Podcast: Why predictive maintenance fails without problem solving on the plant floor

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode explores how to blend predictive tools with decades of shop floor know-how.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

 
PS: Well, today we're going to talk about technology, specifically predictive maintenance technology. But before I get to that question, I just wanted to draw attention to a column that you did a few months ago, and you were warning people against what you called a hubris contagion, and not really a failure of hubris or overconfidence in general, but you were talking specifically about an over-reliance on technology. 
 
And you were clear that the message is not that tech is bad. It can be a game changer when it's used correctly, but there is this dangerous gap that can form between virtual data and shop floor reality. For example, too many people managing from their cell phones instead of really knowing what's going on out there. So how should managers and the plant floor in general be using this kind of technology, and specifically when it comes to predictive maintenance technology, what's your advice for plants that are interested but don't know where to start?
 
JK: Great, great questions, and I've actually been through this, so it's very vivid in my mind, what you can do wrong and what works. The temptation for people is to, like you said, manage from your computer, manage from your cell phone. And while technology can be great or is great, I'll say is great for early indication of a potential problem, it doesn't tell you what to do. It doesn't tell you what to do. So you've got this anomaly that say, shows up on a motor. What do you do? Well, you can just change out the motor, but you’ve got to get out of your office, talk to the electrician, talk to the mechanic, on whatever the device is. Go and see how it's operating. What's going on right now? Is operations, are they using it outside of the design parameters? So they're running the motor at 120% capacity? Are they beating and banging the pump around that you're using? What is going on on the shop floor. 
 
That's where you transition from, ‘Hey, I found an anomaly’ to ‘What are we going to do about it?’ To fix the repair and then also problem solve so it doesn't happen again. If you do not add problem solving, this is very, very important, if you do not add problem solving to your condition monitoring program, you're going to be horribly disappointed. All you're going to do is have more problems come at you, and you've already got your unplanned downtime, and all the chaos that can be the life of a maintenance leader, but adding problem solving is how you get better every single day. 
 
So technology is great. And what I've been seeing is technology is taking over 90% of the effort, and I think it ought to be no more than 40, where you're finding the anomaly, you're finding things fast. And what's critical about condition monitoring is you find the pump failure when it's starting to have an anomaly for vibration. You don't find the pump failure when it's burned on the ground in a pile of ashes. Well, try to problem solve what went wrong when it's just this molten ball of rubble and you're stressed around getting that production center back up and running. So the whole focus is on restore and flow, where, with condition monitoring, finding problems early, you schedule that downtime, then you take that pump and you autopsy it. What happened? Oh, it was our lubrication practices, or it was our packing practices, or it was a bearing problem, and then you root cause that and say, ‘Hey, let's not use style A bearing. Let's use style B bearing from this manufacturer.’ And then that problem solving occurs, and then it doesn't happen again. So you have to blend both. It can't just be technology. And I see too many people managing, just from the red and green on their cell phones. An anomaly is saying, hey, let's just change out that pump. Change out that motor. You are going to be disappointed if you don't add problem solving and going and seeing adds that dimension of ‘Okay, now what are we going to do next?’ Okay, very critical. 
 
The other part of your question was, okay, we think the condition monitoring is the direction we want to go. Where do we start? Well, it depends a little bit on where you're at. If you're 90% unplanned maintenance and you're just reacting, every single day is a brand-new day. That's a tough place to begin, but condition monitoring can be the right solution there. The first place I would start, and I'm going to trip the audience up here, if they've been longtime listeners, I'm going to say, look at the KPIs, and talk to the maintenance people, talk to the historians at your site, and say,’ Where are most of our problems?’ And they may be, ‘Oh, well, gosh, if we can ever figure out these motors. These motors are supposed to last 10 years and are lasting 10 months. Or could be a pump, it could be a gearbox. Get an indication of where your problems are, and then that targets your observation. Okay, so go out and see go talk to a mechanic, watch them do a PM, on a on a pump, on a gearbox, and compare that to what the standard is. And you may say, Okay, I think lubrication is the place to start. After you looked at KPIs, and after you talk to some people, you have this gut feel this is the right place to start. You may think it's IR because it's electrical problems. IR detects heat very early, and you can, like I said, perform the preventative maintenance to fix the circuit board, or whatever, the fuse, whatever's hot, and then you can troubleshoot that. So what you're you want to start a condition monitoring program where you have problems. You don't want to start them on, if you got 10 production centers, and the first five are critically important and the last five aren't, you don't want to start on the last five. Who cares if you're successful, right? Nobody really cares if it doesn't save money and doesn't improve downtime. So you want to pick an area where you can make some improvement because people are watching. You've got the leadership team watching. They're investing in people and in technology and in training. Also that's a given, but also they're investing in downtime. You're going to tell them that this gearbox has a vibration in it, but to them, it's working fine. And you're going to tell them, I want to take an eight hour outage on Thursday to replace a perfectly good gearbox. And there's a lot of faith that comes with that, okay? So you've got to work on problems that are going to make an impact, okay? And then you're going to dive into that gearbox. You may change it out, or change out a bearing or gear, whatever. But then you need to take that gearbox, put it on an autopsy table and find out what's wrong with it. And that's the problem solving that I said you have to add. You have to add that problem solving. 
 
So I would say where to start, with your historians. Start with your KPIs. Point you in a direction. Whether you want to start with IR on some electrical equipment, some vibration on pumps and rotating equipment, you may even start with UE. UE, ultrasonic emissions is a great place to start, because it's really the technology that finds anomalies the earliest and gives you more time to change things out, do the repairs and problem solve. 
 
But one more thing I want to add is, there's, errors you can make in this. You didn't ask this question, but the pitfalls, one is not adding problem solving. And I'm saying this because we started a condition monitoring program at my plant, my first one, and we were pounding our head, ‘We've invested so much into this, and six months later, we've not seen any improvement, nothing.’ And then I reread a book by Ron Moore, “Making Common Sense, Common Practice.” It's on my shelf. Sometimes I point to it, and it says you had to add problem solving, and it's on page 220. I remember the page number. That's how dramatic this was. I'm going back to 2000, and I remember the page number of the book, and it said you have to add problem solving. 
 
But there are some regrets you're going to have going down this path of condition monitoring and problem solving. You're going to wait until your program is perfect. You want to wait until you have a complex program. You're going to study your pump, look at failure modes, look at the technologies, UE, vibration and lube, and you're going to study how you can apply it to that one pump. And it's going to take you six or eight months to get a good program in, or one pump. I used to have 20,000 assets.
Imagine how long it's going to take to do root cause failure analysis, failure mode analysis on every single piece of equipment. You can't so you just start. That's my message: is to just start. If you think it's a lube problem, start with lube. If we think it's going to be electronic, start with IR. Walking around the plant with an IR camera is a great place to start. You start to see things. That's not your best on a lot of rotating equipment. IR is not the best because it's kind of late. You may be hours away from an event, but waiting until you have a very comprehensive plan to start predictive maintenance will be a regret you have, because you just have to start. You just got to start and learn by doing. 
 
The second failure I see people have, and I've had, is they're slightly understaffed. Say you have 20 mechanics or technicians on your team, and you're down to 18, you're going, ‘Oh, we can't wait to do this condition monitoring stuff, but I got to get to full staff.’ You'll regret that, because condition monitoring will dramatically change the number of work hours you need out of your team, because you're going to find problems early. You're going to problem solve them. So those are the two regrets I predict that you'll have. Ty not to have them. Learn from Joe's mistakes.
 
PS: Great, lots of good nuggets in there. We've talked about problem solving before, but I love the autopsy image that you kept bringing forth in terms of diving into your assets. But it is a lot of work, and if you have a huge facility, it may be overwhelming to know where to start, but if you're just acting on that data, and it's great to have that information and act on it, but if you're not going back to really understand what's happening there, you're really not going to save a lot of time in the future. And I think the more that you do that, and the more you understand your data, and the more you get, whether it's vibration data, you can start to understand what you're seeing historically and do some of that problem solving with the data itself, but you’ve got to go and see what you're doing first. 
 
I want to reference back to that column that you wrote. There are a lot of really good nuggets in there, but one line from that article, which I really liked was, experience is not a dinosaur. I think it's just a great phrase, but I think it says a lot in the generational context, and about how generations view each other, how they're clashing in the workplace. As I'm approaching 50, I'm getting older, and I'm moving to that other side of the equation. And you think about all these issues differently, but I'm curious what you think about this. And younger generations are usually more interested in tech or maybe more familiar with it. But what do you see in terms of generations when it comes to working with this type of technology, ad whether it's working together or maybe sometimes the ways that they clash?
 
JK: The concern I had and referenced in that article is, I'll meet with somebody that's in their 20s and 30s and everything's got a technology solution to it, everything. And I think that is half the answer. But there are technicians in your work site that have been dealing with this equipment for 30 years, and they may not be polished on the newest, latest, and greatest technology and whatever is on your cell phone for tracking your equipment, but they've been through this five and 10 times. Sit down and talk with them. Sit down and talk with the person that's been through this. What happened last time? They may not be able to detect the problem as early as you can with technology, but they know a lot about the repair. They know a lot about what we may have done wrong in the past. They may know how they do the PM. You may talk to them say, ‘Hey, we need to replace this whole piece of equipment. This keeps on failing.’ They may say, ‘Hey, we're not doing the PMs on this equipment. We're not doing them. Yes, we shut down for four hours once a month to do the PM, but the PM takes eight hours, so we're doing half the PM every month.’ They know that kind of information. They know the war stories. They know things that we've tried in the past, different bearings, different run speeds. I'm telling you don't neglect that senior employee. They have information, and it can seem a little painful to extract that information from them, because maybe they're a little calloused up. They’re a little calloused up from, ‘Hey, you know, I told them how to fix this 15 years ago, and nobody listened. So I'm I'm just doing my job.’ Nobody will listen to me. We need to shut this down and lubricate it every shift. That's the answer to this problem. I brought that up 15 years ago. Nobody's listened, so we just let it fail. And once a week it fails, and we're down unexpected and everybody's surprised.’ So you got to break through that crust, and it's there and and I always treated that crust as I owned it. I'm the leader of the area. I've owned this crust of previous management, of how they addressed issued. But listen, talk, listen through the war stories, and find some gold in there. I promise you the gold is there. The right answer is technology with experience, that's the right answer. One or the other will not be competitive going forward.
 
PS: The other point I want to steal from you in that article that you wrote was the ways that tech can be bad for collaboration. I think you touched on that a little bit in what you just talked about, but for instance, we're here in this digital meeting, and we're face to face, but it is a little bit different. And when people are stuck on their devices and have their noses in their smartphones and their data, there's less of that face to face collaboration and I think it's about trust, which I think you just spoke to as well, but you can only get that through real human connection. 
 
JK: Yeah, it's, you know, I've seen 1000s of examples where two people are looking at a problem, and they come up with a better answer than one. It happens so often. When I'm just working with my wife on what color to paint the living room, two people are better than one. One person may have a blind spot to, ‘oh, hey, we like that color paint. But let's look at it when the sun's shining, or let's look at under the evening light, and look at the different colors.’ 



So one person may see a problem or see something from a different vantage point because of their experience, and the solution is always better. It's always better when you collaborate. And that really concerns me going forward, as people manage more from their office. They manage more remote. It's just the collaboration. I just mentioned two people. When you get four or five people together, I think somewhere around four or five, six is the best size. You can get a group that’s too big and you get too many opinions, but jump into everybody's experience. They know something. They're wise in some area, and you just need to find it. You may have to put up with a couple war stories that don't mean anything to you, but to find the gold nugget. But I promise you it's there. 
 
PS: Great. All right. Onto our second part of the podcast, our more personal questions, and we have an interesting one today. Do you consider yourself more of a planner or someone who thrives in the chaos of the unexpected? I'll start this one off only because it was a little bit hard for me to answer definitively. I think sometimes I feel like we need to. We shouldn't ride the fence on some of these either-or questions, like that's a cop out somehow. But I suppose we don't need to choose, and we're just raising these issues for discussion and for others to think about as well. So no dichotomies required. 
 
But I think for me, by nature, I am a planner. I would consider myself a planner. I have a calendar for everything, my professional work, the kids stuff, school, sports, running, gardening, shopping, whatever. And I'd say, I even plan out what free time we have. What are we going to get done? Time isn't free. There's always something to do. Even, I think, the way I typically write is very structured in terms of how I move from a transcript to an outline to an article or, to do an interview or record a podcast, there's a lot of planning and preparation that goes into that. So I'm definitely a planner. I don't just wing it, but I am going to ride the fence a little bit here, because there's something to be said, especially in my line of work as a journalist, for being someone that thrives in that chaos. And I correlate this to deadlines. I mean, they're constantly looming over us, and we are constantly trying to add more and produce as much as we can. So sometimes inspiration is free flowing when you don't need it, but other times it's harder to find that creativity or the words that you need to put together to write something when you don't know exactly what you want to say. But for me as a writer, if you put me up against a deadline, even if I don't know what I need to say, I'm going to figure it out real quick, and that creativity will just happen under that pressure. So maybe it's the pressure, rather than the chaos, that drives that for me, and maybe a deadline is really planning out the chaos anyway, so that that makes me more of a planner anyway. But I tell you, no matter how many articles you write or how many issues you break open for readers, after that you're right back confronted with blank page, and you're back where you started, finding your way among the chaos of the unexpected. So I don't know. I may be a little ambivalent there, Joe, I want to know what you think and how you relate this more to manufacturing or your career. What do you think?
 
JK: Yeah, I mean, very easily I can say I'm a planner. My background is in engineering, and through engineering school, they teach you how to take a problem and break it down into pieces that you can manage. And so you put it, however you're going to do that. So in manufacturing, you have an unexpected downtime. First thing I would do is I would say, ‘Okay, you handle the commercial piece of this. You be point on safety. You'd be point on the mechanical repairs.’ And then you work with production planning, try to create some structure from the chaos. That's first thing I do, create structure from chaos. So I do like to plan. 
 
I like to have things methodically laid out. But I'm going to add a twist there. In here, there's a trap. How much planning? And quite often, the biggest problem I see in a plan is they over plan. They try to work out every single detail, what's going to happen next year. ‘2026 plan. Let's create a 100-page document of our plan and everything we're going to do.’ Well, guess what? That plan is obsolete tomorrow. Something's changed. A customer order changed. Customer spec changed. We have less volume. We got more volume. We went into a recession as a country, and the 20% it's off our volume, our price increases that we're planning on, we can't go through. So the plan really falls apart right away. But it's the planning that is important. You know the details; you know the levers that you've got. 
 
So too much planning, I see, is the biggest fault in plants. The plants that I've been in, is they over analyze, and they're so afraid of being wrong that they just keep planning, planning. Just like our conversation on condition monitoring, you could study how to do that for the next 10 years, or you could study for it for the next week and say we're going to start something on Monday, and learn by doing, because you know you're going to make some mistakes. Make sure those mistakes don't injure anyone. But learn by doing. Learn by doing some things wrong. Okay, it's a lot faster than trying to plan for anything that can potentially go wrong. That's what I think is critical as a maintenance leader, is know the line between what's an acceptable amount to plan and over planning. That's what I think is critical. 
 
There were two other guys at my plant. I'm laughing right now. You can't all see my face, but we called ourselves 51 percenters. 51 percenters, okay? That means as soon as we thought we were 51% confident we were going to be correct, we took action. Fifty-one percent and that is extremely unusual for maintenance people and engineering people. That means I'm okay being wrong 49% of the time. But I have the mantra of I'd rather try 10 things this year and be wrong on four of them. We got six things done, very successful in six, then to do one thing perfectly every year. You're going to get a lot more done. And even on those four that you've messed up on, you did something wrong, you learn something and you're going to go after that again. So to me, I call myself a 51 percenter. I'm close to that. I don't need an analysis paralysis. Make a decision with enough planning. That's the trap for me.
 
PS: No analysis paralysis. I like that idea. I imagine there's got to be people out there in manufacturing, though, that are those people that thrive in chaos, and I'm thinking about our past discussions, those firefighters who thrive in the dumpster fire and really rally in those moments. They're probably less planners, I would say,
 
JK: Yeah, and don't interpret that as those people are wrong. It's like, ‘Hey, okay, where should I place those people and inside of my organizations?’ And it took me a while to figure this out. But hey, those people that love to work inside of chaos, and they do it safely, and they do a high quality job, put them on unplanned work. Create an unplanned work crew. That's all they do all the time, and then that protects the planned group for doing the things that are preventing next week, next month, next year's problems. So, yeah, I created an organization based on who likes to do what.
 
PS: Yeah, that's a great point. If you like that chaos, we'll give you all the unplanned work you can handle. 
 
JK: Exactly right. 
 

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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