Reliability Gang Podcast
Welcome the #Reliabilitygang Podcast! I would like to welcome you all to my reliability journey. I am passionate about reliability and I want to share as much as I can with everyone with my experiences. Stories are powerful and my aim of this outlet is to gather as many insights and experiences and share them with the world. Thanks for joining the #reliabilitygang.
Reliability Gang Podcast
RELIABILITY MENTORSHIP - THE SOLUTION FOR THE SKILLS GAP?
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Mentorship beats tools. Full stop.
I’ve been on the road with Maintain Reliability across food factories, metal plants and logistics sites, and the pattern is the same everywhere. Companies invest in systems before they invest in judgement. They gather more data before they build the confidence to act on what they already know. Then they wonder why the breakdowns keep coming.
The issue is rarely a lack of information. It’s a lack of guided decision making.
Training gives knowledge. Mentoring builds judgement. There’s a big difference. In a classroom everything makes sense. On a live plant with production breathing down your neck and budgets under pressure, it’s a different game. That’s where experience matters. Someone standing next to the engineer saying, focus here, not there. Fix this first. Leave that for now. Sequence it properly.
Order is everything in reliability.
Before we talk about monitoring strategies, we ask simple questions. Is planning and scheduling tight. Are critical assets clearly defined. Is lubrication consistent. Are work orders closed properly. Do people understand their roles. If those foundations are weak, adding more layers just increases confusion and backlog.
When the basics are strong, performance compounds.
A proper reliability audit is usually the turning point. Not a tick box exercise. A real look at how the plant operates. It exposes gaps in communication, spares, lubrication standards, ownership and accountability. More importantly, it gives leadership clarity. It turns reliability from a cost into a structured improvement plan.
Technology has its place. We use condition monitoring every day. But the team must own the data. They must understand what a trend means, what the risk is, and what action follows. Without that, nothing changes.
I’ve seen engineers with almost no budget transform a site because they closed the loop fast and acted decisively. I’ve also seen sites with serious investment still stuck reactive because culture didn’t support action.
Reliability works when people take ownership. When KPIs drive behaviour. When leaders back decisions. And when mentors hold the rope when pressure hits.
If you want results that last, start with an honest audit. Build a roadmap you can defend. Strengthen the people. Then layer in the systems.
That’s how we do it at Maintain Reliability.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Reliability Gang podcast. And you know what? It's nice to be back, man, isn't it? It's nice to be back in here.
SPEAKER_00:It's also nice to be doing this podcast on a dedicated day we've set aside for it.
SPEAKER_01:So moving forward, we have actually secured a marketing and podcast day that we have religiously put into our calendars, and we've said to ourselves that nothing ever is gonna defeat us in terms of doing this day. So we're here, we're recording. But uh again, we love the podcast, don't we? We do enjoy doing it. I mean I get giddy, like I just want to talk to someone about like what we obviously we talk probably on the daily anyway about this type of stuff. Like we've said our car conversations could probably be another podcast series, 100%. But to be able to, I think what we do is I go out into the field, do some work, you do your little side quest, do some work, then we come back together again. We're like, let's have a discussion about all the stuff because we're learning constantly through the experiences that we are.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know what I mean? Isn't that right? Yep, we need to like everything that we're doing on our little like exactly like I like when you say side quests because it's quite cool because we are working on our own little projects, aren't we, all the time? Um, and so and it's nice now that we're starting to cross over a little bit, like you've been doing some reliability audits at the moment. And so we're now trying to see how we can refine our processes and now start to teach the guys to do this because reliability, the training, the mentorship is becoming such a big part of what we do now at maintain.
SPEAKER_01:And it's a bit of our identity, isn't it? It is, you know, what when you say identity and what we live for, that has always been in us to be able to actually, you know, make sure that we have the ability to mentor people, and that is the word of this podcast. It is mentorship. Why is mentorship so important? And what is mentorship? I think a lot of people struggle to come to terms of exactly what it is when it comes down to offering it and how do we actually approach it. And what makes a good mentor and what makes a poor mentor, and and what why is it different to training? Because training is very important, and obviously we offer a lot of training, but where does training stop and where does mentoring start? And also, why is it also important to be able to understand that until we empower other people, we can't do everything for them, if that makes sense. Because that's just not how reliability works, and I think that's our experience within this. And also, when we look at business drivers, it's about identifying who really has your interests at heart in terms of sustainability and growth and knowledge, and who hasn't, and who's trying to be able to offer a service, and it might be valuable in the sense, but does it keep you in that perpetual loop forever? And are you ever able to rely on your own information and data? That's another thing because we know big tech's here, we know AI's here, we know all these great senses are here and all this. But if you've got all of that on your site, but you're not in control of that information in terms of understanding it and also owning it, owning the data, what does that mean for you? So, this is why mentorship and training, I think, is going to be so important.
SPEAKER_00:I think mentorship as well is particularly important for the skills and knowledge required under reliability and vibration analysis to a degree because both of these topics are not you can't just go and do the training with them and become an expert off the back. So true. Training is very specifically around uh an opportunity to share skills and knowledge and provide those to people, but particularly for reliability, the topic is extremely broad, it covers a lot of different avenues and areas.
SPEAKER_01:And I think I think you're you're a good example of that though, Anya, because when you first come with me, you're the level two engineer on paper. You know, on paper, your experience was great in 100%, and it was really good in terms of your experiences. But when it comes down to the actual analysis side of vibration analysis, you come on, it was like, oh my god, Will, you've taught me a whole new way of looking at things. You've you know, just you always had the ability to go further beyond even me, potentially, but it was just the way that you looked at things was very different because you hadn't had that mentorship.
SPEAKER_00:I was very unfortunate that the person that was meant to mentor me had to leave the business early. His wife got quite poorly, and so you kind of almost left there to fend for yourself about it. 100%. And uh it's it's one of those where you can go, it's the same with like education in general, right? We we're teaching when we're training the courses, right? We're trying to maybe this is very clear that we're not there to teach to pass the exam, which some people think like school is, right? They're teaching you to pass your exams.
SPEAKER_01:The goal to pass, and that's the metric.
SPEAKER_00:We have to try and like the whole idea, like why we don't necessarily get access to the exams is because we don't want the course to be taught to pass the exam. The taught the courses are to train students to understand the skills and knowledge available to understand reliability. So we talk about in ARPE around the first stages around reliability auditing, how do we benchmark where we are as a site, where we're at, and we talk about how we go about necessarily doing that, but we don't go do it, and we don't talk about a lot of the stuff that I'm now doing in my masters about that there are actually lots of different ways you could do it. Yeah, and the the ways you would handle it at this plant versus that plant might be different, and how you've got to you might have a list of questions that you would need to ask the business, but it could change depending if they're an aluminium factory versus a food factory. Yeah. So what ARPE and what training provides students is a real peak under the cover of this big, yeah, good, big overview. But what we do find, particularly with the high levels of vibration analysis, level two in particular, which is probably the most common course taught in terms of analysis capability and asset reliability, is just because you've attended those training courses, you may find that you are not fully confident to go and lead a business through reliability and therefore you do need a bit of mentorship.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and that's where the experience comes from. Because obviously, even with the vibration analysis, you know, when you do uh receive your qualification doesn't mean you're qualified to do the job. Does that make sense? Because if you've not got the experience and you've actually gone out there in the field and come across the problems and come across some of the roadblocks, how do you know how to overcome them with just uh just a qualification? And this is where it's really important for us as well as a business, because if we start to really understand the future landscape of where where this is going, and we start to really understand, you know, we we understand there's a skills gap, we've been talking about it, and lots of different companies are talking about it now as a as a pressing thing. Same as accelerate, you know. Last year a lot of the stuff was, you know, around that again. Yeah, and this year, when I go back again, probably gonna be the same thing. So even the big companies and and everyone, it depending on where you're at and what lane with reliability, we're talking about the fact that we don't actually have the resource in the future to fulfil what we're trying to do. And a lot of the solutions around that, and a lot of people kind of looking at, well, how do we solve that problem? A lot of people are looking at tech, and I'm not I'm not saying tech is not a solution because it is. It can allow us to be able to get information probably quicker, and it can allow us to be able to put things on and automate a lot of processes. But the thing is with that, is if you're not as a site level understanding what information's coming in, and you're just relying on an AI model or a recommendation to do an action that's opposed to your plan and you can't understand it, I don't think that's the way forward. I think you really need to understand the data that's coming in. And if you don't know it, if you if you're not trained and you're just relying on an external company to give you information, okay, it might be automated and it might be digital, but how does that play for you in terms of where you're going if you don't truly have the knowledge internally within your business set to ensure that these decisions, A, are the best decisions, and B, you can trust them. Do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00:I think we're currently in a position at the moment where AI is evolving very quickly, but we also are not in a position anytime soon for it to currently come and uh spit out our maintenance practices. We can't get it to do our vibration reports yet. No, no. But it is a very, very good tool. We use it all the time, but it relies on the knowledge of the person putting the information in. Exactly. And so we can a hundred percent use AI and the different uh chat GPTs and Claudes to help us write write famikas and help us do RCM studies, but we still need to understand the principles around how to do those. And I think our challenges in the world right now where reliability is becoming such an important discussion topic in many uh C-suites and director level, they all want to look at how the plants are running more reliably. Is there is a massive sknowled gap in that topic, um, and it's not really being addressed either side of the spectrum in terms of training. We've got asset reliability uh training, whether that's with Mobius Institute or Terence with Uptime Elements or whoever that is that offers those courses, they're gonna give you a real good crash course into the broad subjects of reliability, and we're gonna be able to get that awareness level to oh, I understand a bit more about what reliability is, or you swing to the other direction and you go do your master's degree. There's a few universities that offers it. I'm doing mine with Manchester, which is in reliability engineering and asset management, but they are polar ends of the spectrum.
SPEAKER_01:You are literally low frequency high end. Where is the in-between ground that we can find a place that can do the training to give you that broad level spectrum understanding of the training and the elements around it? But also then advance into a mentorship to enable you to implement what you've learned, but also be held accountable on the journey in a roadmap that does get you from A where you are, understands the gaps of where your business needs to be required, and how do we build a roadmap to fill in them gaps to take you on a journey from A all the way to B?
SPEAKER_00:And and there's a a guy to shout out, Sean, over in the US with a company called Ereditio, and they do very similar to this over in the States very successfully. It's it's it's expensive, it it's well, it depends on how you determine what expensive is, but it's more money than you would pay on a standard asset reliability, it's less than you'd pay on a masters, but it's something that is able to hold people accountable, and it's what we call in the UK experience driven.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's it's how do we actually do it? Like less great, we've got all these tools, but how are we going to apply them? Because until you do something, you don't know what's actually gonna work sometimes.
SPEAKER_00:And that's what we're now doing with a few of our customers around this what we're calling mentorship, right? Because what we're trying to do is the one thing that that I've always felt is is uh a real superpower that we have inadvertently in the job that we do is we get to visit a lot of different places. We get to visit a lot of different factories, we get to see a lot of uh places implement reliability or try to. So we get to see a lot of things that work really successfully, don't work really successfully, and we are also in this very tight-knit reliability community. We know Sean, we know the guys in the US, we know we come together for mainstream, we come together for main tech. And so when we are always talking with each other, have you seen this new thing or have you talked about that? We're we are at the leading edge of reliability, and our job is to filter those practices down, learn from the customers that we go to and what worked and what didn't work, to provide the customers we are working with mentorship programs with to say, okay, well, this is how we'd suggest you do that, or we've got this problem, how do we tackle that?
SPEAKER_01:And that's got to start from that place because I feel like when we was kind of doing condition monitoring, we was coming in as a kind of side piece to help people get out of the reactive cycle and all the rest of it. But more than more common than not, we were running into problems where the maintenance wasn't being, you know, wasn't actually effective in in terms of the way it was being operated. So, you know, a lot of the recommendations would go in, but do they have the resource to actually pull them out and do them? Have they actually got spares? I mean, we we were, you know, telling to people to replace things as a replacement with spares that have been sitting on the shelf for two or three years and we're just finding they were damaged. So a lot of these practices that we'd have probably identified in the reliability audit straight away, you know, quite easily identifiable when you're looking for them things, these are the things that need to be fixed initially first before you really head into that. I'm not saying that you can't start condition running, I'm not saying that at all. But what I'm saying is if you'd not done the previous work and done the gap analysis and audit of where you're actually at, you're gonna find that that's not gonna be as effective as it could be if you did them other things. So this also brings me to my next point. It's in which order should we do things? Okay, and this is really important from a maintenance point of view and perspective because there's a lot of things you can do and there's lots of different things you can improve, right? But I think one thing that companies struggle with is knowing where to start to add the most value now, okay? And that is something that we can identify in audit because with our experience we can say, well, I have you got planning and scheduling if that's a no and you haven't got that filled, are we gonna start in dating people with loads of condition monitoring? No, we're not. We're gonna try to solve that problem first. Do you need both things as a company? Yes, you do. You should have both. But what one do we go to first? Well, it depends on what you have in place. So when we do an audit and we do uh, you know, an assessment and we get all of this information in, we're also using our problem-solving brains to think, well, where are the problems now within the organization? Because whenever you draw a roadmap up, right, the idea is to be able to get to that roadmap in the quickest time possible. Because time is money, right? The more time that we can save, you know, and be effective, the more your OE is going to be driven up. That's a fact. You know, the better your your plants running, the quicker it is, the more output we're gonna be able to get. But the problem is, I think, what applied a lot of clients are doing is like they're not saying they're doing the wrong things, but they're doing them in the wrong order, and they're taking far too long to deliver them. And in this wait time that you've got, you can't get to the next stage which is gonna unlock the value until you get until you do it properly. So the idea is what we're trying to do, and we're working with a company really closely at the minute, and it's been very successful, if I'm honest. And uh by no means am I saying I'm a complete hundred percent expert at this, right? I love reliability, but what we do is we take our experience of reality into into practice, and I feel like the first two big projects that we've really led with the mentorship, we've done mentorship before, we've done training, we've done condition modern, we've done reliability all at work, but the way that our business is evolving now is very different. The vision has changed, and it is around that mentorship, and it is around reliability first.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, you have to be able to, in any factory you go into, it doesn't, you know, we talk about a lot about we need to understand what the value is in us changing what we're doing, what the value in us is in implementing a reliability improvement program. Whether you have the senior leadership already bought into the program and you're looking to evaluate the gaps, or whether or not you don't have senior leadership buy-in and you need to demonstrate to them the gaps. The value, yeah. Having the ability to understand where your current site or facility is now compared to either similar industries or benchmark or world class, you can't improve what you're currently doing until you know where your gaps are.
SPEAKER_01:Until you really know where you're at, and this is with me as well, like I've got something called a legend planner, right? And I the only way I can improve as a person in terms of what I'm doing within my business is knowing where I fell short of what I'm not doing or where the gaps are within what I'm doing. So every single month there's a there's like a review, like you have to review yourself. So unless you're auditing yourself, right? Then each section within that, and this could be your plan with like condition monitoring, reactive uh, you know, plan maintenance, you know, leadership, leadership, spares, and communication. Yeah, you could do that, right? You could even do this every and do you know what we should probably think of something as well for people to do that? That's a cool little idea, but anyway, it really opens my eyes because they're things I would not think about. I just wouldn't think about them because it's me. And I think there's there's a weird thing, isn't it? Like when you're doing something, you don't want to almost call yourself out on the things you're not doing. It's it's painful for for for a human. But when you for when I force myself to look at each bar and I'm like, have I really put a lot of effort in with my missus this month? And it's like, oh crap, we missed date night, ah crap, that happened. You know, I give it a six. I'm like, ah, that's crap. I need to improve that. And it allows me to be able to write, well, what am I gonna do now though? Well, I'm gonna plan in day night now and lock it in. Do you know what I mean? I'm gonna make sure we spend a couple of and because I'm aware I can plan to be able to improve it. And I think this is exactly the same analogy when it comes down to when you're looking at the gaps in your plant. There's gaps there that you don't really necessarily know about until they're illuminated with with a with a torch.
SPEAKER_00:And there'll be gaps there that you'll be identified that you maybe can't solve. Yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_01:It doesn't mean you maybe approach them yet, you know.
SPEAKER_00:You leave them till a little bit later.
SPEAKER_01:And that's why I said in which order we do things is important. But you're 100% right. Until you know what things to do first, you can't order anything. You've got to know where you're at.
SPEAKER_00:It's why so many companies go initially to we need some level of condition monitoring. They start getting condition monitoring provided, and sooner or later they don't feel that it's adding any value. They're not doing the recommendations that they're being told to do because they don't have the time, because they're reacting, because they're not they've got no planning and scheduling. And so what their gap isn't that their their problem there isn't that they don't know the the foreseeable future it with which condition monitoring can offer. Their issue is that they have a whole reactive maintenance problem that CM helps with, but it there's like 10 different things that help with uh reactive maintenance, and they all need to be looked at help a lot quicker than what CM can provide.
SPEAKER_01:You know what I mean? Like you know, solving the planning and scheduling and making sure someone even is there to be able to deal with some of the things that they've got to deal with. Until you've got that in place, how do you how do you actually drive through the changes?
SPEAKER_00:And it is really why why reliability is everyone's responsibility, but the more and more that we get involved with this and we do it, is that it is very challenging to do unless there is any senior leadership buy-in. So if you are on a plant and the senior leadership aren't bought in and you've been employed as a reliability engineer, you do have some uphill work to do. You have to get them on board because ultimately the business does need to be measuring some basic financial KPIs to be able to start justifying these things. We may need to justify getting a planner and schedule.
SPEAKER_01:But that's what we can do on the course, though. So when we run the ARP courses, how many times have we had discussions with engineers? We had 10 on the last course, we had a few on the other lot, we've teached this course a lot now. But how many cool conversations we have at lunchtime? It's like, ah, I see this, but how do I get the senior leadership to buy in? I was like, right, okay, here's a plan, here's an idea. Now we're rolling ideas off. It's like, well, what's your where's your biggest pain points now? Ah, yeah, this this machine here. What type of kids failing at the leadership? Are they results focused or are they detail focused? How do they want the information? And then we're like, right, well, let's devise a strategy to be able to get you a pilot project that can land your idea of why we need to do more of this.
SPEAKER_00:And and that's what real mentorship is. That's the part that that's the guidance, guiding principle. We do a lot with another customer where I'm there two days every month. So to be that guy. And and it's it's when we talk about mentorship, what what you've got access to is it is basically like having a personal trainer. Who who's the person there to spot you and make sure you don't hurt hurt yourself? Who's the person there that's advising you? You're not quite doing that lift quite properly. We need to do that. Maybe change your angle a little bit and get more results. Who's the one that's saying, go into the year? You're like, did you do your reps I asked you to do the rest of the last week? Who's the one saying, Did you eat well? What are you eating that crap for? Have you done this? Have you done that? So, with this one customer that I'm with quite frequently at the moment, is it's the case of you know, I'm talking with the guys down saying, right, these are the things we need to be working on between now and the next visit. They need to be completed. And it's also their opportunity while I'm there to say, This is what we did previously, is this the standard that we'd expect? Have we gone in the right direction? They're doing a lot of RCM studies at the moment, really, really well. And it's just making sure have we not missed anything here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and are we doing it in the right way? Because I think sometimes when you keep doing something slightly wrong, then that becomes the normal.
SPEAKER_00:And you have to pivot quite a lot. So I'll go in there one month and it might be like, oh, you know, we've just had, you know, the global business has just made a change to measure total loss, right? And and that's made a lot of impact on the way the reliability program's being run. They can't put engineers on the line when they used to, so the backlog is now growing. So we're over here focusing on RCM studies and was in a good place, and now we've had this global decision which is now completely juggled everything around. So our roadmap that was like we're going this way has to pivot. Has to pivot. Yeah. And uh ARP and that level of training is not going to give the level of experience to know how to pivot.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and this is also another thing you have to consider. Businesses do change like that. You know, you have a lot of global directives that can change the scope of what you're doing, and you know, sometimes it can cause havoc with with the maintenance and and and how things are run or availability of engineers and resource directly. But you are right, you need to be able to understand well, what do them changes mean, and how do I pivot for this to deal with what we've got right now, but also create a roadmap again to be able to get back on track to where it is. And again, like that's something that we've even discussed with the customer. They've got a bit of a temporary problem with you know PMs and stuff. Well, we can do some PMs. We've got we can let's use some of our guys to get out of the bad line, and then we can almost refine at the same time. And these are the things as well that we can offer as a reliability business. It's not just purely down to the mentorship, it's how do we also fill in sometimes? And you're gonna have to as a as a company or a manufacturer to outsource certain bits at certain times. You cannot expect to do it all yourself all the time. It's impossible with the resource element that people have right now, completely impossible. So, but but what you do need to make sure is that who you're working with can get the results. Do you know what I mean? And also you can trust them people, you can vet them contractors to make sure that the business is sustainable.
SPEAKER_00:They've got to be able to demonstrate those results as well and make sure that that the communication is there. Like when we're working on something that maybe isn't so you know financial results, when you you know, when we start working on master asset lists, they take a lot of time. That there's no real financial or tangible gain from a master asset list creation. It's very long term root cause analysis, put a number on that really easily.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's really so we have to adjust and the same as criticalities and a lot of businesses, you have to also remember that a lot of businesses as well haven't prioritised their criticality, and and it's crazy because when you're really looking at kind of the way you do maintenance, especially when you've got a lot of assets, it's like how do I minimize this down to just get the cloud out of my head.
SPEAKER_00:Where's my focus? Where's my focus? You've got all this noise, you've got all these machines around you. Which ones are you focusing on? Which ones are gonna hurt me? And I and I think like the mentorship, what's really nice is what we're able to offer now. Like, we've been doing mentorship a while, but I know we're only talking about it now as a podcast. But what we're starting to do and see with reliability is people have different levels of confidence and training and capabilities in terms of uh reliability, and therefore the level of mentorship requirements. I mean, we've got customers where we just have a two, three hours Teams call once a month. We go through the roadmap, we talk about it with them where they're at, they ask us any questions, they just want to have to be able to check in with a reliability expert.
SPEAKER_01:And it's just you know, that chat for them, like even Anne won't mind me saying this, but like when when I visited him the other day, right, and was doing some motocurrent signature analysis. Just having a chat with him ged him up again. He was like, Oh, glad I had this chat. Do you know what I mean? Because I think sometimes you can get in your own head, and I mate, I can and maintain you can. Sometimes you feel a bit demoralised in the week, you might have had a difficult week, and reliability can be difficult, is like climbing mountains. But then when you get the perspective off someone else, just say, no, mate, you're on the right track, keep going, doing what you keep doing what you're doing, it's gonna happen. You get that reassurance again, and I think, mate, if you're on a site on your own and you're a reliability engineer and you've got people on your side, it's so lonely. It is hard, it's such a lonely thing.
SPEAKER_00:Especially when you're trying to get people to convince you.
SPEAKER_01:Especially when, like, you know, the maintenance hasn't done that for a very long period of time. And like we're we're working with businesses now that have finally got reliability engineers, but they haven't been part of the makeup for many years. Like, it's a very new thing. And and they're in there, like, really, you can see the enthusiasm when they walk through the door, but you can see the gradually, week after week, it grates on them. It's not an easy job, mate. So, like any reliability engineer out there right now listening to this, keep your head held high, man. Keep the it's a long game, man, and and be prepared to play the long game, but don't give up, don't give in. Because, you know, we got we can help you as well be able to not we don't want to fight against your internal organisation, but we want them to be able to see the way and see the way forward because inherently it's always this paradoxial thing that we we we offer, is where it's it's it's kind of the one thing that people want, they get involved and then they don't don't want to make the change when they've got the people involved in the right place, you know what I mean? But this is the part of the game, this is the game, you know. Wherever you're starting out, if if you're starting at the very beginning of this culture part and trying to justify the value, or you've got a company that really understands the value and you're looking at the gaps and and pulling it forward. Remember, it's always a people's game reliability, it's about getting your people on board with you and really doing that. And when you've got a team and you've got people like us, resilient buggers behind you. Do you know what I mean? Like, we ain't ever gonna stop until we get what we need to do because we just don't. It's just not in our nature to.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think I think you know, when you know deep down that this is the way that we should be doing things, and and it it it is a belief, it is a a real strong belief that this is what we should be doing.
SPEAKER_01:Um it's very easy to stay motivated because I mean we d we are very persistent, not in a like pushing way, but it's very much that we know that every company at some point will have to go down this journey, and they will benefit from doing so, and I think that's inspiration because we're inspired, because it's internal to us when you really do believe that we can make a difference, and when you really do believe, and I you know, I think this is why we're so passionate about it, because we've seen this transform quite a few businesses that we've been involved with. When you get that feeling of improving something, and you really truly know how to be able to bring a company through that process, it gives you this inspiration, this inspired, and that's where I feel like a lot of reliability engineers, what they need. Because this game, I'll be honest, you need to be persistent. Some things don't change. I've seen some reliability engineers leave because just the culture, just they just know they're not getting anywhere. Do you know what I mean? And we can see it as well.
SPEAKER_00:And and that's also Which is ironic when there's a role called a reliability engineer and the senior leadership isn't bought into it.
SPEAKER_01:We are dealing right now, even right now, and I'm not naming any names, but I've got you know a couple of organisations where you've got two graduate engineers, reliability engineers, into a company, and they can't even pay for for a week ARP. It's crazy. And and you and they're like, Well, where do I go from here? If I can't even get one training course for me to understand this in in better detail, what am I doing? Which is a multi-million pound company as well. Oh, yeah. They're not like small framework, huge company, and and this this is also it does concern me a little bit because I'm not having these conversations, and then I'm speaking to you know the guy higher up, and he's like, I want the guys to do the training, but it's not gonna get approved from above. And it's like then you then you look above, it's like, wow, you know, this this is the network of the decision-making tree. Like, until sites can have all you know, actual bit of authority in terms of how they train their staff and people on the site level. How are you ever going to change a culture from above? And then when you go above, you wanted to strike group deals of of mass quantity and just want to put sensors on everything and really miss the whole reliability part. These are the troubles and struggles that we're having with with companies. And we actually do some of the CM hit, you know, and and we do on the local side a lot of the reactive work. We're trying to get away from that within the repair centre, but we've picked up and we've we've done RCAs and we've said change, this needs to be changed. And when you put that information across, if no one's there to receive it, then it's just it's just not going to be intertwined into the culture. So when we do look at the culture of organisation and businesses, it goes far beyond just site level. This this does go to the group level offerings, and this is where I do feel like you need visionaries in these group leader positions to be able to implement this perspective and vision, you know, across the business. And that that there is really important.
SPEAKER_00:And I think we we are starting to see it more with the the bigger organizations where there should be a VP, a director that is focused on reliability.
SPEAKER_01:100%. I mean, because let's be honest, you look at the metrics, right? If you improve reliability across any manufacturing site, it's gonna have a positive impact on the bottom line, on the money, on OEE, whatever you want to call it. It will do eventually, it will 100%. And the fact is that we don't have someone who's purely looking at that one thing because you need them at that level. I think you need them at that seniorship level, you need that up there because to be able to make the changes to filter through the company. Because the problem is, even this one particular site, the two guys want to do the training, even engineer manager wants them to do the training, yeah, and he can't get them to do the training because of a roadblock above that he has no control over.
SPEAKER_00:Even like so, some of our we've the the last two, three courses we've done uh ARPE, we're really fortunate to work really closely with Amazon. And the stuff that obviously Amazon are uh a very large huge, yeah, we'll just say they're big. So they they do have the capital available to them, but what they have done very well is regardless of the capital available to them, from the ground up, they have had a focus on reliability and they've understood reliability within that organization. They have a you know their monitoring of their equipment is done with Monitron and they understand its limitations, and for them, it's an ideal solution. And it works for them. They have a very strong program in ultrasound because they know it gives them early indication, and at Amazon, they're not bothered about what the issue is, they just want to change it, and ultrasound is ideal for that. Have we got an increase in decibel level? Yeah, have we lubricated? Where's the levels? Yeah, no, do we change it yes or no? And for their reliability engineers, you know, we're very fortunate to have them come on the course. It's a pleasure to have all of them on there because what it does is it's just for them, it's really nice to see as they walk away, because they have worked in a reliability organization, they get two things when they come out of it with the guys from Amazon. They get to come out of it and go, We are doing the right thing, we are doing a really good job. It's hard when you're within the organization to realize doing it. Yeah, you need to benchmark from somewhere else, and it also gives them a realization of where everyone else is at. Because on we had 10 on the last course, we had two guys off there from Amazon, and there was a lot of people on that training course that were sharing their stories about their plants, and they're like, Wow, we are really far ahead. And I was like, Yes, you are very far ahead in what you're doing, but they reap the benefits from it hugely, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But that becomes a part of their culture, it's their culture, and it becomes a part of the way they run, and this is where you want reliability a part of your culture. I promise you, you do. Because if you can adopt that as a part of you and your culture, you will see things a completely different way. I keep telling everyone, reliability isn't a thing, it's a culture, it's a philosophy, it's a way of implementation. It's a way of working. The you it's it's a it's a thing that it can be sometimes very difficult to explain to someone because it's just not a tangible thing sometimes. It's something that you embody as a part of a culture and a philosophy in the workplace, and because of that, all of these little things that you can call Fit Mika and all these little tools that you've got are just things that naturally flow into it because of the philosophy and what way of working, and you can only attain that through cell mentorship, understanding where your plant is at in terms of gap analysis to know where you're at, and the want and the want and will to know that we want to do better. You have to want to change. You've got to want to change. You need to know that you know you need to be able to look at your metrics right now and say, is this what we want as a business? Are we happy with staying here? Do we just want to be able to create like this and that's it? Right? I guarantee 99.9 everyone is is a no. Everybody wants to improve. Us as a business, do we want to stay where we're at? Of course we don't. Do we want to help more people? Yes. It's the same with other businesses and manufacturers. Do you want to provide more product for more people? Yes. Do you want to help more people? Yes. Do you want to solve more problems? Yes. Do you want to provide more energy to people in the world and solve that problem? Yes, we do. You know, energy plants, power plants. We can all achieve that by improving what we output, okay? And the way we do that is wanting to know where to change. But if you can't look at your metrics right now and say, this is where I'm at, and say, I need to make this better, and and then have the ability to be open-minded to say, audit me, let me know where I can improve, okay? And then take that information in and build a roadmap specifically tailored to where you're at. Do you know what I mean? With the right people within the business to go where you need to go. If you can't do that, then we're not gonna make the change. We're not gonna have an impact. And I think that is the harsh reality right now.
SPEAKER_00:You know, we need to know where we're at. And we do, and like exactly like you said earlier, there are some organizations that are just not ready for reliability. And that's okay.
SPEAKER_01:That's okay, but we're ready to work with the ones that are. That's true. For me, and I know it's for you as well, and all the guys, where we get our buzz is making real recommendations, not even that, just real mentorship, teaching, training. Like, you know, I was with the guys in in Bern in Switzerland, and what an amazing bunch of people that you get to meet along this journey, incredible engineers, you know, and when you share a little bit of knowledge with them, it's so nice to be able to see oh, they care. Oh, okay, we can do this a little bit differently. Yeah, and they're so for it.
SPEAKER_00:Or you, you know, even for the guys, you know, they they see a bit of looseness. Oh, we'll get onto it right now for you. Kit Kieran was at a site the other day doing an optical gas imagery survey before you even had a chance to get the video blessing. They're fixing it. They're getting it sorted straight away. They're getting it down. That's nice to see off the back of recommendations, advice, tangible, or things off the back of it. So that was really helpful.
SPEAKER_01:But remember, the information's provided, but their reaction is the philosophy of reliability. Do we sort the problem? Do we do it properly? Or do we just sit on it? Or do we just sit on it and wait? And that's the question you have to ask yourself as well. Are you a company that's getting a lot of these surveys and you haven't fixed the leak for six months? That's you're not a reliability-centered company. If you're just getting information, you're sitting on it. Are you that company that is hasn't got the kite the resource and understand, or or are you the company that's taking risks with certain things? You know, you've got the information, there's a bearing defect, you know, I'll last another lump. Well, we'll just leave it. We'll just leave it. I'll be okay, you know. Oh, you know, really need to sort self-lubers out or or need to sort my lubrication strategy out on it. I'm keep getting the same information. Needs lube, needs to lube, need to, we need to sort this out. I'll just leave it. That'll be okay. You know, we'll just, we'll just, we'll just we'll just deal with it. Do you know what I mean? These are the things that we've got to be looking at, and you've got to always be looking at how do we change a needle and change it. And that's the philosophy, that's that's the stuff that we want to inspire in people, and that's the I think that's why we're in this game, because there's lots of things to improve with, and um, we're just passionate about making them changes, you know what I mean. So, as a wrap-up, if you are looking to be where like if you are questioning where am I at and you want a benchmark, but you might have you might have your own way of measuring things, but you might want to benchmark that with something else, right? Get in touch with us, okay? Because over a two, three-day survey, right, with with some good questionnaires from everyone else within the business as well from extra data to come in, we can very, very successfully be able to tailor an audit that looks at where the gaps are. And the unique thing about this particular thing that we do at Mainzane Reliability, me and Will have brainstormed hours and hours and hours, countless conversations in terms of how do we do this properly, because we both know that this is the start of any successful program, is knowing where the gaps are.
SPEAKER_00:And sometimes it's also about with the auditing process, yes, you know, we can come in and do the audit. Some of the sites we work with, we develop the internal audit for the group. Yeah. So for one of the customers, you know, they've got a few sites, they want to be able to have all of their sites complete a reliability audit. So it's not just, oh, it's maintain reliabilities audit. No, we take our audit, we work with them to tailor and say, this is the audit because this particular company they go out and buy other sites. So they need to have their own benchmark internally in the business. Where's this site out that we're about to potentially acquire? What's the audit that we need to perform? Where is their level of maintenance at? Because before they even buy the site. Before they buy the site.
SPEAKER_01:Imagine that. It's a bit like surveying your house, isn't it? Would you like to know where the gaps are in your house before you buy it? Yes, I would like to know the roof is about to fall through.
SPEAKER_00:That would be a great idea. I would like to know that there's an incredibly strong blame culture within the organization I'm not acquiring.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. So, like again, that's even better. That's even more proactive. Let's do the order before we even buy a place. Just so we're not buying something that we haven't any surprises with. But not only that, you can see already where your other strengths can come in to be able to play and improve what you're doing. And it's a very good point, actually, mate. Like, there's some customers we deal with that has a group level, and we're buying sites and we're incorporating. And what you find as well is a lot of companies that big organizations that have bought sites, there's been a lot of takeovers, they all come with individual cultures. So when you're trying to marry all of these cultures into one, it's very difficult to do so. And then you've got a group culture and you've got the individual culture of the site, and you've got this mishmash of cultures, it's really even more important than to see where the gaps are. Do you know what I mean? To see how we improve that as a site level, even from the top level. So, you know, going on from what Will said, more importantly, if you're looking after multiple sites and you're like, why does this site operate better than this one? There's patterns here.
SPEAKER_00:Or even if, like we've seen it before, it even if you have got a lot of pressure or there's a lot of um uh leadership is trying to take you down that road of putting sensors on things, wireless sensors, and you feel in your heart that it's not quite the right solution or the right idea. A lot of the time, putting sensors on things and AI and the machine learning and everything that's all in the in the news at the moment, that is a very late stage maturity in terms of reliability. You if you want it to be successful, they can say all the buzzwords they like, like if we put a thousand sensors on, we're gonna reduce your number of failures, it's gonna cost this we've seen this as well. That's pointless if you haven't got plan and scheduling or you can't react to the maintenance or your lubrication is terrible because you're still dealing with failure. If you want to be CM is just dealing with the failure, and not even that, it puts it actually holds you back, and I'll tell you why.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, if you're not addressing the root causes of why things are failing and you're just relying purely on information to tell you when it fails and you don't do anything about the addressment, you're gonna keep getting these repeat failures and use CM as a way to avoid them. It would be like You can't eliminate them, can you, if you're just finding them.
SPEAKER_00:It would be, you know, if we just continue to deal with the failures, we will always be good with dealing with failures. So we need to try and try and prevent those. But to the point, if you've got those those those things being pushed onto the organization or someone's trying to look down those, having something like a reliability audit or a maturity assessment, which is all encapsulated, will let you visibly see how far away you are from what we would consider or the reliability industry would consider a site that should be considering those things.
SPEAKER_01:100%. And and what we tend to find is when we are going in, is that a lot of sites have been sold this end solution and they haven't addressed the initial parts of the real problem. And this is what also distracts them because when they spend that money, oh no, we've spent money on that, we're spending it's reliability, isn't it? No, it's not reliability. You spend money on loads of condition monitoring and and and and and and AI. Yep. You've not spent no money on reliability, but the higher business sees us as one thing. It's like, well, no, we're already dealing with that.
SPEAKER_00:We're gonna prevent our failures.
SPEAKER_01:That's it. We're not having failures. This is reliability, right? No, it's not, and this is the awareness also that we have to introduce people to is if you do the start bit right, your CM costs a lot less. Massively. You're not blanketing, huge amount less. Huge amount less. And it becomes more effective because you know what, I've got a bit more money actually to focus on this really important shiny asset and not all of these ones here that okay might need attention, but they're not so critical to me in my process. So when you go through that stage and that strategy, you end up spending less. Because remember, condition monitoring really is a reoccurring spend. You need to keep spending on it. Whether it's you doing it as a resource, whether you've got sensors on something or continuous monitoring on it, it failures, you know, you want to eliminate the defects so you do get to the fact of wear out in terms of your assets, but you still need to be constantly monitoring that because you don't know when it's gonna happen. But so you don't want to be doing that on hundreds of assets, you want to be doing it on only the ones that require it. If that makes sense. So another thing to have a little think about. But we better stop, otherwise, we're gonna get away. Well, this I stop this idea. I'm trying to keep these to half an hour. We always go to the 45-minute mark, but you know, great conversation. If you are thinking about knowing where your gaps are, get in touch with us because we love an audit. We love getting our getting our, you know. We've got some new systems as well that will produce some very good reports. Cool systems. Um, you know, I think next podcast we're gonna talk about probably the systems that we've built.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe we should get an iPad to do the reporting on now that we've got the iPhone.
SPEAKER_01:See, now he's he's Will's amped up in a minute. He's fully in system mode, but I think that'll be the next podcast. I think talk about systems and how systems have worked for us, but also how systems can work for you guys and what you're doing, and how do we present information? But let's wrap it up. Thank you guys for tuning in. Stay tuned to the next one. Take care.
