SYSTEMS THAT 10X EFFICIENCY

You can have all the data in the world coming out of your condition monitoring programme… vibration data, OGI surveys, thermography images, air leak reports… and still not improve reliability.

And it usually comes down to one simple thing.

No one can actually see what’s going on end to end.

In this episode, we talk properly about that. The gap between finding issues and actually fixing them. Because too often the insight is there, but it’s sat in emails, reports, or spreadsheets and nothing really moves forward.

We get into the systems we’re building to solve that. Things like customer portals where everything sits in one place. Recommendations, evidence, current status, deadlines. So actions don’t just disappear or get forgotten about. Everyone can see what needs doing and where things are at.

We also break down what should sit where, because this is where a lot of people get it wrong.

Your CMMS is there to manage work. History, failure codes, maintenance actions. That’s its job. But it’s not built to visualise vibration data or leak images. Trying to force it into that role just creates friction.

That’s why we’re pushing towards more of a reliability hub approach. Something that sits alongside your CMMS and, where possible, links into it. So when you raise a recommendation, it can turn straight into a work order with proper traceability.

And where integration isn’t possible because of security or system limitations, we still need that feedback loop. So we talk about simple, practical ways to capture comments, updates, and closures without slowing engineers down or adding more admin.

We also get into the value of closing the loop properly on repairs.

When you can link the fix back to the original condition monitoring finding, everything becomes clearer. Photos, verification, root cause… it all starts to tell a story. People understand what those “high readings” actually meant. And more importantly, what needs to change to stop it happening again.

There’s also a lot of money being left on the table in areas people overlook. Air leaks are a big one. They just sit there costing thousands until someone actually takes ownership and fixes them.

And we touch on RCM and FMECA as well. How to keep them simple and useful, rather than turning them into massive Excel exercises that no one wants to touch.

If you’re serious about predictive maintenance, defect elimination, and building systems that actually work for engineers, this one will land.

If it does, share it with someone you work with, subscribe to the podcast, and leave a review so we can get it out to more people.

And I’d be interested to hear this…

What would give you better visibility on your site right now?

Transcript

Welcome And Why Systems Matter

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Reliability Gang Podcast. Hope everyone's keeping well. This is the second one we're running actually today. Two in a row. Yeah, two in a row. We're actually on fire right now. To be honest, we could have probably kept talking on the last one, but I don't think we'd have, you know, ended up getting much time because I remember I've got to edit these and get all the content out for you guys. You know what I mean? So today we had a good conversation actually, didn't we? On the last drawing towards the end of the last podcast, we talked about systems, and recently Will Crane is basically in the matrix, aren't you? You're basically living there, aren't you? I am, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

I I I do it, I don't know. You you can you explain what I do. I'm not very good at saying what I do.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

So his brain was ticking away then, bothering. So um one thing that Will was always being very good at when he first came on board was computers, and he's always been very much into IT systems, building websites, code, all of these things, and I think you've always loved it, haven't you? You've always had a natural kind of draw to it since a young age.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I like problem solving and getting things to do, building computers, being a bit nerdy. He's such a nerd, I love it. I've got a new nerd friend now, though, because we're creating our own system, and and Chris, if he's uh listening. Yeah, pick up Chris as well.

Building A Central Customer Hub

SPEAKER_00 1:13

He's uh he's another nerd guy. He's our full stack developer. Yeah, we're building some really cool stuff in the background. But again, this is something, you know, again, from I'll be honest, you know, when when we first got introduced to Nest Vision, I was very impressed with with that platform. Love the fact that we could be able to give people, you know, recommendations and you know, picture the assets and we can have a look at the lifeline. And that was really good to be able to display some of the online monitoring systems that we've got, especially with the MVX systems that we have and you know how we do that. But for us as a business, it's like, well, this needs to go further beyond just vibration, you know, and condition monitoring. We've got to be able to find a central place that allows us to let people know where they're at within that reliability roadmap and that journey. Do you know what I mean? And we spoke about that in the last podcast about kind of the mentorship and the roadmaps and the audits and stuff. But wouldn't it be amazing if a customer could actually see where they're at real time, see what work has been done, what things need to be applied in a central place with information of what needs to be done and time frames around it. Because remember, when we have that, what does it give us? Accountability, doesn't it? It gives us that information. Are we doing exactly what we should be? How far off are we off the mark? And imagine having that central place that allows customers to see what processes they've got to do and where they're at within their reliability journey, and also seeing them gaps get filled in as they go and actually you know improve the reliability of the plant. So Will has been tasked with the monumental task of making this a reality, and I'll be honest, that's where it started, and then we ended up building like another 10 systems around typical ADHD kind of like, oh, I'm gonna do this, and then oh, it can do that. Oh, well, that would solve the problem with that report.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

I think it's helpful. We have uh we have a platform that we're utilizing at the moment, so that there's a lot going on with building of these systems that we're utilizing. We've obviously we've got Chris, he's doing our full stack development on a very dedicated client portal for the condition monitoring side of things, mainly vibration analysis and observations, as it's a core part of the business. Um, but because we've got this real we understand the reliability side of things, it's not just a dashboard for us. There's a lot of things I'm putting pressure on, Chris, so I'm like, needs to be had to automatically generate work orders through any COS platform if we want to.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Oh god, that's another promo.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

You know, we're doing a lot of that, but to the side of that, we've got another platform that we utilize for um that allows, you know, my level of knowledge. I know a lot about the capabilities of what we can do within development, but I don't always have the full experience in um SQL and other database structures that Chris obviously does, but we have another platform that we can utilize that does allow me to work within it very quickly. It allows us to do a lot of adaptability and give customers access. So, what that has allowed us to do is we have our own OGI portal, we have our own thermal imaging portal now, we have all of this information with the ultimate goal to bring that all into one place. But you know, we don't do massive amounts of thermography, we don't do massive amounts of air leaks, we do you know one or two a month compared to like we're every month with everything else. But OGI we do do quite a bit of stuff, and to be able to create these systems so customers can access that information, can interact with us. But as with anything, now that we understand the capabilities further, and we've been using this platform for a while, but only recently have we really understood the full capabilities we can do.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, but that also you have to give yourself a bit of credit, mate. Um when you look at okay, the ideas there in terms of oh and all the guys pitching with the ideas. We need this. That'll be good if the other guys do it.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Brad Brannan had a great one this week, which I'm now like the cog start ticket. It's like, oh, can we like do a lubrication system where customers can put what grease they need at the points? And I was like, Yeah, that'd be cool. And then what why don't we have like calculated grease volume versus like CBM or CM delivered grease volume, whether it's based on ultrasound or lube factor? We can have this cool graph, and I was like, Yeah, I need to finish the 10 other apps I'm currently working on before I do that one. But it's a great idea.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Don't ask Will Crane to build a system when he's halfway through a system because he'll try to build the system when he's halfway through. I'm halfway through 10 systems, but to be like they're all they're all working in. They're all gonna be there, all right?

SPEAKER_01 5:29

I promise you. A lot of them are there now, which is good, and and every time we build another system, like I was doing one last night doing for uh thermography, and I was like, ah, that's a new way I can do something that I didn't know. And and then I'll go back to the other systems and make that a improvement because it did something a bit better.

Solving Real Problems With Design

SPEAKER_00 5:45

This is what it's about. This is what it's about. The reason why these systems work, it's not because Will can build them, right? There's there's something deeper behind it, okay? There's the experience and there's the problems that we've come across in the past. Because when it was just me and Will, we could have five different systems for different reporting. It didn't matter, it's just me and Will. So me and him would know how to do every single process to a T, and you get the same result, right? And you you you you get it. But when you've got you know ten engineers all going out doing bits and bobs, one engineer comes across a problem. Well, how do I change this? And the XL shit, oh a formulated issue. Yeah, it stops them from actually sending the report because of a formula. It's not the fact that he doesn't have the information, then you get another issue with you know another software for the air leaks. It's like, well, now you can only export it in a in a certain way, and it doesn't look quite the way we want to be able to brand it. Then you've got all of these, these, these things. So so the idea of of you know, great, we can build them, but we need to have the context behind the problems that we've had. And when you're a business and you've had so many issues with certain things, you start to take that, it's like failure data. You take that information, you take how many times have uh you know we not quite delivered on something or didn't look quite as good, and you use that as your information to say, well, now when we build the system, what what are you doing before you build it? Guys, have you got anything you can tell me now before I build this thing before I build it? Because what what happens when you build it and you have to make a revision? It's not as easy in the build phase. The same with any design specification. So obviously, the systems that we build are based upon real experience, and I think this is where now our offering for us has become really unique because we've finally got to a place where I mean we've done CM well for many years, and I've been very like not like overly like cautious, but I've been very driven to make sure the information is there regardless of where what format we put it in. But now all of that is there, but through a very visual aesthetic way that is repeatable, that allows engineers and engineer managers to really get the information they need to make the right recommendations.

Closing The Loop With Leak Tracking

SPEAKER_01 8:00

I think what's really important as well is the criteria in all of this has always been that these systems don't replace the report. So in all of them, we still generate a report, especially for audit traceability. There's a PDF document. A lot of customers still want a physical something. It's just it's an added place. So for um optical gas imagery, we we create the report, there's an audit trail there, we attended the site with the leaks that were identified. But all of our customers get access to their site, their leaks. What leaks are currently open? They can go in, close the leaks out to say that they've repaired them.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

But that's the other thing that you've built, which is really important to actually say. Okay, so each leak has an identification for that one leak.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

And it's unique in unique across like anywhere that we survey, like leak number 002, is at this customer and it won't exist anywhere else within the system. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

And there's a reason why we've done that, okay? So one thing is about telling people they've got problems, but what we're at and maintain reliability is detect, solve, improve. We can't just say, Here's your problem, run away. Yeah, right. We have that unique leak location so we can follow up have you repaired it or not.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Yep. Where's the closing? We've had leaks before, particularly we use optical gas imagery as an example here, but we've had leaks before that we've identified, they've repaired, we've gone back to the next year and gone, that exact leak is leaking again. Okay, it might have just gotten a bit bigger. Well, we can reopen that leak ID and say, actually, this leak has re-reappeared. We've got your previous fix didn't quite fix it enough.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

But that feedback's valid, right? Because when you fix it again, do you want to have it have it leaking again? You've got they've got to change something within that process to ensure it doesn't leak. So the feedback loop of this is so vitally important, and not enough condition monitoring companies do it because it's very easy to give the information in terms of problem, and it does take a while to follow up on something.

CMMS Integration And Security Barriers

SPEAKER_01 9:54

And I think what's really important with all these systems that we're developing at the moment is that systems in in general within maintained both the ones that we have that we've developed that are customer-facing and the ones that we use internally, like our mileage tracker that all the guys use for their new uh VW ID5s, they've just all got. So with these systems, what we have to understand is if we like parallel that to reliability within a factory, there are a lot of really important systems that need to operate, like the CMMS system, right? What's really important to understand is these systems are designed specifically for a purpose. A lot of the time we find that customers use CMS systems, particularly SAP, that isn't quite designed for the maintenance side of things. So it's difficult to use.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Make-do type thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

But but the maintenance management system is a tool there to help manage the maintenance, extract failure data, plan in the jobs. It's not a tool to present my vibration data, to present my OGI data. So what we're trying to develop alongside Chris and the existing apps that we've got within our platforms is this is a central hub to be able to evaluate and review the recommendations and the data that is captured through OGI, vibration analysis, etc. With the end result being that for some of our customers, we will fully integrate within their maintenance platform so that any recommendations we perform it gets captured, it gets captured in their maintenance management system.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

And this is also I love you've actually raised this point because it's it's really integral. And what you're saying is very true. Like the CMMS system shouldn't be showing graphs of a vibration signal, but it should be pulling in the information of recommendations, of maintenance. What actions do we need to do off the back of that? And that's intrinsically important for a CMMS. And and right now, a lot of companies that we're we're working with, they don't utilise their CMMS as much as they should be, and not enough data is going into there to be able for them to really log what they're doing as a maintenance function because everything that is done in terms of recommendation or you know, actual you know work on that plan should be there, and you should be we should be able to find it.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

We've got in within the system, like the one that Chris is currently working on, or where I want this to end up being, is that it's it's really important that for let's say a reliability-led business that has a condition monitoring provider, um, that the communication between those two teams, the condition monitoring team, whether that's us or whoever, and the maintenance teams needs to be really strong. Now, for a lot of organizations, they're gonna have their maintenance management system, which is gonna record the detail and information. A lot of our customers we go to, we can't get access to the maintenance management system for as a user. I mean, we're trying to get into one customer's now, and it has been a monumental task. I have to have a dedicated laptop because I can't have it on my computer. Security-wise. Right? So that there's a lot of restrictions in place. So, what having a this system allows us to do is if the reliability is a focus for the organization, yes, in an ideal world, I'd like to have my recommendation in my CBM portal that's provided by us with a link to the work order that's been generated, that's automatically generated, that in an ideal world on the customer side, they can click that link, but because they've got complete access to their maintenance management system, it just opens up. If we click it and we have access to it, it opens up as well, and we can see the comment history on it. Not always are we going to have the ability though to do that, of course, which is why it's important that customers do understand look, if we don't have access to your maintenance management system, if we can't see that you've generated a job against our recommendation for security reasons or whatever, we have the functionality for you to add comments within against this case, this recommendation. We really do need you to be able to let us know what you're doing.

Verification Through Repairs And Evidence

SPEAKER_00 13:51

100%. Because without the feedback, we can't improve. Like the whole point of like defect elimination and root cause analysis is also looking at why and what was done and was it effective or was it not. That's the feedback loop that we've got to be able to generate from. If if we tell a customer to do something and they do it and we still get high readings, we need to understand why. Okay, without the context of what they did or how they did it, we we don't know that that that is very vague now. So whenever we are trying to verify data as well, is really important for us. And I'll give you an example of verification of especially vibration information and data. We'll, for example, take data on on a gearbox, for example. We'll find there's there's wearing the gearbox, very high acceleration readings, high envelope readings. Great. We'll get that back into the into the workshop, and when that gets stripped, we can see the damage behind that, and we can say, right, this is the kind of levels that are going to attribute to this type of damage, and that will give us a bit of a severity identity and understand that and and knowledge as well. When we're at sites and we can't get the gearbox back and we can't really correlate the damage, is it purely down to the gearware or is it not? Is it you know these these confirmations that we get, especially through the repair centre, it's ideal for us. But also going on to portals and going on to things that we've built, the repair centre, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've just built one for the repair centre, but also just to kind of tie this together to my point, is that through that, we can take an image of the day of the of the actual where we can have that in the pool, we can show the customer this is what we've found, here's the here's the damage, here's the where.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

And and the repair centre stuff that we bring into that, if items come into the repair centre that have been generated a case within the CM platform, we have full traceability on that.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Yeah, so we can pull that vibration there as well and show them from the repair, this is what we're seeing, here's the damage. And imagine one customer has five repairs with us. Well, quite quickly, they can log on to their part of the pool and see the status of every single job. Where is that, is it being dismantled, are we awaiting parts, what damage was caused, and why? That's a game changer for that.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

And we list uh within their like recommendations. So we had a job in the other day, and this uh motor had come in uh and it was full of water. So Darren Blessing was like, I'm not even gonna bother putting this on the ADX test machine. Well, it's full of water, we need to bypass this right now, and I need to dry it out first. So we went through those processes and we had a look at the bearings, and we could see there was significant water ingress, and that and that's why we were getting and we had vibration data on this, we had bearing damage, we could see the damage. Root cause was we had some form of water ingress. Yeah, it was now just trying to figure out where from, what part of the motor. Yeah, and Darren had identified that the seal on this motor was just a standard V-ring seal, it wasn't really designed to be outside, it was undercover, but it wasn't um uh secured all the way around the edges. And and this was in this is in the Isle of Wight, so it's getting quite a battering from the weather when it happens. Um, and this V ring seal that should have been on there didn't even exist. Okay, so this was a we looked at it from a recommendation point of view and said, well, we could just put this V-ring seal back onto it, buy a new one,£1.50, and stick it back on there. Is there something we could do though to actually improve the reliability overall? Because we know this motor is really meant to be inside if we could. Is there an uh an upgrade we could do to the seal that isn't gonna cost a lot of money, that is gonna improve the ability for this motor to last a bit longer? Yeah, we put an oil lip seal on it for that costs an extra 20p.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

I love that though. This is where real reliability works. But that's captured within the report. 20p, right? But until you look at the root cause of why, and you have the understanding, well, this has failed because of this. The 20p that we've now spent on this and the extra time has now improved the reliability of that asset potentially tenfold. Just because it wasn't designed to be outside, now it is, we've made a quite little slight adjustment, that probably won't fail again now.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

And that's that's that's a call to the you know. Unfortunately, on this example, you know, we didn't need to machine out the motor, we were able to just fit the ceiling. Sometimes we might do it in maybe that 20p is a little bit more than that. But this is a phone call, just to make you aware, this is what we've identified, this is what we've seen within the system. We've now built as well for for uh customers which were in the repair center pool, is that we now have direct communication through like a chat function. So, what Darren is able to do is go in there and message Gil or same and go, Hi Gil, you know, this motor's got this issue, we've identified there's a reliability improvement here. We need to we advise that we change the oil ipsil for this. It's going to cost you an extra 10 quid to do. Are you happy to do that? And he can send that off, they get a notification within their email that a new message has appeared, and Gil can go in and say, Yep, I'm happy for you to proceed with that. We do the change, the report gets written, all of our findings, what the root cause of the issue was, our implementation, we made a reliability improvement on what it was and how much it cost extra, the ADX test reports, the on-load test with vibration analysis, a full package there.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

But because we have the glide system available, I'm not going to say it is it yes, there's a lot of time to gather all that information, but very quickly we can gather that, produce a robust report that details what we found, what we did, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

And the results. And that's the beautiful thing. And if you guys, you know, if if you guys are looking for a repair centre that is able to look at that type of it's a philosophy. Again, I said in the last podcast, reliability is a philosophy in the way we look at things. Whenever we dismantle anything in there, or when Darren does, he's always looking at what of why and what ways we can improve. That's always how he's operating.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

It's a very different no mindset, though, to a traditional workshop.

Repair Centre Philosophy And Craft

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Because I've been there, bro. I've been in that that workshop environment where them things are not considered. The QA system is not really. We're not a workshop for 24-7 emergency repairs. We are there to look after our existing customers, really, close a feedback loop, and also offer and help customers with a way so they have visibility of where their stuff's at. Because, you know, one of the customers that we're dealing with right now, they're sending us probably five items a week and they're getting quite a few failures. But for them, it's really frustrating because their supplier right now doesn't, they don't know when they're going to get the quotes, they don't know where they're at, they have to keep chasing it, they don't really know the status of anything. Whereas this here solves so many problems on the on that point of view of just visibility of where they're where their the repairs are. Also, you know, it updates so as soon as we do send it into quotation, it goes to quotation, they can see that. And it also puts the ball in air court. Well, we need the purchase order now to proceed. So this whole idea as well, it allows people to be able to track where they're at with it. But not only that, it has that you know the the philosophy around reliability around that. And and the beautiful thing is like, you know, I I don't think I've really told the story about Darren, have I, in terms of where we came from with that. Like, so Darren Wright, he is a very good engineer. Okay, I think everyone here at Maintain understands how incredible this guy is at fixing things.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

I think we're very fortunate to as someone that didn't know Darren, obviously Will's gonna give you the story now. It's it's there's not many engineers left with that level of uh competence, and he's just been there.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Yeah, I have a huge respect for Darren because he used to mentor me. Okay. So back in the day when I was in Eric's, I was on the workshop, I was winding, and then when I kind of made the step over a little bit to the fit inside, because I did a little bit of that, because I really I wanted to change bearings, you know. I'm doing a lot of winding, I want to change bearings. He kind of took me under his wing. And a lot of the people at the time there didn't really have the time of day for me, all right? And he was one that always had time for me, and another guy called Ben at the time. He was kind of the apprentice, I was the trainee, and he was always there for us, all right? Whenever we needed help, he was there. And he always had the philosophy about doing things right in the first time. He had a reliability mindset from that point. And I remember that. And a lot of people at the time, do you know what? We're actually moaning about him because oh, he takes too long. He take, you know, why is he taking ages on this?

SPEAKER_01 22:13

But if you look at the quality of their work compared to his, you would see the- I remember walking in one day and he had just done this uh uh SEW Helical Bevel and the paint finish. I could see my reflection your dinner off that that that paint job.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

But that is what That's the quality we want for that. That's what we that's what we're aiming for. It needs to be like even from the internal job, whatever, but he as well has a methodical way of working, and he's very precision anyway. And now the precision tools that we've got added to that, there's just no one more would trust to be able to dismantle and put the motor together. Like I've known him for a very long time, and how beautiful is it now to be able to offer him a job where he can actually get the enjoyment out of his way of working, because it was never respected there. Do you know do you know what I mean? And now we've got the you know the repair centre, and even on the wall there, you know, precision, you know, we've got you know on the wall, you know, precision maintenance, you know, as a as a visual aid there. It's it's beautiful to see that actually come true as well. So, you know, look, he is literally heading up the workshop. We've got another guy coming in there as well. Obviously, got Harry been working there a little bit, it's starting to really take off, and I can see I can see why now because what we're offering isn't the same as most repair centres, you know what I mean. So if you are interested in that, come have a chat. We can give you a tour, we can show you what we're doing with some of these portals and stuff. And honestly, I just generally think it's a game changer. I think if you guys have got lots of repairs away and you want to be understand the status and want to have that root cause analysis done, and you want to be able to eliminate these defects, because there's the thing for us, we don't want them to come back. I mean, it's a weird philology. It's like when we send them out, we don't want to see you again.

Air Leaks Waste Money Until Fixed

SPEAKER_01 23:58

You know what I mean? The night the thing is, is with all of the uh systems that we're building, the idea is to try and and as easy as possible, give as much visibility to the process. It's not send at the motorway, I don't know where it's gone. It's not I've had an air leak survey done what next, you know. We want to be able to air leak surveys are a prime example. The amount of times we've done a lot of air leak surveys, you know, it's so quantifiable air leaks, it's so easy to find an air leak and for us to exact to a real good estimation figure out what the cost is of that air leak. And yet the number of companies we do air leak surveys for who don't then go and fix those air leaks afterwards. I mean, we've just done one recently for a customer we work very closely with, and I've got full confidence they'll go fix these air leaks. 4,700 pounds, eight air leaks were identified, 4,700 pounds of waste money that is being wasted on the bottom line in energy cost to run that compressor, to build that pressure up that we are just releasing to the atmosphere. But we have now that full traceability. I haven't implemented it just yet, but I said to Will the other day, I said, Well, why don't we once a month for customers that are integrated in our AirLeak portal send an email out that says, just as a reminder, you currently have eight leaks outstanding in your repair port that are costing you£4,700.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

I would want that. I get it though. I'm a manager and director of this company. How many times have I had people freezing?

SPEAKER_01 25:22

£3,000 emails sitting in their inbox.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

He's over-exaggerating now. But like, listen, like, we are busy people, I get it. I understand.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Especially engineering managers. They're they're getting flight, you know, sales emails.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

They're getting all sorts of stuff. And I know they want to do this work, I get it. And some of the customers I know now are exactly in the same boat as me, but I also have to correlate that. But do you know what? I would quite like a reminder. Because these things are going to creep up on you, and and also, especially stuff like AirLeaks, if you don't deal with it, you are wasting money.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Well, you've wasted money because you paid us to do an Air League survey and don't. But not even that.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Every single month, though, this is the thing that you don't address it, you're you that money's been wasted. Yeah. That's what you have to think about, isn't it? Like, and that's the thing with when it comes down to energy costs and resource, it's another thing. Like, generally, a lot of resource won't get allocated for air leaks because oh, we're reactive. Well, we've got other problems to deal with. Well, let's get out of that reactivity so we can start dealing with these problems, right? Like we can't we can't say, oh yeah, we're gonna be reactive forever. Like, we've got to get an aim to get the hell out of reactivity. So if anyone is in that reactivity right now, you've got to do something about it. Like, let's get out of it. Because we can, it's not easy, but when you've got a robust roadmap and you stick to it, you will come out of it.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Or, you know, there's obviously a lot to get out of reactive maintenance, but for some things, you know, we are available to support with resources or skills if you don't have it, particularly with air leak servers, you know. That£4,700, for us to have an engineer come in to repair those air leaks is not gonna cost£4,700. You you're basically, if you go and repair all those air leaks, whether you do it or we do it, whatever amount of time that you spend on labour to get that done will always be less than£4,000. You're not gonna spend four grand.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

But not even that. If really you should spend that straight away because you'll save the money.

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Yeah, but remember air leaks is a recurring annual savings. Yes, that's what I'm saying. It's four thousand seven hundred.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Every yeah, every yeah, exactly, until you fix that.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

So but it'll increase if your electricity cost keeps going up year and year and year.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Well, exactly that as well. So the thing is because it's coming out now, and this is why we spoke about on the previous podcast about your reliability journey. The quicker you go through the process, the quicker you start to do it.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

It'd be really interesting is if companies could start having a KPI of wasted money per year.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

Oh, that'd be painful.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Sent a motor away from repair, it failed straight after service because it was a poor repair. That whole maintenance cost wasted. Yeah. Uh didn't repair anything.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Year on year on year on year. You know what I mean? Didn't do anything. Because it's not just the potential defects that got missed through vibration analysis. Didn't do nothing about it, another waste. And that's the thing, it's like we've got to control that wastage. But again, it's the it's the philosophy around it. You've got to have the visibility though. But visibility, but this is where these systems that we've got, this is why systems that we build and systems that you guys have, whether that's CMMS, whether that's you know, pools that are made for a specific function, are so vital to your process. So if you're not using systems right now to your advantage and stuff like that, how are you ever gonna have the the the visibility on where you're at? And a lot of these systems we're building, okay, is for the customer, but it's also for us to check our metrics. And I think are we delivering the report on time every single week? Are we doing are we closing jobs out? Are we are we are we actually doing the things that we're telling people to do? We can actually measure that as a KPI as well. How many things do we identify to how many things actually get fixed?

Making Maintenance Systems Easier To Use

SPEAKER_01 28:43

And I think you you pull, you know, we have our own internal systems that we use and maintain reliability. We have systems that we build that are customer-facing to give them that level of visibility. But to pull this completely right round into the reliability and maintenance process. I remember listening to a video at the start of the year about business management and stuff, and it was all like, you know, your business is a series of processes and systems, you know, to get engineers to do certain things, performance stuff. And if you refine those systems and processes, train them out well, you will have a much more smoother operations overall. That's why we're looking at all of our systems inside maintaining and go, how do I make that easier? How do I make that less more efficient? How do I make that less prone to error? How do I make it easier to train a new engineer in doing that process? And the same is within the maintenance processes within a plant. You're gonna have work management systems, you're gonna have lubrication processes. How do we want our engineers to lubricate effectively? You need to start to think about how do we make these processes as easy as possible. I don't go into there's not one factory I go into, and I know it's not gonna change, but I'll talk about it anyway, that there's not one site I go into that effectively uses SAP. I know. Because it's so painful for engineers to use. Whereas the new, when you look at the new modern maintenance management platforms like Maintain X, being used, it's easy, it's it's understandable. So you need to have a look within your, if you're trying to implement reliability, just as how how we are trying to help customers with reliability, if you're trying to implement reliability, you you are a manager of your maintenance program. What systems and processes do you have within the organization that is going to make this as easy as possible through engineers? Do you have a clear work management process? How what do you, you know, we want as reliability engineers when we have breakdowns or problems? What do we want? We want failure codes. We want to understand how the machine failed. We need to devise a way to make that as easy as possible for c uh our engineers to enter to take out the ambiguity to make it easy for them to do. Because what are they focused on? Well, fixing the machine, getting it back going again.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Yeah, exactly, but not even our engineers at the time and place. If we log that information, there's no oh do the report layer, what was it? What was this? Yeah, you know, the the the ability as well to be more accurate if you can input information at the point of time, at that time and place that generates something later on for you to be able to do. Do you know how valuable that is? That's like, you know, we got everyone, and I again I know it's another kind of system, but we've got something called work photos. It's such an easy thing. It's just a put it's just an app where you can put notes and photos, but you can share it with everyone. And I tell all the guys at all the times that you're doing your observations, and we can probably build this, we could pull our don't want to put the idea in Will's head, but you know, there'll be number, there'll be system number 11 that's half done. Um, but it worked for us, you know, just to be able to see the same photos in the day. And it's like, right, at the time of anything that you need to capture it, capture it. Well, we've photo it, then you've got mate a picture says a thousand words, doesn't it? You see that, I thought, ah, that's what we want.

Simplifying RCM And FMECA With Apps

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Well, we've now started like these platforms. Okay, we use it, we have custom, like I said, custom facing the internals, but I've now started to have chats with um a few customers. So we're now putting together this is very customer specific, but eventually we might use it internally, which was so they're starting they're doing their RCM studies, okay? They're picked their, they've done their criticality assessments and they've got sort of five assets that they're currently doing with their engineers. Their engineers have done ARPA, but they're not a reliability engineer, ARPE. And so they are now going through those RCM studies. And we've done training with them on how to do RCM and Famikas and failure modes. And it's all this big Excel spreadsheet. You know, got my severity, my occurrence, my detectability, my RPN score, whether or not I should take action or not. And, you know, this particular site, you know, they're not, we like to use the phrase sometimes, you know, we're not taking, we're not sending astronauts to the moon. Okay, we're just making a food product. So we don't need to overly complicate it. But it's still, it's time consuming. RCM studies can often get bogged down. So we've developed now, which hopefully we might use in in within maintain, and I'm it's a very early stage development, but it's the ability to create these basic RCM studies for these machines, whether it's a blower or an important pump, within this platform. So, what what can they now do? So, what they can do is they can create their RCM study, they can list the functions, they can list the functional failures, but then they can import failure modes. What well I want to import all the failure modes to do with a motor. Well, a mo a motor fails all in the same way. What type of belt drive is it? It's belt-driven. Import all the failure modes to do with a belt drive. The severity and the currents are predefined because we can at roughly figure that out, but that allows them to then go in and tweak them afterwards. So what was taking them potentially a couple of days, they can flesh out the majority of that within a day.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Because I think the time it takes to do an RCM or kind of like a Famika is not down to when you've got the scoring, scoring is the scoring. Yeah, it's your ability to be able to identify what their numbers are. Yeah, you don't yeah, and also not, you know, when you're doing that in your head, you've got a number of failure modes, it's gonna be very overwhelming for you. Do you know what I mean? So I think that whole process allows it to be simplified. The fact of I think that's I think generally, I think with famigas and RCMs, the reason why people don't do them is not because they don't want to, it's because it's overwhelming to do, and it's like, oh crap, like what do I think of here? There's lots of variables. So again, another system that can be built to take that kind of onus off them a little bit to give them the freedom to actually do it without thinking.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

I think I think like RCMs and famigas can get uh like a lot of people get up on them in in the output from them, and they can end up with this huge list of actions. But at the most basic level of reliability, we just want to have a conversation about how they get bogged down though, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 34:48

And that's I think also don't get bogged down in in one of them and not do it because you think crap it's a bit too difficult. You're better off having more data and information that might not be 100% accurate, but have that conversation is done and have the outputs of them rather than have nothing at all. Because I think a lot of companies, but again, this is something that we can help with. We you know what Will did was amazing because he went with the customer and he went through it and he went through the process. That was a mentorship that we talked about last time. Going through how he would deal with it individually. Well, we we problem solved that.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

That's a good example because they were there, we mentored them on how to complete the Famika, we took and the RCM studies, we've shown them how to do it post-ARP training. They've gone away and developed their own Excel spreadsheet and they've started doing these studies. Brilliant. Then, as a mentor, though, I'm coming in and they're getting they're getting stuck on things, they're finding it a bit troublesome. So then I'm thinking to Right, well, how do I solve this problem? How do I make this easier for them to do? Because we're not we're not in a big organization, we've got lots of trained reliability engineers and they're pumping them out the door and they know how to do it and they're managing the systems. We've got a small organization with only a few engineers who really their job is not reliability engineering, it's managing the process. How do we improve this? Well, you know, we're developing all these apps right now. Can I make this process of doing an RCM study or a Famika easier for them? Yeah, I can. I can build an app, I can make them import failure modes in, I can make this pro and I can export a report off the back of it, and now we've got a button that once they've done the Famika or the RCM study and they can export the full maintenance plan.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

I love it. And this is what I think this is what this podcast is about. It's about showing people that we've created these systems to make life easier and make it more practical for people to get the information and have the information in one place. There's valuable that that's value there, but these systems can only be built from experience of problems, and a lot of these systems that are built are to solve a problem. So you don't want a system that's there for the sake of it to give you data. You have to be able to everything that you're doing within your plant and everything you're doing maintenance-wise, should really be there to be able to A solve a problem that you have, or B, make life easier or give you more visibility. That's what we're going to see.

SPEAKER_01 37:07

The nice thing is, is we're living and breathing in those problems. Yeah. And there are a lot of platforms and systems that actually are like I won't name the company, but there's a company that offers a lubrication system that tracks all your lubrication. That system has been designed really around that company trying to offer a product.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Yes, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Rather than being solution, I don't get me wrong, it's going to solve some level of solution, right? But I look at it and I'm like, you know, yeah, okay, it's great, but this is really complex. And as an engineer, I'm not going to use this. I need something on my phone. I've lubricated it two shots, submit. I've done this three shots.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

But mate, there's a practicality with the lubrication side that needs to be simple. I've been there. I don't want to fill out all this crap. I just I just want to I want to just make sure that I'm logging what I'm doing and I'm using the right grease and I'm I'm putting the right amount in. And generally, in terms of that maintenance task, it is important, but when you're logging it, you can view what you're doing. You've got visibility on what you're doing, and you can make sure you keep on top of it. Because a lot of sites don't.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

We've got we have to with any systems that we're developing, whether and and especially those that we're expecting customers to interact with, we have to remove as many barriers as possible. It's got to be so easy for them.

Build From Problems Then Wrap Up

SPEAKER_00 38:21

Yeah, you're right. And I think that's where we'll kind of lead out the podcast. You know, systems can make your life a lot easier. If you guys are interested in anything to do with any of these systems that we've got, or how to create them yourself. Well, maybe how to create them yourself, you know. Like we are problem solvers and we love to do that. You know, I think there's I think this evolved for us. I generally see a big bright future for this, and I'm really excited to see where it goes for us as a business and as well how we can solve other people's problems. But if you've got generally the system's built out of a problem, so if you've got any issue or problem right now, it's like, oh my god, I need to get visibility on something. It could do we could do with CM, it could be do with Alzheimer's, it could do with ultrasound, it could be with Earlix, anything that you've got some form of problem with, come hit us up with it. Because I'm sure that we've got to be able to do that. We could probably build something for you. Well, I do know what we probably already built it, generally have, and I think that's the thing. We're doing this for a lot of customers now, but I think this is why we had to do this podcast because what you're doing right now is is blowing me away in terms of it is.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

I mean, I think it's blowing me away, don't worry. I'm like, oh, I can do that.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

Yeah, definitely. So um, yeah, anyway, guys, thank you for tuning in and we will be rolling on to the next one. So keep keep keep going, keep keep sharing the podcast. Please, as well, if you haven't, please follow us on on Spotify or whatever you've got so you get the notifications regularly because we're gonna start to amp up these podcasts and we'll start to have more meaningful conversations. Take care, guys. Have a great day.