Podcast: How Amazon and UE Systems partnered to scale up a global condition monitoring program
Key takeaways
- Standardizing condition-based monitoring (CBM) globally starts with local wins, then scales through shared training, SOPs, and vendor partnerships.
- Strong ROI from condition-based monitoring builds leadership buy-in and drives lasting culture change.
- Aligning tools, training, and data across regions is key to eliminating silos in global maintenance strategies.
- Success in CBM means shifting from reactive fixes to predictive, data-driven maintenance across facilities.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Thomas Wilk, chief editor of Plant Services, sits down for a roundtable discussion with:
- Chris Hallum, UE Systems operations manager for North Europe
- Chad Coleman, Amazon senior reliability engineer
- Pat Caron, Amazon reliability engineering manager
- Jeremy Bey, UE Systems strategic accounts leader.
The discussion explores the evolution from isolated maintenance efforts to a unified, data-driven strategy that emphasizes standardization, training, and cross-regional collaboration. This episode offers practical insights for anyone navigating the complexities of reliability at scale.
Below is an edited excerpt from the podcast:
PS: Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of Great Question! A Manufacturing Podcast. I'm Tom Wilk and I'm the chief editor of Plant Services, and I'm recording this at the Leading Reliability 2025 conference with a table full of guests here today. We'll get to each person at some point in the conversation.
This conversation is going to answer the question: if you want to build a standardized global condition-based monitoring program, how would you go about it? I'll start with you Chris, we have Chris Hallum, UE Systems, who's the operations manager for UE Systems in North Europe. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
Chris Hallum, UE Systems: Hi, Tom. Thank you for having us.
PS: How did the process of building a global program like this begin? What was UE’s involvement?
Chris Hallum, UE Systems: UE Systems as a high end ultrasound manufacturing company is going to have a lot of partnerships with a lot of industries and customers. We help guide them through the individual site process of building a CBM program, but then look at how we can then take that from one plant and then copy it from one to another to another, to help them build that synergy. A lot of these industries will have plants that are like for like, and they'll all face similar sort of problems, but if there's no synergy of communication or standardization, then you're never going to be able to resolve those potential sort of failures or problems or improve the reliability.
That's how we foster these partnerships with industries and, for example, today our good partners here from Amazon joining us is a great example of how we've taken a very large scale organization with multiple assets around multiple countries with challenges of different languages and cultures, and how we've helped build and foster CBM best practices.
PS: We were talking before we started the recording about the fact that Amazon has attended this conference going back almost 10 years now, and isn't a conversation at the older version of Leading Reliability where this idea started, this partnership?
Chris Hallum, UE Systems: Absolutely yes. I started with UE Systems over 10 years ago and at the time, I was a trainer, so I was always keen to go out and teach people how ultrasound can benefit them. There was a presentation by a gentleman called John Prather, and he was talking about how he and his team had created a CBM program in Amazon North America. I thought it was fantastic, and I was flying back to the UK thinking, “I know there's a lot of Amazon sites outside of North America … are these guys doing the same thing? Because if they are, this is fantastic. And if they're not, they're missing out.”
So that's where I then started trying to knock on the door of Amazon sites that I knew existed and said, “hey, guys, you have you heard about this CBM program in North America?” and that's where people like Chad here came in and started asking some questions. Wasn't it Chad?
Chad Coleman, Amazon: Yes, I'm Chad Coleman, I'm a senior reliability engineer, I'm part of the global reliability team that pretty much developed the condition monitoring program for Amazon. I think it was back in 2018 when I first got introduced to CBM and this maintenance handbook from North America. I sort of discovered it by accident, I found one of the sites had all the equipment for ultrasound, thermography, stroboscope, but it was all sat on the shelf. Nobody really knew what to do with it. There was no guidance, there was definitely no global guidance at that time.
So I was tasked initially with rolling out the conditional monitoring handbook for about 20 sites in the EU. From there, once we standardized the tooling, worked with the vendors to get the training in place for the 20 sites, creating website pages and wiki guidance for SOPs and standard practices and procedures and purchasing. And then we started to consider writing a white paper for a global roll out and covering Europe first and then over to America.
PS: That’s kind of a heavy lift. What kind of time frame are we looking at from the point when, Chris, you thought it was an idea to pursue, to Chad, you working through all this building the wiki and sharing the information out?
Chad Coleman, Amazon: It's been a very long journey, to be honest, there’s lots of challenges along the way, and many of them you don't realize at the time: the training, the vendor engagement, upskilling the technicians, the leadership buy-in, working out the ROI. You need sufficient data in the system moving from a calendar-based maintenance system to condition-based maintenance system. You need to show the ROI, so you need to get all those data sets in place as well. Working with finance, you can see the benefit of the ROI and the maintenance strategy, so then you start to work on leadership buy-in. And then it's more field engagement as well, getting their feedback, updating the wiki and the guidance, coming up with best practices as well as what potentially new technology or new systems that come into place. So it's continuously changing, it's a never ending process, but it’s quite a long journey.
PS: Was there a turning point when you and the team sort of felt like, OK, we have momentum here? Was there a meeting with management that tipped the balance, or was there a KPI that once it got socialized, you're like, OK, wait a second, everyone's starting to buy in on this thing?
Pat Caron, Amazon: I’m Pat Caron, I manage CBM programs for central reliability along with Chad. It's kind of a loaded question, right? I would lean heavily into the statement that it's an incremental thing over time. It’s kind of funny, you look at circa 2015 – because I was a maintenance technician, I’ve been with Amazon 11 years, just a Maintenance Technician I when I got my hands on my first Ultraprobe – in its infancy when it started in 2015, and how it kind of became a siloed and segmented thing throughout North America. You know, it was, but wasn't talked about; it was, but wasn't tracked, stuff like that.
Then it moves over and gets adopted by our international partners, and now there's a bit of catch-up that I'm helping try and close the gap on. There's a drastic level of maturity difference now between the Americas and the international side of it, so it's working on multiple fronts, multiple spaces in the battlefield, like Chad said, you have finance, you have leadership, you have field technicians, all the other cross-functional partners and stakeholders within Amazon all the way up to VP and sometimes CEO level that get involved in various aspects of this.
And it is very much incremental. There are some sides of it that look at it as another metric chaser, green versus red, but even me and my short amount of time actually being immersed in CBM it’s very much a journey to understand the fundamentals of the methodology and understand data quality over time, making sure we accurately codify things in CMMS, and slowly and steadily building our program. Your ROI pays dividends because you're no longer running around with a reactive fire hose, and that takes a significant amount of time and you're just peeling back layers of the onion as you go.
PS: It sounds like Amazon was on a mission as a global company to standardize these processes as best they could. Is that mission evolving from the successes that you're seeing in this program?
Pat Caron, Amazon: At least for me, from my lens, I think it's multifaceted. We very much quickly try to shift gears based on the times that we're in. I think COVID saw a huge uptick in CBM because we had to be able to do more with less contact. We had to be able to do more with less engagement. And the biggest thing that we, you know not just COVID, but the thing that holistically that we face right now is the level of expansion that we've gone through. Even with COVID, while everything was kind of slowing down and various people unfortunately, we're having to close their doors, we picked up speed tenfold. I mean, we were putting up buildings faster than we could blink our eyes. With that comes significant problems with manpower, stuff like that so it almost naturally drove CBM back front and center, to where we have to rapidly figure out how to be leaner and more efficient with the data that by right we already have. So now how can we move from that, like Chad and Chris said, from that calendar and schedule based maintenance to now doing your maintenance based on the condition of the equipment.
PS: I’m one of those families during COVID that leaned on Amazon more than we had previously had. So I'm part of the issue here to drive you more towards global CBM.
Pat Caron, Amazon: Hey, it's no contact delivery! That fits right into that that COVID purview.
PS: Let's talk about where the program expanded once North America and the UK started getting aligned. Where did the program move from there? And maybe this is a good time to bring you Jeremy to talk about this.
Jeremy Bey, UE Systems: Once they got aligned, we got with the core team, with Pat and those guys, and we started off with, let's get some ideas of the problem sites and where are the ones that we really need to dig in on. We had to start somewhere, we had to dig in and start implementing what we call like the Golden Rule, or the Golden Training Standard. We have to start off with what team Europe’s been doing over there, and successfully start putting that in place here, and then once we get the buy in from that or we're starting to get successes from it, now we can start sharing that with other sites. Then other sites are starting to really grasp that and get that buy in, and now they're actually reaching out, looking for the engagement, for the training.
Chad Coleman, Amazon: I think we've discovered gaps across the pond between how NA had done the work, the whole program, and how UE were doing it, but because we communicate quite openly I think we arranged a mini summit with UE Systems from both sides of the bond and we just discussed gaps and shortfalls and best practices, and really the way ahead. One of the biggest ones was training, you know who I was training to the same standards and the same requirements as we do in Europe, and I think that's helped quite possibly in America because they're upskilling, they're getting used to handling the equipment, interpreting the data.
Pat Caron, Amazon: It was the big bit too, at least when we came together from a global perspective. I had noticed before I even stepped into the management role is how embedded it was into the culture from the top down .Various aspects of it were top-down driven, other aspects of it were shop-floor up and everybody met in the middle, but the awareness of the program, the level of communication and the sheer level of adoption the program, albeit you know nobody's great, nobody's perfect, but everybody was aware and everybody at least knew what the best practice and the standard was, and everybody was on their own journey to get there.
The one that I aggressively approached in North America was getting the awareness out there that this existed – why it existed, and getting those communication methods to align with what we were doing internationally. As a global business, it no longer made sense to drive 2-3 different versions of the program in different regions of the world. It was an aggressive push to merge these both together and adopt the best practices of both, and align both so that jointly as a global team we could drive one program and one program only. There's still work to be done, of course, but it’s the layers that you have to peel through.
PS: I think a lot of people struggle with this change management process, so this next question is for those people facing these challenges. Did that messaging effort involve an in-person roadshow where you would visit very facilities? Was it a team of people? Or could you do this. Electronically / remotely and still have it be a success?
Pat Caron, Amazon: It was everything all at once, but I'll double down on my earlier point, it's that even at a central level, it's moving our team away from being purely focused on the metric and actually getting immersed in the strategy, the policy, the plan, the procedure, the best practice, and the guidance so that we could be that better conduit when we go do those site visits and those field meetings and stuff like that. Less harping on the sites about “the metric’s red, the metric’s green” and more like: Do we understand the data quality behind this? Do we understand the strategy behind this? Do we understand the means and the tools and the resources that you have at your disposal? And then now making sure that they're better equipped to go and execute, and go and do the thing. In turn, by covering all those bases, the metric naturally over time changes to green.
Chris Hallum, UE Systems: I think one of the things here as well that is really showing the size of the challenge that we face: when you're looking at organizations and industries that are trying to do standardized programs on a global level, you think of certain large name companies and they may have 60, 80, maybe 100 facilities globally, and people go wow, that's a large scale program. If we look at Amazon itself and the scale of the program and the challenge that they're facing, I don't think there's anything that can compare really. Could you guys actually put a number on how many facilities you are trying to implement a standard program globally on?
Pat Caron, Amazon: It's over 1000, easy. We have 397 highly automated sites in just North America alone, highly automated as robotics and advanced MEG. That alone comes with a significant skill gap just trying to manage a building like that, let alone CBM program.
PS: Does this program involve fleet vehicles, or was it focused mostly on facilities?
Pat Caron, Amazon: Facilities.
Chad Coleman, Amazon: In Europe we traditionally start with the fulfillment centers, several hundred fulfillment centers, but after seeing the benefits and the utilization of labor, you know we can better effectively use our labor, we introduced it to other business units with an absence of the transportation services and delivery stations. So, it was ever increasing, but based on the good data that we can provide from the initial rollouts, using that to fully justify that approach.
Pat Caron, Amazon: And the scope has expanded exponentially, too. It’s grown beyond just focusing on MEG to now we're looking at condition-based monitoring for robotics, industrial robotic arms, solar, all your energy management stuff, fire suppression monitoring, stuff like that. It’s all stuff that we can elevate our maintenance program by doing it based on condition.
PS: That leads naturally to our closing question, which is: what does the future of the program look like? What are some of the next steps you're facing? And what do you anticipate comes next?
Pat Caron, Amazon: Really, driving to a data-driven maintenance strategy so all the data, all the IoT devices, moving all these programs from being in their own kind of siloed buckets, and gathering the data globally, trending it globally. Looking at all that analysis for like equipment, doing that that comparative (work) and not just focus one specific thing now, not one specific building. We're now on the precipice of being able to do that on an actual global scale, and having all these different CBM tools interconnected, whether it's fixed asset monitoring where we get near or real time 24/7 monitoring, or we follow up, we have the portable tools, portable thermography, stroboscope, ultrasound, air leak detection, stuff like that. And it's now getting all of that data, all of that machine learning, all that wizardry in the background, getting it to talk to each other, to take the subjectivity and the guesswork out of the maintenance solution, and being able to prescribe the maintenance solution to the technician, which drastically reduces root cause analysis time.
Chris Hallum, UE Systems: And from the UE Systems side of things as a vendor to our partnerships as well, is that with these large scale partnerships we have the ability to be able to have to change as well. So we have to look at the adoption of our technology, how we can advance it to meet the needs and to be able to be flexible to then be able to pivot with these decisions to help make sure that those programs and those ideas that they have actually happen as well. That's kind of where me and Jeremy are always talking, discussing, communicating and coming up with that, aren't we Jeremy?
Jeremy Bey, UE Systems: Definitely, it creates different challenges for us too instead of trying to find an office shelf solution, of really digging into them and finding out what kind of needs that you have and have them work together to help you get to your goals and keep continuing to work together.
Pat Caron, Amazon: UE’s been an absolute excellent business partner. UE Systems, Flir. Of the condition-based monitoring vendors that we have, you have some that are very staunch and set in their own ways, it's like “no, no, we only sell bananas and bananas only.” Being able to work with vendors that understand the approach and the vision, and understand the sheer scale and magnitude and quite frankly how quick we need to do it, and then on top of that, continuously evolve, it’s been a great business partnership.
PS: Closing question: for those who were inspired by what they heard today, how do they get started, and tap into the knowledge this team has?
Pat Caron, Amazon: For me, I think you would understand what you're trying to solve for, understand what your biggest failure modes and choke points are in your building and with your equipment, and take a good look at the maintenance strategy that you have in place today. Where is your reactive labor going? Where is your preventive maintenance labor going? Can I automate this with condition-based monitoring? Can I optimize this with condition-based monitoring?
And shifting away again from that reactionary mindset, which consumes a considerable amount of time and labor cost, and move more to that condition and predictive approach. But I think it definitely starts taking a good hard look at the building, the process where the business wants to go, and what the problems are with the equipment that you're having in the building – start from there and work backwards.
Jeremy Bey, UE Systems: I think it's important on that too is they see the big picture there, but then they have to go dig in and focus on certain things too, and not trying to bite off more than they can chew. You're not going to have a program develop itself overnight or in a month or even a couple months. It's going to take some time and sometimes the right people, the right components all have to be in place for that to happen.
Chris Hallum, UE Systems: Yeah, I agree, it's at the right time. And the thing is, if there's people out there that are thinking about this sort of thing or finding them stuck in the mud, not sure where to turn next, then the likes of Jeremy and myself are always there. We will happily go out and sit down and we will explore plants with customers, and we'll give quite honest and frank opinions on what we think if they're ready or not, or we'll give them things to actually consider themselves, and then come back to us when they've come up with ideas too.
That's the thing about being a partner with our customers, it's being honest, it's being open, it's being frank with them, because it's all about trust. If there's something that can't be done, it can't be done. But I can always guarantee, “it can't be done that way, but have you considered this way?” Things like that you see. So it's all about those sort of things.
Chad Coleman, Amazon: Additionally, just get exposure. Leading Reliability is a great example. You've got all the top leading vendors, you've got the peers, you've got all that experience. Everyone's been through some similar journey, everyone starts somewhere, all the experience, networking. This is a great place to start your journey.
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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About the Author
Thomas Wilk
editor in chief
Thomas Wilk joined Plant Services as editor in chief in 2014. Previously, Wilk was content strategist / mobile media manager at Panduit. Prior to Panduit, Tom was lead editor for Battelle Memorial Institute's Environmental Restoration team, and taught business and technical writing at Ohio State University for eight years. Tom holds a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from Ohio State University