JK: Let's go.

AT: Again, here's how it works. I've got five different statements that you might hear from a plant manager or maintenance leader. Joe's going to tell us truth or false, and most importantly, why. So, here we go. Scenario number one: My plant is heavily invested in predictive maintenance—vibration, infrared, oil analysis, the works. So, Joe, myth or reality: Predictive maintenance will eliminate breakdowns.

JK: Unfortunately, that's false. Okay, it's going to significantly reduce breakdowns, but one of the key mistakes I made early on here is a failure to add problem solving. So, when you find an anomaly from predictive maintenance—you get a little vibration, you have something in your oil analysis—you've got to problem-solve that. Why did that happen? How do you prevent that from occurring?

Okay, sometimes a breakdown—it could be that your equipment maintenance plan is to run something to failure. Say you had a system that needs one pump, and you've got two of them in line. You may decide, for some reason in your environment, that's okay to run one to failure. I'm not sure exactly what that would be, but you can run something to failure. Lights in the building—you run those to failure, right?

So, PdM takes you to another level, but you're still going to have breakdowns because you can't be aware of everything, and some things are cost-prohibitive to do. So, that one is false.

AT: Definitely, it's not going to fix everything.

Scenario number two: We've implemented advanced condition monitoring technology across our critical assets—sensors, data, dashboards, you name it, we've got it. Joe, myth or reality: Condition monitoring technology can replace technicians?

JK: I'm going to take a weasel answer here and say it depends.

I've seen some organizations that are fully staffed for emergency work, and they're getting extremely low wrench time. They have a lot of people, and they're just used to doing things inefficiently. When you go toward a reliability culture and a predictive maintenance culture, and you start problem solving, you can need fewer people.

But that's not what I have seen at most plants. They're not fully staffed. They use overtime and contractors to compensate for their bad practices. But you can reduce those contractors and go toward a more planned environment where wrench time and efficiencies are much higher.

So, I've rarely, rarely had—well, I've never had—a reduction in force or any layoffs or anything like that. Most of the time, what I was doing was taking people and moving them into more PdM technician roles. So, maybe you have four PdM condition monitoring technicians, and you go to eight. Then maybe you start at eight, and then you add a whole other crew that does follow-up to those findings.

You find a bearing anomaly, an oil anomaly, and you're training people on how to root-cause and problem-solve. So, you're shifting the work. There's usually years and years' worth of work to do, even once you have a culture of condition monitoring and predictive maintenance.

So, it depends on how you're staffed. Now, if you're way overstaffed, yes, there could be fewer people, and usually that works out with attrition. That's how I was handling it. You may have four or five people retire, and you just don't replace them, but there's usually plenty of work out there.

AT: Okay. Scenario number three: We spend a lot of time building out our standard plans and procedures, but some of our most experienced technicians say it slows them down. Joe, myth or reality: Standard procedures slow down experienced technicians.

JK: I would say true in the very short term, false in the long term. And by long term, I mean maybe a month.

Whenever you learn a skill, the first time you do it, it takes longer, and you're not understanding why you're doing it a certain way. But then, once that new standard work gets evaluated once a week, once every time you execute it, maybe once a month or a quarter, you can adapt it if it needs to.
But it ends up being a time saver for everyone. So, I think this is false. It does not slow down experienced technicians when you zoom out just a little bit.

AT: Okay. Scenario number four: We've tried to roll out reliability initiatives in the past, but they never seem to stick. There's always pushback from the floor. So, Joe, myth or reality: Reliability programs fail because technicians resist change?

JK: I've never seen that be the reason for a reliability program failure. You're always going to have resistance to change from people, but if management goes out and says, "Hey, we're going to run a 90-day experiment on this change, and then we'll continue to stay in conversation with you. We'll connect the dots on, ‘hey, we're going to focus on PdM, predictive maintenance technologies. We're going to focus on oil analysis. We're going to focus on vibration,’ whatever it is, as long as management is doing their job of selling that, informing people about things that went well and went poorly, making sure that we do outages—all those things—management drives 100% of the failures that I've seen at plants.

And I'm telling you, every plant has tried a reliability journey five times. Every plant's done that. They've all got their war stories. And when you get into it, 100% of the problem has been how management showed up and showed up consistently.

I've never seen it be a problem with the operators. Now, if you have 100 technicians in your plant, everybody's got the five. Everybody's got the five that you could bring in a gold bar, and they would complain about the gold bar that you gave them, right? But don't focus on them.

One of the things that we did in my plant, we had something called a touch plan. This may be a subject for a whole other video. Our management team went out one on one and made sure we had an individual conversation with every technician once a month. So, if you have 100 technicians, every single person got a five-minute conversation that month, on any shift. We divided that up among the staff. So, if you have, seven people—that's hard math. Say you have 10 people on your staff and 100 people. That means everybody is assigned 10 people to talk to. And you get different conversations with technicians when they're one on one versus in a group setting.

So, my answer to this is that's never been the case for me, that technicians cause a reliability program to fail. Never.

AT: It's management's fault.

JK: Yeah.

AT: And not to put blame on it, but they're really the ones that need to lead the change. And if they're not leading the change, that's really the problem.

JK: If management does nothing, it will fail, and you can easily blame the technicians. Management has a big role to lead, like you said.

AT: All right, scenario number five. We're benchmarking against industry leaders and trying to adopt best practices across the board. Joe, myth or reality: Every plant manager should follow the same reliability best practices.

JK: Now, this is a trick question. You're slipping one in on me.

Yeah, the best practices for reliability maintenance are the same at every single plant. They're the same ones. However, the way you deploy them and the way you focus on them is going to be different at every single plant because the waste that's in your plant is different.

Some organizations may need to focus on precision maintenance. That may be where 80% of their efforts are. Another organization may be focused on PMs. It could be, ‘Hey, if we just do our lubrication excellently every time, we're in good shape.’ Another plant, or even another department, may say, ‘We just got to align shafts. We're going to get great at aligning our shafts.’

But all the best practices are the same. It's the sequence that you put them in place that can change, and the emphasis can change.

Everybody needs to have a good planning meeting. Some people may need to have a great planning meeting, and others could get by with good because they're doing a lot of condition monitoring, they're doing a lot of predictive maintenance, and their planning meetings just aren't that integral to the waste they have in their plant.

It all comes back to what problem you're trying to solve, and that comes from observation. It comes from your KPIs. Then you deploy the best practices in that order.

Okay, so yes, technically they should all follow the same best practices, but in a completely different order. Okay, completely different order.

AT: Definitely, that makes sense. And Joe, thank you for playing my new game. I appreciate it. I think this format works really well. It's very quick-hitting, but you always provide a lot of depth behind each one of those, and I think the big takeaway for me here is that there are no silver bullets in reliability. Whether it's technology or processes or people, it really all has to work together, and it has to fit your specific operation and the specific problems that you have there.

JK: Yeah, absolutely. Great summary.

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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