Podcast: Boosting OEE and Safety Through Smarter Preventive Maintenance

This episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast was recorded live at the 2025 SMRP Annual Conference, in Fort Worth, Texas. In this episode Brian Hronchek, principal trainer and consultant for Eruditio, talks with Plant Services chief editor Tom Wilk discuss how companies are using PM optimization to achieve quick, measurable improvements in both reliability and safety.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

TW: We talked earlier this year about PM optimization, and you just got off a panel about FMECAs, which we also talked about for the podcast. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about what you’re hearing in the market right now on PM optimization and also about safety.

We’ll start with the PMs. The last time we talked, you mentioned it was the hottest topic you were addressing on behalf of Eruditio, the topic you heard in market. Here we are about six months later. Is PM optimization still the focus of people, or are you hearing different conversations emerging here at SMRP?

BH: PM optimization was hot last time we talked, and it’s only getting hotter. It’s one of those things where if we go into a company on a consulting basis, we normally go in with the long-term vision of building a reliability program — but most companies need short-term results. PM optimization is one of those ways to get those short-term results. We pull that up to the front.

So what we’re seeing as we’re engaging the students on the front line are these side conversations with executives and senior directors. Those are happening after class and at the end of the day — their interest is piqued by what they see in the PM optimization exercise. They’ve actually started coming to us saying, “No, just slow down on everything else. We just need PM optimization.”

We’re hearing the same thing from the floor here at SMRP — a lot of the guys were in the workshop on Monday for PM optimization because their companies have a huge PM optimization push right now, and nobody knows how to do it very effectively. So, they’re like, “Well, we’ve got to go to this course because, you know…” It sounds like it’s gaining even more traction. I think the industry is realizing they need results now, and this buzzword of “PM optimization” has really started to catch on. Whether you absolutely know what it is or not, it’s become a very hot topic — and it’s getting hotter.

TW: That’s really good to hear because, you know, PM optimization in general is a useful activity, but as you’re saying, it’s not really something that’s just going to flare up and then die out in the conversation. It sounds like you’ve got some real traction with technicians and decision-makers who showed up for your workshop to learn more about it and get it implemented.

BH: Yeah, whether it’s because it’s a buzzword or because people actually know the value — people are being drawn to it right now. So, it’s a tide.

TW: It’s interesting, too, as the business landscape levels out — something we talked about briefly in March, April, and May — was that, you know, given the change in administration and given the challenges in the business landscape, people weren’t sure whether this was going to be a temporary focus on looking at what we can optimize now instead of making investments. But what I’m also hearing at the event is that investments are being made, and part of that is in training of this kind, to make sure everyone’s skilled up to drive efficiencies throughout the process.

BH: Yeah, I just heard the University of Tennessee had a really good talk on developing talent and finding talent — because just hiring talent is not an effective strategy right now. It’s just not out there, so training is a hot topic for sure.

TW: I’m curious — is there a success story you can talk about, either with Eruditio on the job or that you’ve heard from a plant practitioner here, when it came to processes they optimized, or PMs that they were able to assess and eliminate?

BH: Yeah, there is a company out there that’s done a pretty big overhaul, and they’re getting ready to do more. (And to be open, they’re one of our customers.) Imagine an asset that has 1,800 inspection points, right? So that’s where they start — 1,800 inspection points. 

There’s so little faith that the maintenance department can actually get anything done because they shut down for an inspection. Their inspection — or I say inspection, but what I really mean is PM — their definition of PM is “periodic maintenance,” which includes find and fix. Our definition is PM inspections where you find, then you go plan and schedule, and then you fix, right?

Because of the way they were running it, they would dive on this asset to do 1,800 inspection points, which would result in maybe a tenth of them getting completed. But they’d find enough they’d have to fix, and they’d be down for three days instead of eight hours fixing everything they found.

The operations department has so little faith that they’re ever going to get (the equipment) back, they say, “Well, we’re just canceling all the PMs. We’ll give it to you once a year because we can’t absorb all this downtime that you cause us all the time.” And yet still, when they come out of the PM, the assets are breaking down. So nobody has faith that PMs work. Nobody has faith that if they give an asset away, it’ll actually come back. So it becomes a completely reactive environment.

After their PM optimization efforts, they reduced that from 1,800 inspection points to 300 inspection points because of all the waste that was built into the system. Those 300 are polished up to where they’re very effective at finding the problem so that it can be planned and scheduled. Then they’re able to come back two weeks later and address all those problems, and the performance has dramatically increased. They went through eight months of not hitting targets, followed now by months and months of accomplishing their production targets because of the application of PM optimization.

I’d love to dive in further because there’s more to it than just polishing up the paperwork, and theirs is a great story of that.

TW: That’s really cool to hear. There have been a couple of good case studies, also. There was an insulation manufacturer who said that since the start of the year, his business hadn’t really slowed down, they’ve been going 24/7. They’re slowing up a little bit right now, but one of the markets in the U.S. that’s been booming ever since the start of the year is new home construction.

They were able to engage in a couple of PM optimization efforts to make sure they had operators on hand to run the machines 24/7 and not spend time doing routes that were needless—extra work that wasn’t really benefiting the machines. So that’s something else that picked up while I was here.

BH: One of the magical outcomes of PM optimization is, during the process, there’s not a flow chart that gives you a clear, cut-and-dry answer like, this failure mode has to be addressed this way. It’s not like that.

The questions are asked, and they have to be answered based on the business. For businesses that are in 24/7 operations, you get the opportunity to say, “Hey, we could address this with vibration, we could address it with ultrasound, we could do a physical inspection—but we’re going to make a choice to do something that allows us to do the inspection while we run instead of during downtime.”

By having that flexibility, you can match the maintenance strategy to the business on the fly as you polish these up and completely maximize throughput—if that’s what you have to do—without negating or giving away anything in your inspection process. There are things to consider, like how much money you have, how much time you have, how many people you have, what technologies you have available—and you’re weighing all of that when you’re answering these questions.