Podcast: Reliability program not working? Here’s what might be wrong

Key takeaways

• Prioritize reliability by choosing where to excel—get a C on less critical tasks to focus on what truly drives plant performance.
• Reliability success demands active operations ownership—learn failures, engage on the floor, and earn credibility.
• Promote small wins visibly—selling reliability outcomes prevents loss of sponsorship and ensures long-term buy-in.
• Without structured problem-solving, best practices fall short—embed it into your process to triple reliability results.

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. In this episode, Joe shares his remedies to common hiccups that can jeopardize your reliability program.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

AT: Joe as always, happy to have you back with me this month. 

JK: Yeah, excited to be here and perhaps help somebody with some of my experience and lessons learned the hard way.  

AT: I'm sure you will. So we’ve talked a lot on this show about how to start that reliability journey at your facility, some of the small things you can do right away, how to build momentum for your program, even specifics about who ultimately owns reliability and why at the facility. 

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. You can go back, by the way, and listen to those about where to start, what to do, and how to be successful with reliability in small steps.  

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.  

Anna, you mentioned operations not getting involved. This is huge, and operations not only needs to own reliability, but they need to learn reliability. You can't just say, ‘Hey, I own it. I own it.’ That means you’ve got to go out there and learn why equipment fails, talk to the mechanic, find out what the PM that you're shutting your equipment down to do, these eight PMs, what are they doing? Are you going out there and seeing what you're spending your money on, just like it's your own car? What am I buying? Operations leaders that get involved with their time in reliability, those organizations will excel faster. We encouraged our operations leaders, pure operations leaders, to be CMRPs, certified reliability and maintenance professionals, sanctioned by SMRP and that made a difference. So not just a hand wave, I sponsor this. I understand it, and I'm getting involved.  

Loss of sponsorship is, if you looked at nine out of 10 organizations that fail with a reliability effort, it's loss of sponsorship. That means, you're not getting the results. We gave you a year. We gave you $100,000. You hired these people, and I don't see dramatic results. We're moving on to something else. We're going to try Lean now, or something like that. The solution to this is so simple. It's so simple that most people skip it: you've got to sell reliability. You’ve got to sell it. You’ve got to sell your victories. If you prevented 20 pump failures last year, nobody knows it. You don't know about the failures you didn't have, right? So nobody knows it. You've got to connect the dots for people. You’ve got to say, ‘Hey, we started a lube program, we started a vibration program, and we went from 30 pump failures in a year down to three. We made that change. It was worth this much money.’  

One of the things I like to say is, when the business cycle changes, there's a recession or something like that, you lose some of your business. Why do plant managers turn to cost cutting? Why do they say everybody across the board, needs to cut their cost 20%? Why do they say that? Because it works and because they don't have any faith in another solution. You've got to be the money machine. Reliability and maintenance can easily be the money machine. It can be the efficiency machine. And if you get 20 successes lined up, that's the last thing a plant manager is going to cut, because you have credibility.  

Another thing that hurts organizations is, and this, you’ve got to look in the mirror for this one, is excuses. ‘It's not a good time. Well, we started, but three people retired. We really don't have a full complement of people. It's not a good time. We’ve got this corporate audit coming up.’ Not to blame everything on corporate but it's never a good time for people. One of the solutions I throw at people is we'll go out and do an observation, and I'll assess their wrench time, pre best practices deployment. And their wrench time will be 12-15% which, if you're appalled by that number, I bet it's in your plant too.  

There are some simple techniques to get that to 30%. Putting a kitting practice in place for all your planned jobs. Audit your jobs and see how many people you have assigned to those jobs. So many times I saw people with three people assigned to a job and they could have got it done with two, or two people when they could have got it done with one, or they assigned it for eight hours and the work only took two hours. There are so many things to do to go after wrench time. I have never seen lack of people and resources be a legitimate excuse. Never, not one. And I've been in maybe 37 plants, I think was my last count.  

Another thing people get wrong, and this is very subtle, but is not adding problem solving. When you go in down the reliability journey and implementing best practices, you can't just add planning and scheduling, and how to have a good PM, and add condition monitoring, and doing all those best practices. You’ve got to add problem solving. When you find a problem, how are you going to not have that problem next time? Problem solving is key, and everybody needs to understand the funnel that leads into the problem solving. Every mechanic, electrician should know, if I have a problem, I bring it to this venue. Maybe it's a once a month OEE meeting or something like that, but you’ve got to have problem solving, or you'll be disappointed with the results. You'll get better, but you'll be very disappointed. You want to triple your results at problem solving.  

And Anna, you mentioned this, it's just such a core belief of mine, is you’ve got to get out on the shop floor and not manage and make decisions from the office. Reality is different than you think it is, and the problems become evident when you understand reality and the waste that exists in your plant. So many people think their wrench time is 40, 50% but not on the day that I'm doing an observation. When I do the observation, it's 12, 15%. I've actually audited a wrench time of a job at a plant that they hand picked for me, and it was zero. It was zero, the wrench time for the entire shift.  

So know reality, don't just study your KPIs. KPIs point you in a direction to go to the shop floor. So having that go and see mindset in your meetings, on your agenda, why not have the last agenda item be go and see. If you put in a new route for lubrication. You’ve got a new lubrication tech. Hey, let's go out and talk to the lubrication tech. Let's talk to him about how he's improved failures on pumps because of what they're doing around lubrication. Let's go and see and talk to them about what they're doing. What was the condition before? What's the condition now? Connect those dots. Having go and see on your agenda, to me, is very powerful. There you go.

AT: Lots of good stuff as always, but I have to start with first, Joe, you want me to get a C? Are you crazy? I can't do that. 

JK: That is hard, but it is reality. I mean, you want to do everything with excellence, but when you're drinking from a fire hose, you can tell yourself and tell others you do everything with excellence, but you will not be the best you can be. There's a real good Warren Buffett video on YouTube. It's called Warren Buffett's 5-25 rule. Okay, everybody, look that up. Go to YouTube, 5-25, rule. And he was interviewing this guy, and he said, ‘Hey, tell me about your 25 priorities, top 25 priorities this year.’ And a guy listed his 25 things he's supposed to do. And then he said, Warren Buffett asked, ‘what are your top five?’ And he circled those top five. And then Warren asked, ‘What do you do with the other 20?’ And the guy said, ‘Well, I try to fit them in as I can, do the best I can here or there. He said, ‘No, those are the avoid at all cost items. Focus on five and you'll get dramatic results. Dramatic results.’ So this is, it's very common. It's hard to do. I call it getting a C. What can I get a C in to save my time so I could double down and do excellent into things that are going to make a difference.