Maintenance Mindset: What is the CBS program, and how can it boost your bearing knowledge?
Welcome to Maintenance Mindset, our editors’ takes on things going on in the worlds of manufacturing and asset management that deserve some extra attention. This will appear regularly in the Member’s Only section of the site.
Last September I had the honor of presenting a keynote address to the RPM Symposium, a two-day event sponsored by HECO that focuses on reliability and maintenance best practices in general, and on electric motor driven powertrains in particular.
One of my slides listed out some of the key certifications in the M&R community: the CMRP, CRE, CRL, RMIC, and CAMA. However, one of the afternoon sessions introduced me to a new certification, one that I’d like to share with you today.
The session, “Bearing Failures – How To Prevent Them from Occurring Again,” was delivered in a science lab-type auditorium by John Masek, senior vice president at Bearing Service, Inc. and current president of the Bearing Specialists Association, or BSA. The room was packed too, as Masek passed around example after example of bearings that had failed for one cause or another, like flaking, pitting, spalling, rusting – you name it, and a physical example was soon in your hands to examine.
At the end of the presentation, Masek introduced the Certified Bearing Specialist (CBS) program and certification, which identifies and quantifies the specific skill sets to certify an industry professional as a bearing specialist. “We wanted to create a differentiator so that if you're in sales, in distribution, in the bearing industry, we made an assumption that if you had better knowledge than your competitor sales person, then it was going to be a win for you in the marketplace,” says Masek.
The CBS program was created by the Bearing Specialists Association, an organization focused on connecting distributor and manufacturer leaders to move industry forward. “Our tagline is We Build Relationships, so we're all about networking and building meaningful and lasting relationships,” said BSA association manager CJ Church. And Masek credits the organization as helping his company and others cultivate new product lines and connect with fellow industry executives that otherwise might have been difficult to access.
Around the early 2000s, BSA members decided that one way they could serve industry would be to develop a body of knowledge that would better support sales and distribution. The end result of that effort was the creation of a certification task force and the development of the Certified Bearing Specialist program, which includes both an exam and study guide.
The 75-question CBS exam tests skill sets in the selection, application, and analysis of bearings, including but not limited to: explaining product lines (including seals and accessories); diagnosing problems with installed components; understanding probable failures, problems, and causes; recommending interchanges and substitutions; and proper lubrication techniques. The CBS exam was prepared in consultation with NOCTI, to ensure that both the exam and 200-page study guide were reliable and valid.
In 2020 the content was refreshed by BSA. “We spent a lot of time during COVID actually getting together, myself and a couple other subject matter experts, and we went through all 200 pages of the study guide and created some new content,” said Masek. “We went through all the quiz questions and review questions in the study guide, all test questions (there's two versions of the test), and revamped it all” to catch up with 15-plus years of technology changes. Since then the BSA regularly revisits the content, and is preparing a third update to the materials that will include advances such as in-bearing sensor technology.
The interesting thing about this certification is that, although originally targeted at sales and distribution roles (service and applications engineers, field service technicians, technical support specialists, inside & outside sales representatives, account managers, etc.) in order to better serve front-line plant workers, the certification has begun to appeal to those front-liners themselves and their managers, something I witnessed in person at the RPM Symposium.
“Originally I think the intent was to have this study guide really be something that our distributor members embraced, and had their inside sales or outside sales force take and become knowledgeable,” said Masek. “But I also felt really strongly that our manufacturers could also benefit. At the RPM Symposium, I had a couple maintenance people come up and say, yeah, that's something I'm interested in.”
Masek thinks the biggest beneficiary would be people who are actively turning wrenches or supervising people who are maintenance people. “Most of the time, our core customers as an association are MRO customers who need parts quick because they’ve got a machine that's down. This certification would help them understand some basics about all the different types of bearing products that are out there, and how to successfully apply those products.”
Masek sees this certification as delivering genuine benefits to people who are engaged in the maintenance and reliability of equipment. “It's going to help them as a maintenance person to understand more about the products that they're installing. I think that BSA certification program will go a long way to educating them, and increase their mean time to failure and also cut down on their maintenance expenses by knowing our products better
To learn more about BSA’s CBS certification, you can visit the Bearing Specialist Association website (www.bsahome.org) and download the CBS brochure.
