Podcast: Creating a competitive edge with data-driven lubrication and maintenance practices

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Plant Services editor in chief Thomas Wilk speaks with ICML CEO Bryan Coggins and ICML Marketing Director Paul Hiller about the evolving culture of reliability and maintenance within industry. The conversation explores how ICML is strengthening its role through training, certification, and real-world case studies that demonstrate measurable ROI in lubrication management. Bryan shares insights from his diverse background in manufacturing and energy, emphasizing the importance of balancing long-term strategy with short-term results, while Paul highlights how ICML’s messaging and outreach are driving cultural and operational improvements across the sector.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: Bryan, tell us a little bit about yourself and the path that led you to your current role as CEO with the ICML.

BC: Sure. Actually, today marks exactly five months since I started with the ICML. It's been a lot of fun learning and creating new relationships, not just with the folks at ICML, but in the broader marketplace. It's a pleasant group of people. With respect to my background, it's a bit eclectic. I've worked in manufacturing environments. I've worked in oil and gas. I've worked in renewables — utility-scale wind turbine. I've been part of Fortune 50 companies. I've been part of family-owned companies, private equity, venture capital — pretty much covered everything, which is atypical: retail, construction, geophysics for a period of time, government contracting. I've done a lot of different functional disciplines, and I've kind of rotated back and forth between operational sets of responsibilities and financial sets of responsibilities.

PS: Interesting. And now you're moving into an organization which has such a strong thought leadership component to it. Was it that that drew you to the ICML?

BC: I would say the thing that was interesting to me — I was recruited into the role, and the person that recruited me brought it to me not sure whether I would be interested or not. And as they described the position and the opportunity, I thought it presented a unique challenge. The service industry is always really a challenging dynamic, because you're constantly fighting against this “last impression is your best impression” kind of a mantra. And to have that set of responsibilities, you've got to be willing to compete, and you've got to compete against your own expectations every day in a bit of an unusual way.

You're not really looking at metrics so much as you're looking at interactions and how you're perceived in the marketplace — how your customers view you. And I think the particular challenge for ICML is, in many cases, the end-user client of the examination for their candidates isn't the person that you're actually relating to most frequently. Generally, that's going to be your training partners. And I think that nuance complicates the process and makes it even more important that we're effective communicators, and that we’re messaging the right things and reflecting the discipline and desire to meet people's — and exceed people's — expectations every day.

It's a very challenging dynamic, and for that reason I'm interested in participating, and I'm really blessed to have a really strong team. This is a very high-touch model, and every day the dynamic is very fluid. And the fact that they're as versatile and adaptable as they are has been a lot of fun for me. This would be a very, very difficult job if you didn't have such a talented group of people around you.

PS: My experience with maintenance and reliability teams — those phrases you mentioned seem to capture that dynamic in general when it comes to that side of heavy industry: high touch, strong teams, lots of interactions. There was something in your background which jumped out to me when getting ready for this podcast — your experience with ARCO Alaska — and that's where you had some direct touches with experience reducing maintenance costs and focusing on extending the life of your capital assets. For those who are curious about that part of your background, could you talk a little bit about your experience with ARCO?

BC: I was fortunate enough to live in Alaska for eight years, and I spent two years of that working on the North Slope, which is a week-on, week-off schedule. And up there, we had, I think it was about $15 billion of capital in place, and that was over 30 years ago that I did that. And it was really interesting, because like all organizations that are kind of constantly struggling with the balance point of cost and risk, we were evaluating a lot of rotating equipment — gas turbines that help inject miscible injectants into the formation to scrub the formation and maintain reservoir pressure with enhanced oil recovery methods; water injection, etc.

So we had a lot of rotating equipment, very, very high PSI injection rates. We spent a lot of money on the capital, and we also spent a lot of money on the turnarounds and routine maintenance cycles. I was tasked, in an environment where oil price, wellhead price, was extremely low at the time and our budgets were pretty much blown up relative to revenue expectations, to look at costs. And you could have catastrophic risks if you don't service that equipment properly. So we spent a lot of time and a lot of money trying to assess turnaround schedules — what would be an appropriate and reasonable set of risks to assume. And I ended up buying some software; I was the field business manager at the time. I ended up buying some software with an affiliated Stanford University organization, went down, got some training on this decision tree software, and then we applied it back with our equipment. 

It worked out really well, and the thing that was neat about it is we had a lot of different people — engineering, operations, maintenance, finance — all working together, collaborating. And we all had a lot of skin in the game because the budget situation was fairly dire. And certainly we didn't want to hurt anybody; we didn't want to have an environmental issue, a spill or something like that, because we pushed equipment too hard. And we certainly didn't want to have any unexpected downtime and the related production losses.

So we spent a lot of time and energy collaborating on what we thought was reasonable. And I think the thing that was really outstanding about the outcome is when it was all said and done, we got a good outcome. And when the engineering folks did their post-mortems and tried to evaluate the equipment, they didn't find any examples of us degrading or significantly impacting the condition of the equipment. So that was a good thing.

But it was fun. I really enjoyed that experience of being on the slope. I love to learn new things, and being in those facilities and working with those folks — and the massive, massive amounts of capital and the complexity that they represented — was a really excellent learning platform, especially for somebody at the time who was quite young.

PS: Exciting time, definitely. That's my bucket list state as well, Bryan. I've got 49 of 50 knocked off, and one of these days I have to get up that way.

BC: I'll be happy to advise you as best I can. I had a great experience up there.

PS: Maybe we can shift over to the general challenges that face maintenance and reliability teams, especially on a cultural level. And Paul, feel free to chime in at some point too. But Bryan, you did touch on that — the power of teamwork to get the job done in ARCO and, of course, other places. From a cultural perspective, what do you see as the most common challenges that organizations currently face when they're trying to manage their assets and manage risk?

BC: Wherever I've served, I've always found the biggest challenge is the reconciliation of a long-game bias versus the short-term bias. And depending on what company you're talking about, what the company's performance — and that's usually measured in financial terms — looks like, and what measure of pressure everybody's experiencing about that expectation or ambition is, what creates more hassle and more challenge than anything else is how do you reconcile that long-term, 5-, 10-, 15-, 20-year set of ambitions and requirements against the next quarter or the next half or the next year.

And not everyone I've worked with has had my same views, right? So I might be long-game biased, and they might be feeling more pressure about short-term results. They might not have the same commitment to the company or the industry that other people have, and for that reason, they may be willing to accept more risk. Trying to reconcile risk aversion and risk acceptance is really the cultural battle that you're constantly fighting. And that's not going to be different whether you're talking oil and gas or utility-scale wind turbines or any other business for that matter, including ICML. So the cultural aspects are: getting everybody on the same page, making disagreement not mean confrontation, and reconciling those competing priorities. 

Then the last part of it is the illusion of control. You have this idea with probability, probabilistic modeling, that you're going to get certain outcomes if you make certain decisions. And even though you're constantly attempting to skew probabilities in your favor, the fact remains that sometimes you're not going to get the outcome that you wanted or hoped for. Dealing with that illusion of control, and how you respond when things don't go as you expected them to, is something that creates a lot of pressure in organizations. It tests people. You fall into the blame game, and people struggle with accountability and responsibility, and spend a little too much time in that spot mentally, then moving forward with mobilizing to find a solution.

I think about things in terms of honoring effort and intent, giving positive feedback first, and mobilizing to find a solution. And if you can do those three things in that order, you can usually reconcile most issues.

PS: Yeah, I was going to ask — is there a way that you saw to thread the needle between the long-term goals and the short-term ambition? Would you also say the recipe you outlined helps you negotiate that tension?

BC: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's one of those things. I've been in the C-suite for 25 years at this point, so I've been in this decision-authority kind of set of responsibilities for a long time. And what I've found is that you can find the common ground, but we fall prey to our ambitions for expediency. 

People tend to “oomph” the conversation. Rather than let the conversation evolve and really try to understand and reconcile the competing points of view, people feel like if they just raise the intensity of the argument, it suddenly makes it more compelling as an argument. And that's not typically the case. I think that if you can figure that piece out and if you don't put time constraints — I mean, obviously there's a finite amount of time before a decision's got to be made — but then part two of that is: decision made, supported 100%, no pocket vetoes, making sure that everybody agrees that while they might not have gotten exactly what they wanted out of the conversation, if everybody's a little bit unhappy, we probably reached a pretty decent accord.

The idea is that if you got everything you wanted, then you probably bullied your way through the conversation, or people acquiesced in a way maybe they shouldn't have, because a lot of times these are big deals. And it's really important that the apprehensions and anxieties get expressed right alongside the ambitions. You can't have too much doom and gloom, and you can't have too much Pollyanna. You’ve got to figure out where the midpoint is, or somewhere near the midpoint, on those two extremes.

PS: Yeah, I hear you. You're saying that when it comes to leadership, part of what it means to be an effective leader is to create that culture where people can talk and collaborate. And as you say, not bully your way through. It takes some courage and some confidence for people to feel free to raise their voices, I think, in groups like that.

BC: It's true. I think for a long time, when you're younger and you get one of these roles, you think that you just tell people what to do and that they'll just kind of acquiesce and fall in line. And what you find is that you're an influence peddler, you're a thought leader, and then you're the person who's ultimately holding the bag when the decision gets made.

A lot of people would say, "I want your job." And I said, no — what you really want is my paycheck. You don't really want the responsibility for making these decisions, because it's not for the faint of heart. When you open your mouth in these situations, half the people in the room may fundamentally disagree with you. Half of the people might think you're brilliant. And the next day, you might have a new issue and have another conversation, and those people switch positions. Suddenly, the ones who thought you had it all figured out aren't sure that you can get your shoes tied without help. It's a very interesting dynamic to deal with. You've got to be comfortable being somewhat stoic about situations and not take things personally. Try to keep everything professional.

That's the coaching I give to my teams: don't make it personal. Don't let your feelings get hurt. Don't let that influence what might otherwise be excellent thought processes and decision-making. When our egos get involved, that's when we tend to make poor decisions, because then it's about winning the argument, not about getting the most correct or the most advantageous probabilistic model created and executed.

PS: Paul, any thoughts to add?

PH: Brian's background and the management philosophy he's talking about has been beneficial with the staff, and it's positively affecting the kinds of messaging that we are starting to put out with ICML, and the value and impact of certifications on production outcomes at companies that have successfully utilized ICML-certified people on their teams. So it's kind of a new direction for us, and that's pretty exciting to be a part of.