Telling my family to help keep the house clean is about as effective as telling a plant to do more predictive maintenance. We can all agree on the goal, but the kitchen counter is still cluttered and the laundry is folded, but inside out. Once we established what “done” means, the house got a whole lot cleaner.

Standard work isn’t about creating a perfect process that everyone follows forever. In order to scale a reliability program, organizations need to build the skills to perform the work, establish common expectations for how work should be done, and then, create a system for improving those standards as conditions change.

Those same lessons emerged repeatedly during presentations and discussions at Ultrasound World 2026, where reliability leaders from companies including Eco Material Technologies, FedEx, and Amazon described how they built predictive maintenance programs across different sites and workforces. Their experiences highlighted hands-on technician training, enterprise-wide standardization, and site-level adaption, and the challenge of balancing all three as a program grows.

In the first three stories in this Ultrasound World series, I explored why reliability programs depend on more than technology, how reliability culture determines predictive maintenance success, and why frontline performance is often determined by how leadership communicates reliability strategy. This fourth story looks at why training people to perform the work and creating feedback loops allow those standards to succeed and evolve. 

Training doesn't create capability by itself

Training programs need to move beyond classroom instruction. Brian Heinsius, senior reliability manager at Eco Material Technologies, who manages reliability programs across multiple industrial sites, found that simply sending technicians to courses did not provide enough practical knowledge to create consistent results. “Even sending them to a level one cert course, they didn't even have a good enough technical level to understand what they were doing after they went to the course,” Heinsius said.

The missing piece was hands-on coaching, so Chase Sasser, southeast regional manager at UE Systems, went on-site. “Chase spent many trips out there walking them through, helping them build routes, going through it, telling them this is what you should be looking for, this is what you should be doing,” Heinsius said.

Heinsius also incorporated training into the rollout of new sites, giving technicians experience with the equipment and monitoring systems before those facilities came online. He emphasized that reliability education requires ongoing investment. “I've tried really hard to be at those sites to coach, teach, mentor them, and help them to build a good, solid, sound team,” he said.

For organizations concerned about training employees who may eventually leave, Heinsius argues that avoiding training creates a larger risk. “You’ve got to train people,” he said. “And if they go away, they're not leaving because you didn't train them. They're leaving for other reasons, and you’ve got to figure out what that other reason is and fix it.”

What struck me about how Heinsius described the training process was the distinction between training technicians to understand how the technology works and training someone to actually use that technology effectively. Certification can create a baseline of knowledge, but many will still need to translate that knowledge into standards in practice.

Standardization also has to survive at the site level

At FedEx, Stephen Ford, maintenance engineer, inherited a predictive maintenance program where practices varied widely between locations. “When I took the program over in 2023, the only thing that we had standard in the whole UE program was the naming convention,” Ford said.

The lack of consistency made it difficult to ensure technicians across locations performed work the same way. FedEx’s goal for improving its reliability program was straightforward: “How do we make it to where no matter who's on our crew, they're going to get the same results?” said Jeremy Bey, strategic accounts leader at UE Systems, who worked closely with FedEx. 

Even at a massive operation like Amazon, scaling a reliability program does not mean making every site operate identically. What stood out to me was that each site is flexible and balanced to its operation, and the team does not view standardization and site autonomy as opposing ideas. The leadership team establishes the minimum expectations that need to be consistent across the organization, while individual sites retain flexibility in how they execute the work.

Chris Hileman, reliability engineering manager at Amazon, knows the challenge of keeping standards consistent as sites adapt them, and he said there is definitely some give and take. Too little governance creates fragmentation. 

“Whether you're in the UK or British Columbia or SoCal, Southern California, I want you to do things the same,” Hileman said. “I want you to collect the same data points. I want you to store it the same way.”

But too much central control can make the process impractical for the people expected to use it, and reliability leaders also cautioned against creating rigid programs that ignore site realities. 

“How do you build governance that scales without stifling?” Hileman asked. “Balanced standardization, site-level ownership and autonomy.”

The site may have flexibility in how routes are structured, how work is scheduled, or how resources are assigned, which allows technicians and site leaders to account for the realities of their equipment and workload without undermining the consistency needed to compare performance across the organization. “Balance preserves ownership and engagement while ensuring consistent outcomes,” Hileman said.

Site feedback is also essential to making those standards practical. “We have to reflect,” Hileman said. “This is how it's supposed to work on paper, but we also need to keep the pulse on the floor.”

In some cases, that means adjusting processes based on technician feedback. “There’s a lot of feedback we've gotten from some of the folks on the floor,” he said. That feedback loop also keeps standards from becoming static, and frontline technicians are often the first people to identify the gap between a route that looks efficient on paper and how it works in practice. The goal is not simply to enforce the standard, but to continuously improve it.

Standard work is a starting point, not an endpoint

When I arrived at Ultrasound World 2026, I expected to hear a lot about ultrasound technology, analytics, and artificial intelligence. I did hear all of that. But as I processed what I really learned from the conference, I realized the conversations were less about technology and more about culture, leadership, communication, and execution.

This article adds another piece to the execution puzzle. How do we keep work consistent and evolving? Training builds capability. Standard work creates consistency. Governance keeps that consistency intact as programs scale, while frontline feedback keeps standards connected to reality. 

The same balance is playing out in my own house. Clean your room is an expectation, maybe a goal. But a list that says here is what clean means, here’s what you do, and here’s how you know when you’re finished, that’s a standard everyone can understand. And if the checklist suddenly doesn’t fit our schedule, we change it. The goal remains, but the process evolves.