Lee McClish with NTT Global Data Center

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

reliability, maintenance, years, industrial, ntt, people, assets, operations, cmms, cool, good, program, great, spent, platform, departments, conversation, started, data, part

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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 go all right.

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Thank you once again for joining industrial talk. And thank you once again for your incredible support. A platform that is dedicated industrial talk is dedicated to industrial professionals all around the world because you are bold, you are brave, you're daring greatly. You collaborate, you solve problems, you do everything that I am so proud of. And that's why we here on this platform celebrate you because we are your industrial cheerleaders. I'm just adding that Li SSB just getting fancy pants with my intro. So it's pretty good. And as you can tell we are broadcasting from Accelerate 23 It is in Orlando and is brought to you by those wonderful people at Fluke reliability, go check out booth reliability. And you will not be disappointed go out to the world wide web that is the World Wide Web by fluke reliability and you will not be disappointed. All right. Lee Liddell and I got his card in front of me. Right here. You're out on video, you can see it, leave it clish. Did I get that? Yes. All right. He is the director of maintenance and reliability. So that he's guy at NTT, global data centers? Americans, let's get cracking. Good conference Li.

02:43

Very good conference.

02:45

It is pretty good. You know, it is pretty good. And I've been saying it, either. I've been drinking the Kool Aid and I'm such a homer for what's going on in this place. But it was set to biggest to smallest is the right size to be able to have great conversation. Yeah, meet up with people see Mad tech. Okay.

03:04

And that's peppered with just all bunch of vendors. Yeah, no, here just

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talking to users. There's one right there. He's a user right over there. We're gonna have a conversation. For the listeners, let's get let's get right to it. Give us a little background on who you are. And let's so sort of level set before we get into that. Because I'm just intrigued by the maintenance reliability at from a date. I'm looking at that I'm looking at your journey. Let's get going.

03:32

I started in the Navy. I was in a submarine force for 10 years active duty. And then I did

03:38

do you do you know, Jack Nichols?

03:41

Oh, yeah, yeah, I met him at this event in 19. And he was in the Navy Reserves for a long time. And I retired from the Navy Reserves both as captains, so he I was good conversation with him.

03:55

Small World Go. I'm sorry. I digress. There you go. One of the things that always happens with this program is because the world the industrial world is, you know, fortunate eventually. I don't know everybody. I don't know. That's my goal. You know, everybody in the industry continued. Sorry about that.

04:13

Yeah, I spent 10 years in a nuclear Navy and submarines on active duty and actually stayed in the reserves for another 20 and retired with 30 years of service. And so I thank you when I came out of the Navy, as you know, my early 30s I started working for a corrugated box plant as a maintenance supervisor which was a good background for me they had steam boilers you know, like we did on the submarine and so I kind of jumped right in and charge them mechanics electricians and really kind of learned what bothered you know, when they go out to machine you know, what are they dealing with, you know, how they an engineer, design that piece of equipment. And so I stayed with him for 15 years I worked for folding carton plant learn a lot more about reliability than Reliability centered maintenance, spent three years with BASF large chemical company as reliability into Near and in a maintenance manager. And then out of the blue. This guy calls me up. Say, I'm Tom, I work for raging wire. Like, that's a cool name. He's like, cheers. I

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don't know what it is. But it did grab my attention. Yes. Wow.

05:12

So what do you do? He has a data center i Okay, well, what do you do?

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I want to know, is it a baseball team? Because that's a cool baseball name. What is it?

05:23

Yeah. So he's telling me, you know, hey, you know, we're the cloud. We provide, you know, plays for the servers, power them up and keep them cool. And all that and I go, Well, sounds to me like you need it guy. I hear why you call me. I'm a mechanical engineer, you know, no, we want somebody mechanical background, because on mechanical equipment, to start and build or liability program. And so I went to the interviews and have a look back and it was about five and a half years ago.

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Is it NTT, NTT

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bottom? 14,

05:56

I don't see that cool name on NTT. Not to say NTT is not a cool saying it's not their

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entity, bottom 100% and 17. Oh,

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there you go. So with that said, you know, it's easy for me to put, and you're gonna have to educate, it's easy for me to understand a reliability and maintenance program with, with rotating equipment with, you know, assets that are out in a manufacturing, you know, floor or whatever I understand that help us understand from a, from a data perspective, what that looks like, I don't even know what that looks like.

06:38

It's different. So just defining criticality, I mean, 30% of our assets, we all consider a criticality of one highest level, because it's either electrode distribution for the power, or providing a cooling effect, knowing things that aren't like air conditioners, for offices, you know, parts of the building, and the facilities and things like that. So most of our assets are, are critical, and then look at the hierarchy. And it's not like a department to machine to a parlor machine. Yeah, I mean, you just have all these individual components, you know, generators, and UPS is and, and batteries and transfer switches. So they're all individual things. And so I really do my hierarchy by a category, electrical, mechanical building, fire, life safety, those types of things. So that was different. The other thing I really found like different is there's, there's not like a maintenance and operations departments, who are just one department, they do the maintenance, and they do the operating. And they caught crew, critical facilities operations. And so they can't point the finger at each other because they are the same, right? That's a lot better. Now, the thing that they really get more involved in is like some of the codes like NFPA, 70, B, NC, NIDA, MTS, all those kinds of you know, I

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have a full of acronyms right now, just so that I can scoop it up and put some milk on it and eat it up, Molly. So

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I spent some time looking through those, you know, there are recommendations and testing for, you know, Transformers and high voltage switches and switch boards, and even generators, and which are a standby generator, because they'll run all the time, they're just there when they're needed. So I did research on those to create what was called a scope of service, which is the beginning of the pm plan. So you have to look at all your different manufacturers was OEM recommend and kind of mesh all that together and say, Okay, well, this is where we're going to start, we're going to do this monthly or quarterly or annual, or, or whatnot. So my focus has been more on predictive maintenance. And I look at IR scanning, you know, in manufacturing every year, I was religious about getting iris scanning done at least annually. And he find 2030 deficiencies, we fix them next year. 2030 more as a great program. But you know, I hadn't done a year ago in a data center, and they found zero, no deficiency. So how do you justify doing that?

09:02

That is that's, that is such a interesting, I always think that okay, yeah. When everybody goes down the road of saying, hey, we want to be a reliability company. We want to have that culture. We want to be able to focus on and manage these assets. It's all good. Don't get me wrong, I get it. But the reality is, is that you hit the financial low hanging fruit, it's all Yeah, I totally get that, man. That's great. And then eventually, that if you do your job, right, it's sort of goes away. Yeah. It becomes sort of day to day, whatever, but I don't know. Yeah, that's a tough one. It is. So there you go. You don't have anything so

09:43

you have to really look at the business case and doesn't make sense. I mean, if he waited, like say every five years they infrared scan. I mean, it's probably way too much. Yeah, you know, and that's really not gonna get to the data you can't trend to.

09:56

So, so you were here. You've been here at Accelerate 20 Three, and a part of that you had a, you had a conversation, you were a keynote, you weren't just any speaker. And that means you are a bigwig when it comes to speaking. explain to the listeners what you were talking about there.

10:15

So I started out with focusing on CMMS. And what we've done use that to leverage our reliability program. So when I joined a company had just started using E maintenance, and an IT guy was in charge of it. So we got the basic standard package, nothing with I couldn't go run a meantime, between very poor, I didn't have fair cause remedy codes, there wasn't and there's a lot of clutter on the screens, all these fields, I'm like, What is this, we're never going to use that. So I spent my first year just kind of doing cleanup of it, you know, and making it so I could get some good data out of it an excellent redeployment actually took a trainer, me and him, we went around to every site, we train everybody, which is good, because then they can meet me, you know, since I was new, and then we were off off and running. And, you know, when I joined, there was zero corrective work orders, you know, so it was a whole culture development, you know, through with it sounds kind of explaining all the different attributes and things I've done, you know, with the program.

11:17

So you did that, you now you're deploying that email platform a little bit more. So but how? How did you begin that journey into the, into your organization and TT? And then where are you at today? After a period of time? How long have you been with them?

11:34

Five and a half years?

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where you are today? Yeah.

11:39

Yes. On the beginning, it

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was just not I'm not trying to put you in a uncomfortable situation. They don't support me. No, I'm not asking you to do that.

11:46

At the beginning, it was just me, I was hired as a reliability engineer. And so I have a lot of time on my hands to build the foundations. I did FMEA is and all these Will,

11:56

Will Will, Will will. So you just acronym the heck out of me. Does that mean

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failure models? They are failure modes? Effects? Analysis? Yeah, go? Yes. Got it.

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I just had to go to

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go for it. So I use that and did a pm optimization and all of our tasks and the scopes of service and spent a lot of time making sure those are pretty solid. And I bounced them off a lot of different industry experts, people out in the field and go and do it for a living like, okay, Yancey, Anita tells you you needed like dualis testing. Yeah, is a really value added there. Does anybody really do all this stuff? And if you do it, then what do you get out of it? Yeah, so I kind of went through all that analysis. Early on, it's good, good, good, good, good. And then three years into the company. And then they promoted me gave me these maintenance coordinators who do all the scheduling of the maintenance. So I was really kind of able to evolve the CMMS, you know, even a little bit more. And then, you know, last year, and actually, then I changed departments, I was in operations. And I went to they create a real estate facilities departments, I went to that, by myself, again, I was able to hire a CMMS, administrator, a scheduler. And then he gave me all the coordinators back again, because they left them in operations. And I have like eight people who work for me, and we do all the scheduling and I set all the standards. So the people doing the maintenance don't work for me, that makes a kind of a challenge. And I can't reach out to technicians say Well, where's my feedback, you know, where's my completed work, or I have to kind of work with these folks and work together and, and hope to get some feedback from them. So that's when things a little bit more difficult. You know, I can't go around the 13 different buildings and, you know, go and look at every single task for every, every step of the way for a PM, you know, I really need input from the guys out there doing the work.

13:45

So fast forward, you you've been with the organization a little over five years, got it. Good. You brought in because you were a maintenance of reliability, get it was going to be able to try to transform NTT and bring in those those disciplines. What are the benefits? Have you seen from when you started to where you are today?

14:08

Well, one, we're at least document what we have. And we are getting like some failure modes and things that are coming up. We are doing a quarterly analysis of our failed cause remedy codes and seeing you know, where there's more deficiencies or, you know, our chillers, you know, we found that we have issues with their sensors. You only have a separate like, you know, a lot of batteries and there's a separate battery monitoring program is kind of separate. We don't have that as part of E maintenance. I don't know if that will be because it's pretty specialized. And

14:42

why it's so special. It doesn't need us. It has a need for a different system. So, yeah, well, again, I'm not trying to get you into trouble. I'm just sort of pointing out some sort of interesting decisions.

14:56

Yeah, sure. No problem.

14:58

No problem. All right. So one last question. And from a future perspective, from within the organization, we know that, you know, cloud, storage, whatever, all of that stuff, it's, it's helped facilitate a lot of this, this, you know, transformation software as a surface, that type of stuff. And it's good. But there are you seeing, not everything could be in a cloud, not everything could just sort of reside, it's going to be the size of Australia, eventually the whole farm, what do we do? How do we, how do we begin to manage that? Because, you know, I take pictures, you take pictures we take, everything goes to the cloud, and just magically finds a place to call home. So what do you do?

15:53

Well, our company can't build data centers fast enough. I know, when I joined five years ago, we had six now we have 13, and two years of rebuild eight more. And so we just keep building and building and there's all this edge, we're gonna start building smaller data centers, or just edge data centers that are smaller just for those types of devices. And I'm really looking at more predictive analytics and trying to capture data and trend it and whatnot. And so and so one of the major issues is cybersecurity, you know, and so that's somebody outside organization. Yeah, get that data, and do something with it that you wouldn't want to do with it. So I think it's been selected, you know, really looking at your credit county or equipment, where your pain points and putting in exact number of sensors and things and capture the data that really is going to tell you a story. It's going to make a difference. Yeah,

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I there's so much change happening. It's just, it's not bad. I mean, it's just, you have a big job ahead of you. Oh, yeah, that's what that means. Hey, how do people get ahold of you? If they're interested in saying, hey, I want to know more about Lee and NTT. And what I can do whatever it is, LinkedIn

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is a great place. I have over 800 contacts,

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you go that lead mcclish out on LinkedIn, we are not listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information for lead about that. You are great. Thank you. All right, listeners once again, all right. We are from Orlando broadcasting live, accelerate 23 Fluke reliability, go check them out at on the worldwide web, you will not reach out because they've got answers, as well as MTT. I got it right here, you're gonna have all that information out on industrial talk. So do not be afraid, find out more reach out to these wonderful people, we will be right back. You're listening

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to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

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That was a great conversation with Li Li MC clish. He is with NTT global data center, we were at the Fluke accelerate event in Orlando, which, quite frankly, was the right size with the right people. If you're in the world of asset management, reliability, maintenance, you need to reach out and be a part of that in 2024. That is a A must attend event. All right, we're going to have all the contact information for the layout on industrial talk, you know that so reach out that your to do all right, we're creating a platform, a platform that is dedicated to industrial professionals. You need to be a part of this platform. Your voice needs to be amplified. You just go out to industrial talk. You click on whatever amplify my voice. I don't even know what there's a button out there. I created it. I can't remember it, but you need to connect with me. Let's have a conversation. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Lee change the world we're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.