electrical or specific machine, you're almost certainly asking to have some trouble at some point. So I'm a big believer in having multiple vendors that you can turn to sometimes I will do, you know, we may have main vendors, but I will do some business with vendors just to keep them in the loop, just so they know that we're going to do some business with you. And when we call or email, we need to part, you know, we really need it and they understand that. So, you know, it kind of comes back to relationships between the parts person and vendors and even me with the vendors too. You got to establish those relationships.
- [27:02]
A
Yeah, that's such a good point. Fantastic. And so super helpful here. Maybe. Let's, let's wrap this section up with one last quick question I have for you. And if nothing comes to mind, tell me, but in your mind, what do you think is the most common CMS mistake that you've. You've seen in the past?
- [27:19]
B
I would say probably not for like a specific work order for a specific production line, not having all the steps down for like say a pm. So the technician will do the pm, but he only did what you had listed. Okay, so make sure when you have a piece of equipment or a production line that's going to be PM'd, that you list everything that can be listed on that pm, whether it's a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, a semiannual or an annual, five year, whatever it is, you need to understand a person like me. What needs to be on pm? That's one. There's two things. The second thing is always have a comment section at the bottom of the PM for the technician to write down his comments, her comments, notes, so that you can learn from there. And I guess if there was a third thing that goes wrong with PMS is when technicians do leave notes, do you follow up on them like they say this needs to be? I did, I ran out of time. But this component needs to be replaced soon. Do you follow up on that? So those are three things that related to CMMs use that people can fail at pretty easily.
- [28:32]
A
Yeah, these are such good comments. I think the last one is especially hard because the way that a lot of these systems work is like the comment will be there, but if the work's executed, it's executed. So it's. Or how you have to be quite proactive to go back and see, oh, the technicians wrote local or there's a step missing there. And maybe another last follow up question on this, the first part that you mentioned which like you know, all tasks needing to be documented, you as a maintenance manager, is this something that you're doing or are you suggesting others do this? Whose job is it?
- [29:03]
B
Where I work, I'm the one that will edit the preventive maintenance but documents. But people give me input. Okay. Like the technician from the floor, the foreman, they, they will sometimes come up to me say hey Jim, you know, this is not on the pm. And really we feel like this PM is not complete if this is not on there. So would you mind putting this on there for me? And I said yes, absolutely I will. And I'll go in and do the editor and put it up, put it on the PM for that specific machine or production line.
- [29:32]
A
Okay. Yeah. So it's essentially like in your system it is kind of like your ultimate responsibility. But of course it's very much driven by, by the fitters and sparkies and people doing the work. Really. Okay, well, fantastic. And next step would be good to talk about the. This kind of again relates to this, which is good, but the hidden cost of poor troubleshooting. And this is something that we had our initial plan to talk about. So without me giving any further context, what do you think are the hidden costs of things like misdiagnosis, repeated failures and other things? How do you look at this?
- [30:09]
B
No, that's a good question. You know, jp we've already talked about, about people standing by and they're going to be working overtime and you know, maybe your product, if it's a food product, maybe it's getting too warm or what have you. But the other thing that we didn't talk about was parts usage, if you will. We talked about inventory, but sometimes people just start changing parts just to see if they can figure out if machine's going to be back online or not. There may be trouble figuring out what's wrong exactly. And you can stack up pretty quickly a large dollar amount in parts that you lost out of the parts room. And also what happens is somebody pulls a part off and puts a new part on and the machine still doesn't run like it needs to. Maybe the circumstances change so they keep putting parts on. Well, what do they do with the parts they took off? Were they really bad or not? And if they end up back on the parts shelf and they were not, the part wasn't 100% functional, but it's on the parts shelf as a used part with no tag, no label, no nothing that it was previously on a machine, what the person would run into. Then the next time they go troubleshoot something, another person come by, pick up that part that's been on the machine previously that's not fully functional, take it to the machine, put it on machine still don't run. And what they could run in. And then they may think, well that wasn't the problem. But that really may have been the problem. You see what I mean? They may have changed the right part. It's just that they put a part on that had been previously used and wasn't fully functional. So now you've got even more. It just keeps on compounding.
- [31:37]
A
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean there's so many like stories I've heard. We have a customer that I was speaking to, the maintenance manager, your counterpart there, about four months ago and they were explaining to me that they had, they used to have this mentality that they, it was always better to rebuild their drives than it was to buy new. And they figured out after like doing a lot of like looking at the data over time that every time they did a rebuild, the life of that drive would be significantly less. And they, you know, the maintenance manager told me like we knew that we eventually figured out that we reinstalling a failure in a time bomb in our site and just to save a few hundred, a few thousand dollars, you know, because the difference between net new and rebuild was, was not that significant. You know, it's. This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it definitely is related to that point where that. Yeah, it's, it's such a good, such a good thing to highlight what you've said.
- [32:33]
B
Yeah, well, a couple things I, I think is kind of have an understanding, even if it's a rough understanding of what it costs the plant to be down for 30 minutes in an hour. Okay. And that can help you pretty quick decide whether you want to rebuild something or just buy a new one. When you kind of think about it. Yeah.
- [32:51]
A
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. It's. And it's crazy to me how, because this is something. When we engage in conversations with, with, with prospective new sites, it's crazy to me that how few people actually know that number. And you have like, often we were there to help them give them benchmarks like industry, like sub, sub, sub industry, same size as you. That's typically the size. And often people are like very surprised. Like, oh, is it that much? You know, how, how do you suggest people should go about doing this? Is it as simple as go to the site leader and just ask and. Or do you think like, well, maybe just, just run some numbers. Like how. How do you suggest people find that number?
- [33:30]
B
Yeah, well, it probably depends on where you work. But again, you know, go back to relationships we're talking about. I've got a good relationship with the plant manager and he provides that information for me. He can tell me what it cost me down 30 minutes or an hour. He don't withhold that for me from me. He figures that if I know it and I can apply that towards my decision making, it helps the whole plant.
- [33:52]
A
Yeah, I agree. And so going back to this idea of troubleshooting there, where you know that the super good example you provided on the parts like in, in your eyes, what does good troubleshooting a good system here looks like?
- [34:05]
B
Yeah. I think that again, looking at a macro view of it, troubleshooting involves a certain skill set. And so again it comes back to are your employees trained? Have you sent them to the schools? You know, have you sent, have you brought in instructors from the outside to the job site for say machine machine specific training? Have you brought people in from that company and trained your technicians on the machine and then onboarding, okay. When people come in, there needs to be. When new people come in and even after they've been there for a while, there needs to be what we call job knowledge transfer. If you have people that are very good on equipment and they can troubleshoot and they can fix and they can repair. That's fantastic. Question. Can they pass that knowledge on to other technicians that aren't as good? And that comes back to a culture also. So as a manager, I try to induce a culture where sharing information is paramount. Okay. And on the job, training, job knowledge transfer, onboarding, those things are very critical. You will find some people have a natural knack for learning troubleshooting skills, and some people do not that are in maintenance. What, no matter which type you're dealing with. To me, good troubleshooting involves making sure that the technician has the exposure they need to the right people and the right resources. And also a component of it is when people troubleshooting, you also kind of have to have an internal clock in your head when a line's been down. And at some point, you as a manager may have to call someone else to that line. The person troubleshooting it already may get their feelings hurt. They may not. But sometimes, you know, you can't let the plant be down that long. Okay. So if you have people that are more qualified, that could get it running quicker, kind of have them turn a clock in your head, know when you need to call that other person in, get the line back up, and let that person that's already working stay there. Let them. Let them learn, let them observe. And then I. I think to kind of close it out, do an autopsy of the downtime in the first place. Why did it happen? What. What was wrong? How did you go about troubleshooting? How does other person go about troubleshooting? What. What. What problem was identified? How was it identified? How can we improve this process if it happens again?
- [36:16]
A
And when you carry that, that process out, that last part where you do the autopsy, where does that. What does that look like when it's done? Is it like a doc and like a word doc for you? And where. Where do these live for you guys?
- [36:29]
B
Yeah, it lives. I stored digitally, of course. I'll take notes and storm digitally. Some of my guys do the same thing. Some just keep notebooks. But, you know, you just have a. You. I'll call it a huddle session where the guys, the people involved get together and even people that were not involved get together. We just kind of get in a circle and talk and. And just talk about every detail of the downtime from beginning to end and document all the details of it and ask, you know, how can this be prevented? Or how. Or how can we, if we can't prevent it, how can it be done next Time quicker. What resources or tools or documents do we need to have or what troubleshooting steps does anybody need to take? You know?
- [37:12]
A
Yeah, no, that's, that's fantastic. I think it's especially, especially useful in today's age where we're having all these tools that are natively built using AI that can, that can really surface that information quickly for you. Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned that. Last topic that we wanted to cover today was about developing skilled technicians in a high compliance environment. But you know, it'd probably be helpful in any environment. Something we, we talked about throughout the conversation so far. But yeah, I'd love comments here on, on the idea that like we, we were just talking about troubleshooting and it's, this is definitely, it's not an area of memorization. Right. It's an area where you're trying to, to build this into a sequence and a system. Yeah. Can you talk about that? What, what does proper diagnosis look like in skilled technicians and how you train for that skill?
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, I think the first thing is, is when you walk up to a machine, you need to understand the sequence of operations of that machine. Okay. And what I find when people go to tr, when they make mistakes, they, instead of starting at the beginning of the troubleshooting sequence, they may start in the middle because they didn't understand maybe the sequence of operations of the, of the machine. There's all types of different, you know, packaging, product, machines. One of the first things is have a document that details the sequence of operations for the machine, what it, what it does, what happen, what's the next step, and so on until that product's produced. Because if a technician doesn't even understand how the machine's supposed to operate, they're going to have a hard time troubleshooting it, understanding what the troubleshooting process should be, what it looks like. So I say that's, that's number one is sequence of operations of the equipment. And then after that I think it comes back again to making sure they have the right knowledge, they've had the right training, they've been exposed to the right people. The documentation, the follow up review of
- [39:05]
A
the downtime and that documentation, that, that would be different to the OEM manual, right? That's not what you're talking about.
- [39:11]
B
Yes, that's correct. You, you create that yourself. You create that yourself.
- [39:15]
A
Yeah. Okay. No, that's, that's really good. What, what do you think is, is the gap between like the, you often what people talk like, talk about trade knowledge and like the, the knowledge that exists in, in your super experienced trades head and, and structured problem solving skills that you know might be something that someone more junior could come in. Like what, where's the gap between these two things, you think?
- [39:41]
B
I, I think that if I'm understanding the question correctly, people that come in that are new, they compared to people that are experienced and have been in, in the industrial maintenance trade for a long while. You know, you want them to be able to learn, but you want them to learn the right way and you don't, you don't want them to, you know, half learn how to electrical troubleshoot or half learn how to diagnose a hydraulic system, but they think they learned it fully. Okay, so I think that the gap is probably, it exists probably in a state where people sometimes think they've learned something at a level they should have learned it, but they don't know enough to understand that they only learn maybe about half of it and they got more to go, if you will, if that makes sense.
- [40:38]
A
Yes, it does. But, but how do you, is how do you go in and expose that unknown to them? Have you found.
- [40:45]
B
Okay, well, you know, again, they need to know that you're not there to make them or call them out or make them look, you know, stupid or anything in front of you, in front of the other peers. You're, you're, you're there to help them do better and be better equipped to do the job. So when, when you as a manager see someone not fully getting the grasp of electrical troubleshooting, hydraulic troubleshooting, troubleshooting in general, you know, pull them to the side, have a talk with them and, and just, just say, hey, I seen you kind of missed these steps right here. You were real close and had you, you know, interjected, you know, these steps into your troubleshooting process, you know, you would have, you'd have had a much different outcome. So just give them feedback, you know, if you want feedback from them, but be willing to give them the feedback also when they fall short.
- [41:36]
A
Yeah, that's, that's, I definitely agree with that. I think that's, that's totally the way to do it. Do you, actually I wanted to ask you this throughout, but the examples are always good, you know, as you, as you've gone throughout your career, do you have any tangible examples of, you know, like having upskilled technician and seen the change and seen the effect of that change over the years, whether that's current site or previous site or any sort of stories along this?
- [42:03]
B
Yeah, I Think that what comes to mind is I got a gentleman that works for me and he's, he's very, he's just naturally good anyways, but very, very talented. And I had a planned electrician, he's going to retire and he, he did plant electrical work and PLC work and worked on programming VFDs and so forth. So this other gentleman who was younger was, was coming up and I felt like he done everything on the floor for, for maintenance, but I felt like his expertise would be better in electrical and PLCs and programming VFDs. So what I did is I approached him and said, hey, this gentleman we all know is going to retire. And I think before he does, I'd like for you to have some job knowledge transfer from him. So I want you to work with him, I'm going to change your shift and I'm going to have you work with him as much as we can for six months. And so we did. And you know, he doubted himself at first somewhat. He said, well, I mean I'm interested, but I don't know if I could do it. And I said, trust me, I know you can do it. And you know, he, he just took to it and did fantastic and learned and so that when the other gentleman retired, I mean he was great, but it's like you really didn't even know. You didn't see a drop off in anything because this other person had stepped in, had absorbed the knowledge. So whether that's an electrical or if you have an ammonia system, refrigeration system, I've had seen, I've done the same thing many times. Took someone off the floor as a maintenance mechanic. So I thought they had good aptitude for that side of it and put them in the ammonia position when an opening come up. And, but I didn't put them in there like throwing them to the wolves. I put them in there to train first. And you know, also I teach electrical at a community college a couple nights a week. And it's kind of the same thing when you, you have a student and they're struggling understanding electrical motor control circuit and you keep explaining it to them and you keep working with them and then finally they, you see that look on their face when they get there. They're like, oh God, I, I get it now. I, I understand. And, and then that's when I kind of have to say, okay, I, I know you understand, but you only understand that much right now it seems like this much, but it's this much. You're going to, you're going to understand more here as we keep going. And, you know, I think that's. That always. It's a good feeling for me when I see people, you know, finally kind of come to it like that.
- [44:27]
A
I bet. Yeah.
- [44:28]
B
Yeah.
- [44:28]
A
It must be so rewarding.
- [44:29]
B
That's, that's fantastic.
- [44:30]
A
Yeah, it's, it's a perfect, perfect example of like that last chapter we wanted to address on training mentorship certification. I think you started the conversation talking about this mentorship and the idea of how important this was. Yeah. Do you want to make a comment as well on the role that certifications play and the importance of them if you're involved in teaching as well?
- [44:54]
B
Yeah, I think that, you know, being able to obtain certifications that state you've put in X amount of hours towards a certain trade with electrical or machine work, hydraulics, anything like that, it helps auditors, you know, they may ask for information like, well, this person doing this job, how do I know they're trained? Well, when you can provide that documentation to an auditor, you know, it carries weight. Instead of just saying, yes, this person can do this. They're qualified, you know, having those certifications. Just another form of documentation, another form of proof, if you will, then showing that you've put in the work and made the commitment.
- [45:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. Which, which helps also the person that's done it right. That, that little certificate. I'd love to close us off. If you're ready with our usual rapid
- [45:44]
B
fire man,
- [45:47]
A
brace yourself. None of these are too tricky. I'll just ask you the question and say whatever comes to mind. First, what is one reliability myth that you think needs to disappear?
- [45:58]
B
I think that one reliability myth that needs to disappear is when you see, when you receive a new piece of equipment, that it's going to run like it's new all the time. When you first started up, there's a lot of times there's lots of bugs to work out or something that wasn't done right. So you're going to, you're probably going to have to do some stuff with that piece of equipment.
- [46:18]
A
We've all experienced that version of that story, haven't we? Okay, that's great. One behavior that you think needs. Well, no, sorry. One behavior that improves reliability in general,
- [46:30]
B
you being accountable and people seeing that one thing.
- [46:33]
A
Site leaders misunderstand about maintenance, that they
- [46:37]
B
know how to fix. Fix everything. I mean, they, most of them kind of know it, but they, they assume that. Like in my maintenance department, I've got guys that are good at electrical. I got guys that are good at welding. I got guys that are good in hydraulics. I've got guys good at just troubleshooting in general. But everybody thinks they're. I mean, a person may fall into the trap of thinking they're all about qualified the same, and they're not. They have the strengths and weaknesses. Every. Every individual has. Has their strengths and weaknesses.
- [47:05]
A
That's a good point. And your last final advice for maintenance managers.
- [47:09]
B
You know, if you are a maintenance manager, I would say that in a production environment, understand that the consumers rely on these manufacturing plants to produce the products that they're going to buy. You know, if it wasn't for manufacturing plants, what would you have to buy? You know, you would have trouble at the grocery store, you'd have trouble at the hardware store, you'd have trouble buying a vehicle. So understand your role as a maintenance manager and what it means to provide a reliable work environment. You know, me and the plant manager have a saying that he's responsible for running the plant. I'm responsible for giving him a plant to run. That's. That's kind of the gist of it.
- [47:48]
A
That's good. I like that a lot. Fantastic. Jim, you were great. This was.
- [47:51]
B
I appreciate you.
- [47:54]
A
Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much.
- [47:56]
B
You do, too. Thank you, sir.
- [47:58]
A
It's a pleasure. I really love doing it. Yeah. No, thank you. 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.