Gary Wood with Fluke Reliability

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

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Scott. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's get all

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01:19

So are you passionate? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I tend to go down the rabbit hole a timer. That's okay.

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He's been very kind and very understanding and very patient with me. So kudos to him, because of technology. Yuck. Hey, by the way, I told you autonomous vehicles. We drove in autonomous vehicles, which is the best thing next to sliced bread? Yeah, you got to do it. Got to put that on the product. Put it, put it. Get your Uber, get your Waymo, boom. Get it all connected. Get in one. And you're you. You will not be disappointed. You will not I've got to try talk me into it. You have to. It's all good. All right, for the listeners out there, give us a little background on who you are.

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03:19

I thought I'd throw a complimentary Yeah,

03:23

but yeah, had a had a great career. Wouldn't trade it for anything. And love every stop I was at, love the people I worked with and auto maintenance technician to help make my life easier, and to CMS programs,

03:35

Yeah, but see again, this is interesting from from that perspective, you know how long I've been having this conversation about maintenance and reliability and asset management forever. Yeah, forever, you know, because I'm only 45 forever, it just happens all the time. Is it? It requires someone like you in a leadership role to be able to just say I'm all in I am going to do that. Why don't we have that?

04:06

Honestly, you know, I've done a webinar a while back, and honestly, I think it's the sign of the times, you know, like Prince said, right? It's just a sign of the times people's not as as focused on what they need to do to make things better internally and for their teams, right? Everything is dependent on something else within CMS, within manufacturing industry, you know, so a lot of people want to sit at the desk and run from the you can't do that. You've got to do your gamble walks. You got to check on your teams. You know, it's always a positive to know just a little bit of the personal aspect of your maintenance teams. You know, Hey, Dale, How's your mom doing? I heard you went in the hospital or what, you know, just little things like that. Yeah. Maintenance tech says, wow. He really cares, right? So it really makes him. Gives him a go, yeah? Gives him drive, you know. So it's not just his family and people and friends that care about him. He knows now work cares about him. So he'll, he'll run through a wall for

05:13

you, yeah? And it's, it's, it's a profession. It's a from a manufacturing and just an industrial perspective, it's a it's a necessity. Yeah, it is. It is. How do you deal with, I'm sorry, what's your role with fluke? See, still scatterbrain from technology.

05:29

So I am a customer success manager there with fluke. And you know, customer success, you know you have implementation, and you have all these other portals within CMS providers, but customer success is what takes that client and takes them through the future, right? So we want to take them by the hand. Look, this is based on what we're having in meetings about, you know, if they're wanting to tie in some condition based monitoring, right? Okay, let's look at the best way to do that. What are we looking for in that condition based monitoring. Are you looking for reporting? Are you looking for the equipment to flag? Are you looking to, you know, increase asset lifespan, sure to all of these things. So definitely taking the customer by the hand into the future, because a CMS system is like a living document, right? As you as your company lives and grows, so does your CMA, MS, okay, so we've got to continue taking that to the future with the clients, nurturing them and making sure they're headed in the right direction. How do

06:28

you how do you keep people from pencil whipping into your CMNs, yeah, ever evolving, growing. The

06:36

only thing, the only thing I can the only thing in technology today that kind of helps with that is, you know, the sign off on work orders. That helps some, yeah, you know, they can still pencil, whip it per se. You got to be strong internally. Okay. See, once again, it's a human equation. It's a human equation. Everything is a human factor. So you have to look at the KPIs. Look at your reports. Look at your your asset down times, right? If I know this gentleman has been on this equipment in the last two weeks, yet, I'm have a downtime of it, you know? Is it the same issue? Is he pencil whipping or Yeah, you know what I mean. So, and then you have other variables. How old's the equipment? Right? Equipment, you know, is like our cars, they have personalities. Sometimes they'll run X amount of hours with no inter no intervention, and sometimes, you know, they don't last long at all. So asset, life span, I guess, plays a big factor in that as well.

07:40

So as a customer success manager, let's, let's, let's say I'm interested in deploying some sort of a solution, and I'm talking to you. Do you ever have to have the conversation saying, Well, Scott, that's great. However, you need to do this, that and the other thing, before we even venture into this particular desire of you being able to manage and monitor or whatever? Well,

08:03

you know, I stay out of the internal processes because, you know, you don't want to get in, yeah, but you want to be successful. I understand that. But the best thing to do is just look at what they're trying to do, what people they have in the system. Now, I do advise a lot of clients have their teams involved in a decision making process that creates that team buy in. Yeah, right. Maybe that's something that some of these pencil whippers are looking for. Yeah, they didn't reach out to me see how I like it. I'm gonna just pencil whip it. Yeah. You know, a lot of times that's the case. A lot of times it's new technology. Maintenance teams are scared to death of new technology, so we want to incorporate them with that. Hey, how do you like this system? Test this out. Give me your feelings. Only you know, then you have a team buy in. Now you're looking at gaining world class, getting 90% plus on those KPIs. Yeah, that so you really got to have your team buy in with everybody. That's the that's the only way I know, as a CSM externally, to get involved

09:04

with that. Yeah, it's, it's that. It's the, well, I'm gonna because of inflation, it's the million dollar question. It's not a $10,000 it's a million dollars. Million dollar question on how do you create that culture, that that reliability, culture within your organization that has that sense of pride and focus to be able to do it with effectively, yeah, and with a level of competence so that you can manage those assets right?

09:34

So I had one stop, and I'm venture down the rabbit hole here, yeah, where I had my introductory meeting that Monday morning. Everybody here's your new maintenance manager, yada yada, yada yada. And I actually had a technician take and pull me off to the side back in the parts room, and told me, you know, what are you doing here? We don't need you to come in and change everything here. So. Thought, and I looked him in the eye, and I said, I'm not gonna change anything you're doing. I'm gonna change the way you do it and make you better. In the end, remember that gentleman that I told you would walk through the wall? That's the type of gentleman he was. He'd do anything I asked of him, and done it 150% so that bleeds through your team.

10:23

So, so take us through something like that, that transform, transformation. Hi, I'm a company. We're venturing into this world of reliability. We're, we've heard about it for the past 35 years, and now we're deciding to do it. We're just now deciding to do it so we're committed now take us through some sort of a use case where you've seen success.

10:54

Well, I mean, you know, I've had clients in the past that I've worked with that I actually went on site one time in I think it was Michigan, Traverse City, Michigan, I believe it was no apologies. It was Grand Rapids, Michigan.

11:10

You offended a bunch of people from Grand Rapids. Now, I don't know.

11:15

So I showed up on site and we had a couple of guys that just and they're older gentlemen, you know, guys our age, we just, we don't like the change. We just talked about this while ago. We don't like change. We don't like technology. We're scared to death. It's going to replace this, this, any other, has nothing to do with replacing anybody. It has everything to do with getting the most out of our assets, you know. And people just don't see that. And once you go in and explain why we're doing this, why we need you to apply every minute of time you spent on a work order, conditioning this asset, parts and all that, once you explain why we're doing it, it tends to go over a little better. So

11:58

yeah, and we've all been down that road. It's it, you know, from the use of technology and solutions and using them, right? Yep, it makes, it makes your life easier. It

12:09

does the work life balance. Yes,

12:11

yes. But what about it's

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12:54

Wow, see, that's, that's what's out there. That's, that's, yeah, that's sort of that silver lining that exists. It might be some heavy lifting in the beginning and maybe some gnashing of teeth and complaining

13:07

long hours. I mean, it's going to take that in the beginning. How do

13:11

you sustain it? Let's say, for example, I've had this conversation a number of times, and I would love to hear your insights. So I've got a lot of inefficiencies out there, and I'm working and I'm really committed to my my my reliability program. Okay, now we're working everything out, and it's operating as a machine. And then there's a new executive that comes in, and he wants to, and she wants to, or it wants to cut costs, and it decides that, hey, this is where we're going to do we're going to sweat the assets a little bit more, we're going to cut back on maintenance, and we're going to do that, and then all of a sudden, it doesn't work anymore. How do you how do you ensure that that culture survives those executives. Well,

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you have to have.

15:00

You've got to show the receipt. Show it in your report. Yeah, come with the receipts. Because everybody says nowadays, bring your receipts. We know when that new executives coming, that's your time to get your facts in line. Get your receipts ready. Do it, yep, be prepared. Don't sit out.

15:16

What do you see? What do you see in the future? I mean, what? What fun stuff that you guys got going at fluke,

15:21

ah, you know, I really like the Azima stuff, the vibration a love that. It

15:29

sounds like an adult beverage. It

15:30

does. I really like the Azima connect assets, okay, a lot of PLC data, data gathering stuff like that, giving me live data on what my assets are currently doing. You know, I've used that pretty much throughout my career, and I've used condition based monitoring to determine what my Pm is, right? Okay, if I have an asset that is supposed to by pm go by quarter, okay, but it's not going over two months, then I'm gonna back that pm up to two months. So now I'm gonna do away with that. You know, that corrective downtime, that unrecorded downtime, things like that. So using condition based monitoring to massage I like to call my PM, keeps everything in check. Condition based monitoring also, you know, once it gives you the flags, the reporting whether you're within parameters outside whatever the case may be, it helps you get ahead of things, especially and you know, the one thing that that condition base is truly all about is the downtime lags that we see, you know, And back in the day, a machine would go down, and it's not, it's not immediately recorded. Right. Operator may be down the line, working on something else, right, coming back, doing his, you know, his production run, what have you it may be 30 minutes before he finds that that one particular machine is down. Okay? So you've lost 30 minutes there. He's going to fill out a request. How much time to the request was approved, and once it's approved, how many, how much time in past till it was assigned? Condition based monitoring goes past all of that. It lets you know up front, hey, here it is,

17:16

and it's getting better all the time. Yeah, yeah, especially with the Zima, where Azima, you've got just a data lake of just squiggly lines and vibration and all that stuff and and it just keeps getting better and better and better and more refined,

17:31

exactly. And the more life instance we have, the more we can take you mentioned it while ago, the more we can take the human factor out, the better we're going to get. Okay, that doesn't mean you're gonna lose your job. Don't mean you're gonna lose your job. You're still gonna have your job, because somebody's got to do the work. Yeah, okay, so, but yeah, once we take that human element, and it's not really on the maintenance side, it could be production, okay, yeah, the operator has to observe, you know, like it was at my past organization, they have to observe, report it, fill out a request. Once the request is approved, then it's handed to maintenance. Okay, I've actually seen instances where operators went down the line. The machine went down, yeah, they went down the line. Okay. It was their break time. They went into break for 15 minutes. To the relief guy come in, made a run, didn't report the machinery. He figures I'm just a relief man, I'm not doing that. And then keeps going, and lost an hour's downtime, just cause nobody, you know, it got past the operator, then he went on break, and the relief man didn't do it. So that's, that's a lot of gap time. I mean, you're talking about a machine that runs to tower, two tires every 10 minutes. Yeah, two tires. Think what tire prices are now, yeah, okay, so you're talking about what 12 tires an hour,

18:53

interesting, and that's a manager conversation that they have to have.

19:00

Yeah, you need, you need to brush up a little bit. Yeah,

19:05

all right. For the listeners out there, my friend, how does they get a hold of you?

19:09

Oh, man, I'm on LinkedIn. Gary wood, my phone number is on there. My email address. Anyway, you want to get hold on me?

19:17

LinkedIn is probably the best. Yeah, I'd say like. I like them, yeah, absolutely, because we're going to have all the contact information for you. Oh yeah,

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because that's how we roll. That's how y'all roll.

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