Ask a Plant Manager: Expert advice from Joe Kuhn

"This is a huge trap for leaders. You fundamentally have to decide if you want to be a hero or be a leader. A leader grows people, grows other leaders, grows the technical expertise of people."

"An operator comes in, and his priority is to work safely, operate the machine to make quality product, keep the housekeeping all cleaned up, make the right product in the right order. And if you have time, do the PM. That is a problem."

"Put your thumb on the scale and say, ‘Well, we're doing this PM. It's only two hours long, but they always find something so we want them to correct it. We don't know what it's going to be, so let's just add six more hours to the job and then we'll be sure to get it done.’"

"Look at the news media. If it bleeds, it leads, right? I mean, if you watch 24-hour news, you'll jump off a cliff. Everything's bad. Everybody is naturally drawn to that, I think it's the way we evolved a little bit, over 100,000, 200,000 years, so it's just natural."

"No matter what waste I see in a plant, any plant that I've managed or that I've coached people in, I would start a yesterday, today, and tomorrow meeting (YTT). Some of you may call this just a morning meeting or your daily management system. But, starting one in maintenance, I think, is critical. It's a critical tool for me."

"Most maintenance managers that fail get sucked into today. And so they spent 100% of their time on what they were good at, why they got promoted. They spent 100% of the time in today, trying to make it better. And then they wipe the sweat off their brow and say we'll try it again tomorrow. And so you never implement solutions that are strategic. You're always doing tactical ones."

"What's interesting to me, is this question around where do we start? We’re 100% reactive maintenance. Where do we start? That only gets asked by people that have not done observation. Once you do observation, so let's say, for example, you and your lead team or maybe you're an engineer, maybe you're a planner, supervisor, if you go out observe your crew, a crew of two mechanics for one full day, and then a second full day, you will have a laundry list of things you can do simply that can improve the efficiency of those two people."

"If you want to start a fight at a reliability conference, ask who owns reliability in your plant? There's a lot of different opinions. I have 37 years of experience, and a lot of examples of where I was able, my team and plant were able, to get dramatically improved results by doing it differently than most. Okay, so my firm conviction, and I've been in a lot of debates on this, but it's still firm conviction is that operations owns reliability. Okay. And that upsets the operations people, and it upsets the maintenance and engineering people."

"Now, wrench time, you'll hear numbers like 50% is good, but there's so much that determines, your potential for wrench time. 30% could be good, if you're working at elevation, for example, or you have long distances to travel, or you need significant safety instruction to conduct work. So really comparing your plant to another doesn't make any sense. Comparing your plant today to your plant next month, that's the key. That's where you need to focus."

"I'll address it from a standpoint of: the business needs this, you got to cut 10%? What would I do? First thing I would do is I'd get the leadership together from the maintenance department, maybe your reliability engineers, if you have any engineering people in your plant, a couple thought leaders, innovators, maybe a lead planner or planner supervisor, just that group of people and say, ‘Okay, guys, 10%. Okay, let's first have a review of where our money's being spent."

"I think it's important to realize that what's happening is a clash of cultures. You have the old school time-based maintenance, all of our history of this pump says fails every six months, or you have to go in once a quarter and do this on this gearbox. So you got that culture, colliding with the culture of, hey, let's just put all these sensors and tell us we’ve got vibration or we’ve got heat. We've got something going on that is telling us there's a problem. And those two cultures meet usually in the planning meeting, to plan what work are we going to do next week."

"I walk into plants, every single one of them. I've been in over 40 plants. Every single one of them has told me this problem. We don't have enough people to start our reliability journey. We can't; our backlog is growing. They said all those same things. After a week of Kaizen, I mean in going out and doing this observation in teams, not just one person but going out maybe with the leadership team, understanding what waste is and going out and seeing how work is being executed."