Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The thing you got to remember about maintenance and production is from the outside looking in, it would almost seem as if we're natural born enemies to production or operations. Maintenance is a net negative. They don't see the effects that what we do potentially have two, three weeks, four weeks, three months, a year in the future.
They see you're taking my equipment down right now I have this target that I have to meet. You're not making me any money. You're costing me downtime, therefore you're costing me money.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome to why they Fail, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on why continuous improvement efforts fail. Buckle up, because we're not here for motivational fluff. We're dissecting the short sighted decisions and leadership agendas that sabotage CI success. But don't worry, we'll clue you in to the few simple keys to success to avoid these pitfalls. If you're ready for the truth, let's do this.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Welcome to another episode of why they Fail where we cut straight through corporate buzzwords and get into the real operational truths behind manufacturing and continuous improvement. Today we are joined by John Eccles, a veteran maintenance leader who started in the trades back in 2009 and has spent years on the plant floor working across electrical, mechanical and automated programming systems. John brings deep frontline experience and and reliability and plant maintenance, showing exactly how continuous improvement methodologies like Lean Six Sigma and Total Productive Maintenance intersect with daily factory operations. In this conversation, we expose why so many facilities run their machines into the ground. How fancy predictive sensors get rendered useless by production pressure, and what happens when teams resort to pencil whipping work orders just to keep computer dashboards green. Let's jump right in, John. What was your catalyst? What got you into this? What started you down the journey of this mixture of maintenance and continuous improvement?
[00:02:03] Speaker A: When I entered into the maintenance field back around 2009.
As you spend more and more time in the trades, be it electrical, mechanical, programming, whichever it is that you choose, you can't help but see the pitfalls and the failure points of the different processes and things that are put in place, the things that don't engage the technicians, that don't engage the managers. And it turns into more of a lack of edge school type attitude where things are swept under the rug, allowed to make the numbers look good, but the equipment's not going to necessarily reflect that. But as long as it looks good in the computer system, then everybody's happy. When you see these things and you see the equipment that you're charged with taking care of, degrading and getting worse and worse and the reliability spiraling out of control.
You can't help but gravitate towards the methodologies of continuous improvement, be it six Sigma, Kaizen, what have you, to look for ways to improve those processes to make them more efficient, gain more engagement and improve the maintenance programs as a whole. Because by doing that, when you improve maintenance, you improve the operational efficiency of a plant and then you improve the end product. So it's beneficial for everybody across the board.
[00:03:24] Speaker D: My time in manufacturing in particular, I've seen different kind of maintenance environments. The type that I see the most is you've got a plant manager, you got leaders, you got supervisors, and they beat these machines to death. Things like planned downtime, stopping to do maintenance is that gets in the way of production. In order to save 20 minutes of downtime for planned maintenance, they want that 20 minutes to produce. But what happens is down the road and not very far down the road that thing goes down, then it's down for hours or days or weeks. I see this everywhere I go where the short term thinking, the short term gain, we have a long term detriment that actually cause so much more problems. I know that companies that have continuous improvement in place and have a good of continuous improvement really look at this differently because they understand that it's like owning a car. If you don't change the oil, if you don't do basic maintenance to it over time, it's not going to last as long. Whereas most leaders I see of manufacturing plants don't subscribe to that. They subscribe to let's get the numbers, let's get the product out and then we'll deal with the machines when we have to deal with them.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Well, the thing you gotta remember about maintenance and production is from the outside looking in, it would almost seem as if we're natural born enemies to production or operations. Maintenance is a net negative. They don't see the effects that what we do, what it can potentially have two, three weeks, four weeks, three months, a year in the future.
They see you're taking my equipment down right now I have this target that I have to meet.
You're not making me any money. You're costing me downtime, therefore you're costing me money.
That's the way they see it.
And I understand that the companies that we support in maintenance, we're there to make sure that they're operating efficiently and that everybody is successful and we have to partner together. Now. Analysis of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I believe is how the old Saying goes. And it ties in perfectly to this because sometimes if I come to you as a maintenance manager and I tell you, hey, I need to take this equipment down, We've noticed an issue with it that we can correct now in 15 minutes, but if we keep pushing it and this component breaks, then you're looking at several hours of downtime.
So you sacrifice 20 minutes now to save two, three, four hours later on.
Perfect example of that is in the last plant that I worked in, had a very similar conversation to that and was told that we could not take the equipment, that we had to keep pushing, keep running. And it ended up with the failure of one of the most important conveyors in the building and three days of the entire plant being shut down behind that failure, when it could have been something that was easily fixed within probably a 30 or 45 minute window, they couldn't see the opportunity ahead of them to go ahead and correct this problem.
They saw that I've got these numbers that I've got to meet today, and if you take this equipment down, then I'm not gonna be able to meet those numbers.
And that's unfortunate. But it's also common.
As a maintenance manager, I have to make a point of partnering with my partners in the production side, the operation side of things, to help them become more educated in the importance of these things and also to help them to be able to see how a. I'm invested in their success. I'm not here to help them fail, I'm here to help them succeed. And if I'm making a recommendation is for that reason.
[00:07:24] Speaker D: Let's kind of talk about the, the interaction between continuous improvement and maintenance. You said something that I believe they shouldn't be. Two things. Continuous improvement should be melded into how we maintain our machines. There are lots of companies out there that take part in what's called TPPM, right? TPPs, Preventative and Predictive maintenance, et cetera. I want to ask you, most CI programs, most continuous improvement programs, within 18 months because of lip service? Because people say, I want a maintenance guy, I want tpbm, or I want preventative and predictive maintenance. But it's just really executive lip service because when it starts getting in the way of production, we tend to go back. What are the earliest stages of those red flags that you've seen at a company?
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Well, having been at the forefront of the introduction of new predictive maintenance policies, everybody's always very excited about it at first, just as you said, and everybody's touting the benefits of it. From the site level to the executive level. It's going to save this much money. It's going to make our maintenance technicians this much more efficient. We're going to be able to accomplish this, we're going to be able to do that. And it all sounds wonderful. On the forefront where the wake up call comes from is when that predictive maintenance system is starting to throw all sorts of warnings out there. You know, this equipment has a bad bearing that's going bad. We're seeing an overheating trend in this motor over here. This conveyance is belt is running off true. And it's causing an issue.
And these things start stacking up because historically speaking, in any sort of a manufacturing or production environment, nobody ever likes to take the equipment down. Even if it's to do scheduled PMs that are dictated by these continuous improvement programs. They don't want to actually give the equipment up to get these things done. So then those get skipped, the issues compound and they grow.
But in their computer system, most of these are designed to where these work orders have to be closed out that day within a certain time frame.
And it falls within your KPIs that if they're not closed out, if you have X amount of misses or a certain percentage of misses or what have you, then it counts against the maintenance group's KPIs, what they have to reach.
So to avoid that, what do the maintenance guys do?
There's a very commonly used term called pencil whipping, I. E. You've got a PM that has to be done. You have a predictive maintenance check that has to be done. The predictive maintenance system flagged as equipment.
And you have an hour to go inspect it and respond to that flag.
But they've also got all these other calls coming in and production doesn't want to give the equipment up. So what do you think they do? They go into that CMS program, EAM program, apm, whatever, and they click and say, yes, all this has been done.
They get very proficient at this. They can click through these checklists like lightning.
So when you look at it and you look at the actual reports and the metrics that are coming out, everything is in the green.
And if you are a director level or vice president level and you're sitting three states away solely looking at the numbers that are coming out and being generated by these programs, you think everything is great and wonderful and the whole program's working wonderfully.
But then that catches up. Once that catches up to you and all the equipment starts having these redundant simple problems that are causing a lot of lost production time. Then that's when the continuous improvement initiative falls apart.
Because everybody that touted how wonderful it was is now looking for that scapegoat. Why we've implemented all this, everything says it's great.
Where's the failure at? Well, it's not going to be.
We wouldn't give them the equipment.
It's going to be, oh well, this program's not efficient. This program doesn't work. It says we're good to go, but the equipment's falling apart. And the next step to that is to abandon the entire thing.
So it starts. Your first red flag is when you see technicians that are just filling out paperwork without truly doing the work.
And it compounds from there because as soon as they start doing that and your preventative maintenance gets behind, then your reactive maintenance will go up, your equipment downtime will go up, and then you end up, end up with either the abandonment or significant changing of the whatever maintenance initiative or continuous improvement program you have.
[00:12:19] Speaker D: So we, we start out, we start out wanting to be proactive. We start out wanting to put systems in place. We start out wanting to make things visual. We start out wanting to understand what's going wrong. And then we start tagging things that are broken and, and those things pop up everywhere.
So, and this, this tends to get in the way of production and, and production always takes precedent. And then your guys start pencil whipping things because they, they, they have their duties. But again, because production takes precedence over maintaining your equipment. You know, one thing that I see in a lot of facilities is, is there's a maintenance department and there is a production department and they kind of butt heads, but there's no interaction between them as far as melding the two together.
So methodologies like tps, Total Productive Maintenance talks about autonomous maintenance where, you know, 80% of your, your maintenance can actually be done by your operators.
But we tend to move those apart and say, well, oiling a motor, that's not, that's my guy's job, is to make the part, not to do that when there's two concentric circles that could take over a lot of that with that autonomous maintenance. Why do organizations buy shiny new tech toys really before fixing basic equipment Standardization, how does that mature into what we're talking about?
[00:13:55] Speaker A: New toys gets a lot of praise. It makes headlines. It's the top thing in the company newsletter when they roll them out.
New monitoring solution, a new software package.
And anybody that's lived through major software changes doesn't celebrate those they Dread them because it never fails to shut the entire company down for at least a couple of days.
[00:14:19] Speaker D: Can you give me an example of a shiny new thing that somebody jumped at it at one of your companies and then. And how that was detrimental and how simplifying the process could. It could have made a more significant change.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. You have the big push nowadays is to predictive maintenance. There's many companies out there that are in this space now and it's typically going to be some sort of monitoring system. Sensors that are physically installed in the equipment, typically service mounted and they go through and they'll be thousands of these sensors installed throughout a plant. They're monitoring for vibration, they're monitoring for heat accumulation. If something is supposed to be moving in a perfect circle, it's looking for elliptical movements. Anything that's outside of the normal operating parameters for that equipment.
Absolutely amazing programs because it will tell you sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes months ahead of time when a piece of equipment is cool to fail. And it can save you so much trouble in having to replace multiple pieces of equipment to solve a problem when you can identify the small problem that's leading up to everything immediately and change it. These things get a lot of headlines in a company when they roll them out and they're not small investments for a large size plant. It can be hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to implement one of these things, especially if it's not at launch and previously installed when they build out the building.
But if it's company wide, you're looking at tens of millions of dollars to implement one of these systems. Throughout multiple sites, they're always presented as the thing that's going to change the world. Everything's going to get better on every aspect of the business because this is going to help the equipment to run better. But the secret to it is, is it doesn't help anything run better if nobody's acting on the alerts that it's giving them. The same thing goes back to the PMs. They roll these out and you've got this shiny new website to go to. And it gives you all of this great, just in depth information, graphs what your vibration level is on this bearing. And now it's spiking to this. We need to go look at it. Or this belt is now generating excess heat.
It's a wonderful thing.
But if it sends an alert to your maintenance department or if you don't have a dedicated maintenance department, you're production head and they say, oh, I don't have time for this. And they just click it off or they type an update into it to keep the person monitoring this on the other end of it from bothering them about it all day.
They'll say, oh yeah, we went and we checked on it and everything seems fine. We'll continue to monitor.
Now you've completely neutered the entire benefit and efficiency of these programs and they will get dropped like that.
[00:16:57] Speaker D: You're seeing these programs, these shiny new sensors that you put in, but because they haven't really addressed the underlying complexity of all the things that are going wrong, they just put this in place and then it sets off alarms. Then they don't have the time to react to those alarms. I see this a lot as well, where companies have implemented Lean or they've implemented some other methodology. They have Taktine boards, they have stuff on the wall, 5s safety, and nobody follows the tactile boards say that we have 30% efficiency, but nobody pays attention to it because they thought putting in these things is gonna fix the problem. But putting these things in and not using them to continuously improve the process, it's like we all want the easy button. We just want to put the thing in and then it's gonna magically fix all our problems.
And it doesn't. And when it doesn't, then we have all these things up on the wall. We've got tact, time boards, lean boards, we've got visual boards, but nobody uses them because there is no complexity that was removed to get to that point.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: You can also struggle to get buy in from the very people you're asking to use these systems, because half the time there's no training that's provided to them. And unless they've gone out on their own, say taken a course in Six Sigma to gain their dream belt, or they have a solid understanding of that methodology, or Lean methodology, the company might have a internal training program where they go to this website and they click on this link and they watch this 20 minute long video and it tells them that the initiative is 5S. And they've got to make sure that everything has a place and everything is in its place and it's all marked out and labeled. And you've got a square for your trash can, a square for your water bottle. I've seen these things get ridiculous, but
[00:18:50] Speaker D: sure. But if they don't have a purpose to improve production, it's just another thing that we put in place that has no effect.
This happens everywhere where I get calls. I want 5s. Kevin, can you come help us implement 5s or can you come train green belts? And I asked them, well, what's a catalyst for? What do you want it for? Want it to do halftime? They can't answer that question. They said, well, we just wanted to improve the process.
The same thing with maintenance.
We want maintenance to come in and fix stuff, but we won't really allow them to do that. We want tpm, we want predictive maintenance, preventative maintenance, but we don't take the time to implement the preventative part.
We just have them there as a show and then we run our machines into the ground. How can companies get out of this? It happens at every company. I'd say 90% of companies, just like 90% of companies, fail at continuous improvement. They probably fail at maintaining their equipment because they're so focused on production. Just like continuous improvement, we don't have time to continuously improve. We gotta make things. Those are the companies that end up eventually dying, going away. I can tell you thousands of stories of companies like this.
How did these companies get to reactive maintenance, where production is king, to get to preventative maintenance, where we take care of our machines to the point where they last us forever and they produce forever. There's one company that I visit, they're using World War II circuit machines and those machines run as well today as they did then.
So many different companies that try to get into this company to sell them new machines, new technology, and they won't do it because they can do exactly what they need to do with these older machines because they've been so well maintained.
They really promote continuous improvement and they promote using what they have rather than buying new stuff.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: It's funny that you mentioned World War II era equipment because I was actually on site at a plant this morning walking through a maintenance program where they're wanting to implement like an APM or a CMMS type PM monitoring system. And a lot of the equipment that they had in there was built in the 1920s or the 1940s and it's still running. I've been in precision grinding shops in the past where they had equipment from the 1920s, the 1930s and 1940s is still running today, just as well as it ever had.
And then on the other side of the shop they have a brand new CNC machine that is down every other day because there's some glitch in the programming or glitch in the software. There's a lot to be said about old Relay logic solid iron machines. They work. Are they as efficient as some of the stuff we have nowadays on the Forefront. Not necessarily necessarily, but if you look at total downtime, they probably are more efficient.
But you're asking about really how to get buy in. Like you were saying, you'll have these customers and you'll ask them, or clients rather, and you'll ask them why they want to implement 5s or what have you, and they can't even answer that simple of a question. They're wanting to overhaul their entire way of doing business, but they don't even understand why they want to overhaul it outside of, well, I read something about this and the improvements that it can bring, or somebody's told me something about it. And you can't expect something to make a change that you don't understand.
It's just like I tell technicians that have worked for me, you can't hope to fix a piece of equipment if you don't understand what that equipment's supposed to be doing in the first place. If you go to it and they say, operator says it's not doing X, Y, Z, and you're understanding that it was supposed to be doing something completely different in the first place, you don't even know where to start troubleshooting it at because you don't even understand how it functions. Same thing with this. If you're going to implement a continuous improvement program, one you can understand what you're wanting to implement, what the actual realistic goal to back into that is. The same thing comes with any sort of maintenance, continuous improvement initiative. Rolling out a predictive maintenance program.
A company that I worked for years ago rolled out a program called Max, and it was one of the earliest forms of predictive maintenance that I ever saw. It was amazing even for that early of an iteration. It would learn how many cycles this piece of equipment would run, learn what the failure rate of different components and then 200 cycles before that failure rate got there would notify the tech that was in charge of that, hey, this is fixing to fail. You need to go ahead and change. This part saved a ton of downtime. When implemented correctly, we were begging customers to let us implement it on their equipment for free so we could get it out there. But since it was unproven, all they were seeing was that we were going to take this equipment down for a day and they weren't going to have access to it for that day. You're telling me it's going to save me all this time in the future, but I've got to have it running out without any way to show them the benefits of it. You can't get that buy in.
[00:23:52] Speaker D: You said something earlier that stuck with me.
I implement ways for companies to continuously improve. In order to do that, they have to start from infrastructure. I get calls daily that people want a green belt train, they want 20 people to come to our training and go back and save the world. And I tell them it's not going to happen.
They're going to learn good things, they're going to become more viable in the marketplace, but they're not going to do anything for your company.
You really have to start from the beginning, from the infrastructure. You have to start from understanding what do you want to do, what's your KPI, what are the goals of your company in numbers. If I know what the goals of my company are in numbers, and I know the problems in my company because we have ways for our operators to identify waste and variation and we start seeing the problems that are attacking those numbers, those KPIs, well then we can bring maintenance into it. Maintenance just becomes a part of continuous improvement. If I'm having trouble from my bending department and that directly affects the KPI, then I need to have something in place. If I have a lot of downtime, I need to have something in place to mitigate that. Instead of just going out and arbitrarily starting to fix problems, I back up and say, where are the 20% of my problems that are causing me 80% of my pain? If I don't have my KPIs, I'm not going to really understand where my pain's coming from. I have to really gauge my process, not by, hey, this is the problem of the day. These are my KPIs, these are where I'm performing well. This is where I'm not performing well. And I'm not performing well because these certain machines are contributing to that because they're always down. And then improving that by improving the machines, improving the maintenance of those machines. All of a sudden it's not a daunting thing. The machines are part of a problem that are affecting our ability to meet our KPIs. When I put these things in place in continuous improvement, it becomes very hard to argue and say, well, we need to produce first because we're seeing our KPIs are being continuously hammered by the fact that we have 30% downtime on our machines.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: Having a solid KPI base, provable and illustratable KPIs, not just Phantom on a computer screen, but something that you can back up with hardcore facts. That way, when you're presenting this information, say I'm a maintenance manager in a plant and we've got a daily production meeting that I have to attend. And from my end of it as far as the maintenance of the building, the running of the text, I have to pass along this information to the plant manager so he understands what we've done, where we're falling at on this scale, what our goals are and what our effectiveness is, our oee, our overall equipment effectiveness. And if I just get up there and I just throw a bunch of numbers at him that are arbitrary and they sound great and they make everybody happy and you get applause in the meeting, but at the end of the day they're empty and they're meaningless. Then those are not provable, illustratable KPIs. That's just fluff.
[00:27:01] Speaker D: I heard you say a lot lip service. That's really what I'm seeing is the. There's a lot of correlation between what you deal with in maintenance and what other people deal with in continuous improvement. I've got 20 green belts. I want them to go out to save the world. That's a lip service because it's never going to happen. I want to hire a maintenance department. I want them to maintain my machines, but only when I say you can maintain them. I want to put in sensors in place so that I can see bad things happening. And then when I see a whole bunch of bad things things happening, I give it lip service because production takes precedence. It's an age old story. As I'm talking to you, I'm remembering where I saw this going on, where I see this in companies where it takes precedence. Nobody really understands that Prato concept. Or is it 20% of our processes where 80% of the problem is coming in and then focusing on that and focusing on maintenance. I want to ask you a couple more questions. How do reliability leaders shift from policing standards to coaching frontline problem solvers? How do we get from one to the other?
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Again, I keep coming back to buy in because that's really the root of everything. If you were to do a root cause analysis on where these problems are arising from, that's going to be one of your five whys. Do these people that are performing this work understand the why behind what they're doing? The first thing that you have to do is you've got to get them, anybody from production or maintenance out of firefighting mode and into fire prevention mode. It's one thing that you always see and I don't care what building you go to, what company you go to. In what country you're in, you're going to see maintenance techs chasing fires because that's typically what we always slide back into. And historically that's always been the mentality of what maintenance does. We fix the equipment when it breaks down.
Take your automobile for example. You don't think anything of it when you take it to the shop to have the oil changed in it. But you're going to think a lot about it if you skip several of those oil changes and now you're having it hauled into the shop because your motor's locked up.
[00:29:11] Speaker D: But that's what companies do. They don't practice the maintenance of the car. It's the other way around. Run and gun until it breaks down.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: What I have found that has been the most beneficial to me is one brutal honesty. I'm not, never have been, never will be the manager in your maintenance department that is going to tell you just what you want to hear. I'm not going to quote the pretty numbers to you. I'm going to tell you the hard truths. This is where you're failing at. This is the issues with your equipment. These are the issues with the text. These are the problems that you're seeing because they're directly related to either ineptitude on production associate side or as much as you hate to admit it, but just actual sabotage. Somebody doesn't want to do their job that day so they intentionally take a machine down. Some of them are very good at that and they can take a machine down for hours. Being able to convey that and have that trust between the two departments, production and maintenance and have that conversational ability to where I can tell them something and they understand that I'm actually trying to help them. That's part of buy in. Now. They understand we need to take this equipment down. We need to do this PM we need to investigate this alert from this high priced fancy preventative maintenance system that we've implemented. Once you get to that point, then they can start seeing. Now we're starting to follow this path and my equipment reliability is going up, my equipment failure is going down, my productivity is coming up. It's just like anything else. When you're fixing these problems, there's always a painful transition. Just like with you. People want you to come in and train 20 green belts and then they want them to save their company and then they're going to send a bunch of people to you that probably have zero interest in learning this stuff. They're just told, hey, you've got to go take this class and then they expect them to come back and be gung ho about implementing these things that they may or may not even understand, have no buy in for it. And then when it doesn't have the effects that the business owner or the manager wants it to have, what's the first thing they say? This is not effective. Six Sigma is pointless. Look, I had all these people trained and it didn't do any good. Like you said earlier, they didn't even understand what they were asking for the first first place. Same thing with maintenance. You've got to bridge that gap.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. What John shared today drives home a critical lesson for every leader. You cannot inspect, monitor or high tech your way out of poor machine discipline and operational silos. When production quotas force maintenance teams to pencil whip work orders, you are simply borrowing time at an astronomical interest rate until catastrophic downtime brings the entire plant to a standstill. Long term reliability requires brutal honesty, direct alignment between production and maintenance, and genuine infrastructure built on actionable key performance indicators rather than corporate lip service. If you want to dive deeper into why transformation initiatives stumble and how to build processes that actually succeed, make sure to grab a free PDF copy of my book why they Fail and the Simple Key to Success through the link in the show notes below. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is a completely free way to support what we do. Make sure you are also following the podcast on both Spotify and Apple so you get every new episode instantly and leave us a five star review to help more continuous improvement leaders find the show.
