Podcast: The intersection of maintenance and microbrews

Corey Dickens, CMRP, is a senior solutions consultant at Brightly, and describes himself as a maintenance practitioner and CMMS super user. Hs career has taken him into a wide variety of plants and industrial facilities, and recently he presented on maintenance best practices to the Craft Brewers Conference. In this conversation with chief editor Thomas Wilk, Dickens explains why some brewers refer to it as "equipment caretaking" and the hunger among brew pubs and micro breweries for maintenance knowledge.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: Corey, welcome to the podcast!

CD: Thank you. I will mention I am now a former practitioner. I think a lot of people that switch over from the practitioner side to the services or technology side, we always consider ourselves recovering, or recovering from our former life and the heartache and the headache.

PS: Oh, man, well every old experience lets you build up to the new one, so I'm glad that led you to this place here.

CD: Somewhere I never thought I would land. I mean, I was at a manufacturing facility during COVID, and a lot of the big wigs got the opportunity on Fridays to take off, work from home, where I can have my calls, I can check e-mails. Maintenance doesn't get that luxury. Operations doesn't get that luxury. The warehouse doesn't get that luxury. I remember implementing a CMMS and I was like, “hey, I can do some of this admin work from home on Friday, do you mind if I work from home?” They’re like, “not a chance, you're the most senior guy here on Fridays.” So now we're getting the chance to work from home, and you know how we were talking before about family and kids – well, it’s awesome.

PS: It is, it’s one of the best side-benefits from COVID. In the media world, we used to gather in a large HQ office, actually here in Schaumburg, IL, where we're talking today, and I do miss some of that people time, but the (work from home) benefits have been incredible.

CD: When you have a lot of heads down task, the office is a little more disruptive, but when you're able to kind of open up your calendar and do more collaboration, people development, team building, then yeah in-office is awesome.

PS: Well, about a month ago you presented at a conference that was somewhat uncommon for maintenance professionals. This was in Las Vegas, right?

CD: Right, very uncommon. You're talking about the Craft brewers Conference, which is put on by the Brewers Association. It’s an international body and it’s what you think of – microbreweries, regional breweries, all the different categories of craft brewers, even the larger brewing companies that you know about, right? Those are I think considered the regional brewers, so like Anheuser Busch and Coors, all those.

In that industry “maintenance” is not a taboo word, but it's also not common terminology. You're talking to people, especially in smaller scale of breweries – it's hobby brewing at first, so they’re artists, and they’re a little bit of scientist / chemist as well, right? And they ferment something and have a tasty beverage, and then they try to sell it. They’re based on community at first, then they start bringing food trucks, and next thing you know they start getting into some local distribution. That local distribution may blow up, may not. If it gets bigger than that, all of a sudden you're adding assets, you're buying more facilities, you have client deadlines, you have supplier deadlines, you have quality issues, you start falling under different buckets.

So for craft brewers, there are two types to me. There are ones that are food service oriented that the brew pub set up. What they brew goes into a keg and then they get poured from a tap at their brewery set up. When you start getting into more and more distribution, you become a manufacturing facility, whether you like it or not. You are manufacturing goods on a mass scale for the consumption of the public.

PS: Here in Chicago we saw that with Goose Island Brewing Company. I have watched them grow from just a friendly large scale local brew pub on one little island to now they're international, they're worldwide.

CD: It's a lot of great success stories like that, and at CBC in the past few years, there's been a trend and it's actually a trend in a bad way. There's the Chief Economist for the Brewers Association, Bart Watson, and he posts a lot of statistics, or they do a lot of research, the Brewers Association for the brewers. And I believe they're actually at an equilibrium so that they're kind of tapped out of the amount of breweries and beers that can be on the market without having it kind of saturated, or over saturated. There's only so much room for so many businesses, and they're at that equilibrium.

So at CBC, what we noticed was a lot less of the breweries-in-planning, the people there to learn to launch their brewery in the next year. You don't see some of the faces you saw last year because they've gone out, because they kind of kept that mentality of hobby brewing or they tried to get too big, too quick and they didn't have best practices in place, they didn't know how to run a business. And then you see some that are just doubled and tripled in size since you saw them last because they have a good plan and they've become business leaders and they're starting to acquire the other ones and turn them around.

PS: Another reason I wanted to talk with you about this was because this is a non-traditional manufacturing environment, I like that phrase you used on your LinkedIn profile. It sounds like the extent to which there are some similarities – employee turnover, consolidation, rapid scaling – these are all problems which traditional manufacturers have had to fight with, and also traditional manufacturing maintenance departments have had to fight with – constant turnover, constant change, sudden growth. Did you see those parallels coming up when you talked to the brewers?

CD: 100% and again it even comes to the language when we talk about in manufacturing, there's different languages between maintenance and finance, and maintenance is seen as a necessary evil. Well, small breweries it's the same way, like the brewers are doing this in addition, the brewery team is doing this in addition. So when you start seeing an operations manager name pop up as a role, you're like, “all right, they understand there's more pieces to the puzzle.”

Siemens had a great tag, which is, “brewing is an art.” Your brewers are artists or chemists, they should be focused on the quality of the beer, and testing and perfecting their craft. Maintenance, it's a chore! So you have to alleviate that, and for the ones scaling they need to realize the best practices. Manufacturing has been that beacon for many industries for a very long time.

You talk about RCM; RCM is being adopted heavily in the healthcare industry right now by ASHE. Well, when did RCM start? Late ’60s? Nolan and Heap, right? And it's been used in manufacturing on and off depending on who you talk to ever since. But it’s been established and now other people are discovering it, and it's just funny how it comes full circle after so long. So same thing with breweries, that was my goal of being there was the education piece: “In these market dynamics, we see it in manufacturing too. I was at a small manufacturer. These are the challenges.”

You can do effective maintenance management without software. We talk about people, process, technology. You’ve got to know the game you're trying to play to be good at it, and you need to do the right things for the right reasons, and you don't need software to do that initially. You can use Excel, except you can use SharePoint as our software, and you don't need an additional software for this. But when you scale to a point where you have multiple maintenance people, and now it's a little bit more complex, a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more in the weeds, the software may help them – now that they're effective – be just a little bit more efficient. And for a business leader, you're now not hands in the cookie jar every day. You don't see what's going on. No one's telling you all problems either, so you need some kind of reporting structure to look at: What am I spending? What's not going well? What are we going to do to fix that?

So now as a business leader, when you talk to the ones that are scaling or acquiring other businesses, they have to have a best practices for their business and how they're going to handle going from leasing my facility to owning my facility. “Oh, now I'm in charge of coordinating these contracts for HVAC and electrical and pest control, all this??” Who does that fall on? Whoever wears the maintenance hat in your brewery?

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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.