Podcast: The one meeting every plant can’t afford to miss

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 offers insight into how to get your team to support communication, accountability, and asking for help when they need it.

Below is the transcript of the podcast:

PS: So you and I generally come up with these questions that we talk about here, I think we've done a pretty good job of covering a wide variety of topics and keying into the different aspects of your experience as a plant manager. So we try to focus on broad leadership issues, as well as, very specific step-by-step advice to whatever problem we've highlighted. 

On a side note, if any of you out there have any burning questions for Joe, don't hesitate to email them, we'd love to hear from any of you, so please do.

Last week, we went big picture, we talked about some of the ways that maintenance managers fail. And so this month, we're going to focus again, very specific, and very simply on one action that Joe thinks all plants should implement. Now, we've talked a lot about on this series about observation. That's the first step to everything, you’ve got to go and see, right, Joe? So first and foremost, observe your observe your operation, observe where you can make improvements. So beyond observation, Joe, what is one action you would implement at any plant?

JK: Yeah, great question. And you are tying my hands a lot, Anna, with these questions. Because it always starts with knowing the waste in your plant. But no matter what waste I see in a plant, any plant that I've managed or that I've coached people in, I would start a yesterday, today, and tomorrow meeting (YTT). Some of you may call this just a morning meeting or your daily management system. But, starting one in maintenance, I think, is critical. It's a critical tool for me.

Let me describe what that is. This is a meeting where the key stakeholders get together, the maintenance manager, whoever is on day shift, supervisors, maybe a technician, maybe a couple planners, maybe your entire technician team, if you've got seven or eight technicians. Okay, so what are yesterday today and tomorrow meeting?

It’s just like it's sounds: we talk about yesterday. Okay, yesterday, we were supposed to get three PMs done and maybe an outage on a piece of equipment. How did it go? Yes, we got all three PMs done. We had no problems, or we only got two of them done. This was a problem. Here's how we're going to make that up next week. So, basically holding the organization accountable for what we said we were going to do yesterday. 

Okay, today. Today, we're talking about, we're supposed to get three PMs done today. And we got this outage on a crane or we are replacing a brakes. Okay. Does anybody see any problem with us getting that done today? Do we lack the resources? Did somebody call in sick? Do we not have the brake pads already identified and at the scene? What problems do we foresee? It could be production; they can't give up the crane. Okay, what can we do about that? Maybe, we delay it until tomorrow. Maybe the maintenance manager needs to call the production manager and say, hey, we're ready to go on this. We think we can get this done in two hours. So talk about today. Tomorrow, the same thing. Okay, we've got these five PMs scheduled for tomorrow. We have no outages. Does anybody need any help? Any concerns, need more resources, need more people, need more coordination, whatever it is to be successful tomorrow.