Podcast: 2025 - Best of "Ask A Plant Manager"

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 collects three of the most popular clips from the past 12 months. 

PART 1 (March 2025): Maintenance vs. reliability engineers — Key differences and how they work together

PS: We recently did an episode on organizational structure and how many employees you should have and what your team should look like, so I don't think we'll get into numbers here today. You can listen to that episode from December 2024, but let's dive into how to use maintenance and reliability engineers differently based on their strengths and weaknesses, and how do you best get the two working together?

JK: Yeah, great question, and there are a few traps in here that I will specifically point out. So a maintenance engineer, the primary focus of a maintenance engineer is to keep the equipment running, to work with the technicians to make sure that they know the right procedures if something unexpected comes up, like a downtime event or planned maintenance for this weekend. Do they have the procedures? You're part of that help chain for the crafts out there. They do a lot of reacting. They address issues as they arise that come up. They’ve got to be flexible and have the ability to adapt, but to keep the equipment running today, this week, this month, this quarter, their time span of control. They are there as a technical resource to help things go okay.

Now, contrast that with a reliability engineer. These people are working on the strategic problems or opportunities, however you want to say it, that the plant may have, that the equipment may have. What are the problems we have at the end of every year when we sit down and say, ‘What were our number one issue? What was our number one? Number two, number three.’ The top reliability, expensive production issue, and they're always the same. It’s lubrication failures, motor failures, pump failures. What is it at your location? And the reliability engineer uses data, looks at the CMMS that you have. How much downtime will we have and how much money we spend, and what's the PM on that? What's the failure mode of that? What can we do to improve that? Maybe it's adding predictive technologies. Maybe it's a design change. Maybe it's a skill change, something we need to do a little bit differently. Maybe it's balancing differently. But it's a different time span that they're working in.

Here's the trap. The number one trap I want to talk about is reliability engineers getting sucked in to the day to day. Like a moth to a flame, we have this disaster. We need all hands on deck for the disaster of the day. And you suck the reliability engineer into that. They end up working on the here and now, on a on a non-Top 10 issue it. It’s non top 10 for the year, but it's top 10 today, and then it's 4:30 in the afternoon, and they'll say, ‘I'll try to do the reliability stuff tomorrow.’ So that is a massive trap.

One of the biggest boosts we got in our reliability effort at the plant I worked at was when we separated reliability and maintenance engineers. I mean, actually, physically, they were different people. One of the things that's popular is to say, ‘Hey, Anna, your job is, you're a maintenance engineer and a reliability engineer. You do both.’ And I've never seen that work, 100% of the time. I've been to 32 plants, at least 32 that was my last count, and 100% of them, it fails because you get sucked into the here and now, the drama of what's going on. 

The main difference, simple difference, between a maintenance engineer and reliability engineer is the time zone that they try to work in, the time span that they're trying to work in. One is strategic; one is tactical. Both are critical. One's not better than the other. A lot of people like that stamp of, I'm a reliability engineer. I went to one plant and they called everybody a reliability engineer. We had no maintenance engineers, and they did that just for egos. But they're both important.

PART 2 (July 2025): Reliability program not working? Here’s what might be wrong

PS: Today, we're going to flip that switch just a little bit on the reliability journey and focus on what might go wrong in that process. Joe, we know from our discussions that operations should own reliability, and to get started on that journey, you can start small, focus on the waste and promote and advertise those small wins to gain acknowledgement of your success along the way. So those are all great episodes. But sometimes your best intentions still get muddled or overtaken by other problems. So Joe, can you talk to us about all or some of the problems that can go wrong when you are starting your reliability journey, and what should folks be on the lookout for along the way? 

JK: Yeah, well, listing all the things that can go wrong is a long list, but a couple things that came to mind as I heard you ask the question, and just things that when I've gone into plants or experienced these myself, these are the things that I hear.  

The first one was corporate initiatives. You may be wanting to undertake a reliability transition, create a culture of problem solving. You've got all these ideas and best practices, and then corporate comes down and says, ‘Hey, we've got this new HR initiative, we’ve got this new safety initiative, we’ve got this new thing that everybody needs to do.’ And you say, ‘Well, I have to do that, but now's not a good time, and so I'll do the corporate initiative, and I'll push back the reliability initiative and maybe give it a little less sponsorship.’ I think you understand. I think the listeners will understand this too.  

Well, one of the things that I did, and this is not going to come across well initially for you, but I'm telling you, it's reality. I call it getting a ‘C’, okay. If you're given 100 things to do, you can't be perfect on all those. And this is what leaders, maintenance managers, engineering leaders, operations leaders and plant managers face all the time. You get so many initiatives. You try to be good on all of them, and you can't. You end up failing on all of them. And then, best case, you push out the optional ones. A reliability transition is an optional one. A corporate initiative on HR is required.  

Well, getting a C. I'll just throw out an example. Say you’ve got this corporate initiative and it's some HR thing that you have to do. To do it perfectly with excellence, it'll take you 80 hours. Getting a B, maybe 40 hours. Getting a C and getting a passing grade may take you about four hours. So choose projects to get a C in. Those 100 things that you've got a year to do, which ones are okay to get a C in and which ones are going to move the organization forward that you want to get an A+ in. And reliability should be one of those at most locations, reliability is just huge.  

Now I wouldn't tell corporate you're just going to get a C on this, but it's something I did all the time, and it had a massive impact on our ability to drive change at the plants I worked at – massive. Most people get overwhelmed in the bureaucracy and getting a C, having that mindset, I would tell my employees, what's it take to get a C on this? And I'd have to lecture them. I know you want to do everything with excellence. I need you to do a, b and c with excellence, and I need you to do this one, and I want you to get a pass/fail, get a passing grade on this, but you don't have to do it with excellence. That's huge. Corporate distraction, I'm not saying, corporate is all bad or all their ideas are bad, but sometimes they don't perfectly align with your plant. And they make policy for 30 plants, and it's not as big a deal at your plant. So pick which ones make sense to get a C and which one to do with excellence. And that'll buy a lot of time for you.  

PART 3 (October 2025): Why predictive maintenance fails without problem solving on the plant floor

PS: 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 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. 

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. 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. Try not to have them. Learn from Joe's mistakes.

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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