Podcast: Smart strategies for training your maintenance team, no matter your budget

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode offers insight into training the maintenance and reliability team and building credibility.

Below is a transcript from the podcast:

PS: Our topic of the day is training for maintenance and reliability professionals. We could probably talk this whole podcast episode about workforce development issues. It's an issue for many manufacturers to retain the workers that they have or attract new workers to plant jobs. In that strained environment, I think training becomes even more important, especially as more and more in manufacturing are adopting advanced technologies and that landscape is changing very rapidly. Our overarching question today is, how do you know what to train your workers on and how do you do it? And let's try to look at that two-fold. So perhaps you're a manufacturer that just got a large training budget. You got an increase. What do you do with that budget? Or on the flip side, you have a training budget cut, or have always had a very small budget, or no training budget. What do you do? How do you focus a small or large amount of money you have on the right training?

JK: I'll tackle both of those. So first one with a large training budget. Okay, first question I ask is, why did you get a large training budget? Good chance the leadership team doesn't know what else to do to improve reliability and maintenance, and they just they want to throw money at something. That's really the experiences I had with that. ‘We got to do something better. Here's some money.’ So don't be fooled. They're not just giving you money just to train people. They're giving you money because they expect a result. So don't be fooled by that.

Also, remember, in our previous talks, I talked about every reliability and maintenance tool, every practice, every action, is targeting a waste. An inefficiency is another term for waste. You've got to begin with, where's the waste in your plant? What is the business case? What are you trying to do so you get $50,000 for training? What are you trying to prove? Is it, ‘Hey, every year, year after year, we are inundated with lubrication failures. We're not putting the right lube in the right frequency. It's leaking out. Our people aren't doing it right.’ What is it? Is it pump failures? You're rebuilding pumps, and they're only last in six months. What is the problem? Could be problem solving skills. Could be troubleshooting skills. You're slow to find the root cause or the problem. So, a fix may take eight hours, where seven and a half of that are finding the problem. How do you find that faster? So what's the problem?

It could also be you're pretty good at planned maintenance. You’ve got a good scheduling system. You’ve got good PMs, but you're not doing anything predictive. You're not using vibe, IR, UE, lubrication excellence techniques. You're not doing any that. You're not oil sampling, for example. So you have to start with where you are in current state.

Now be careful. Here's a trap. Don't fall down this trap. If you're doing a poor job with planning right now, or you're doing a poor job with PM compliance, don't jump to doing vibration and infrared and ultrasonics and lube sampling. Don't do that. You can't jump steps. Okay, if you find something with vibration, for example, and you've got this highly trained person, they find an issue. Well, if you can't plan it and can't execute it, what's the point? Okay, so you’ve got to start with your current state. Improve your basics first, and maybe your training needs to start with how to plan and schedule jobs, how to execute PMs.

The next thing, if you got a little money, what's nice is, how are you going to conduct that training? Maybe you can hire somebody, a consultant, to come in and help you get a jump start, somebody that's done this before in a plant. One of the things I love with money is getting external certifications. So in that example, where you’ve got a good foundation in place, but you're not doing anything with predictive tools, try external certifications. Find somebody that wants to be a lube tech, lube tech level one, lube tech level two, vibration tech level one or two. Those are certifications you can get. Level one you can get in a week. You take a test at the end of that week. Level two is another week, take a test. And that is creating a subject matter expert, and that is sustainable through time. Also, I love the sustainability of creating subject matter experts. We call them SMEs. You may say, ‘Gosh, on balancing, we have these two people that we've hyper trained in balancing. They're the balancing experts. It's good in lasting investment when you do that.

Another trap you have is, I see people, ‘Hey, let's train everybody in shaft alignment and balancing.’ Okay, well, you do that and you train 40 people. How many people use that in the next year? It may be five or six. Try not to train, I almost want to say, don't train anybody if they're not going to use the skill in the next year. Okay, don't just throw money at everybody. Create some subject matter experts. You could have every person on your craft team be a subject matter expert on something, whether it's motor lubrication, balancing, rebuilding, pumps, whatever it happens to be, but definitely think through sustainability. What will sustain through good times and bad? Somebody threw money at you this year, but are they going to take money away next year and don't train people on things that they're not going to use within the next year. That's what I would do with some money that came into the organization to beef up our training.

So where we're going to go on the flip side of that. I have no training budget. I still have a skills problem. What do I do? Well, almost the same process, nothing changed. What's the business case? What waste do I have in my plant? The thing that I would subtract out is the external certifications. Sending somebody to Cincinnati, Ohio, for a week to get level one training in lube. Those are the kind of things that cost money. Create the internal subject matter experts. If you want somebody to be your lube expert. I don't know why I'm picking on lubrication, but get on YouTube. Get on Google. There's so much information. Doing the basics well in maintenance is 90% of the value. It's 90% doing the basics well. You can do a lot of things on your own.

One of the things I guess I neglected to mention earlier on, if you had money and want to spend money on certifications, root cause failure investigation or analysis, RCA, is a good skill to teach one or two people inside of your plant, depending on the size.

So focus on the waste in your organization. For both these, if you have no money and you have a lot of money, focus on the waste in your plant to get some success and momentum. Don't think an extra boost in training is going to last forever. You can have some things open to you if you have money. You can bring in external trainers. You can bring in some certification to some of your subject matter experts that you identify. But the trap here is I see people wasting money on training people that will not use that skill in the next 12 months.

PS: Okay, it was funny how you started off, questioning where someone would get this large training budget. And I, I'm just curious, in your experience, do you not see big training budgets out there, or do you see people wasting what they have more than making the best use of it? Where do you think the industry is at in terms of what it puts into training?

JK: Well, I was in a commodity business. We made aluminum. And the price of our product was fixed based on the London Metal Exchange. We were driving down cost constantly. Every year, the starting point for my budget was 5% less than the previous year. So I never had the luxury of somebody saying, ‘Hey, here's some extra money. What do you want to do with it?’ But based on results and credibility that you establish, say you went in and the reliability of your equipment measured by OEE, or whatever you're measuring, was up 15 percentage points, and we made more production, I was able to have very easy conversations and even the vice president would say, ‘Hey, you guys delivered $3 million to the bottom line last year. How can we go faster?’ And then I say, ‘Well, I'd like a $75,000 increase to my training budget, and I’d like to do this, this and this.’ And they’ll say, ‘Go ahead,’ because I've established the credibility. It all begins with credibility. I've been in the industry as a practitioner for 32 years, and have been consulting for six or so years since, I've never had somebody say, ‘Hey, here's a a pile of money for training, not based on credibility. See what you can do with this, that's pretty rare.

PS: Yeah, credibility is a good point, and you've made a really good business case for training. And I just want to hit on employee aspect of that. I think mobility is important in any career, just for peace of mind. Even if you're happy where you're at and don't necessarily want something new, I think you should be advancing your skills, especially in manufacturing, and just having that option of something new or better, or just learning new skills is important to keep people satisfied at work too.

JK: Absolutely, the people, the crafts people, love being a subject matter expert. They love additional training. One of the things that's beneficial of having your craftspeople take on, maybe vibration specialist, is they can focus on that. If you give it to your maintenance engineer, well, he's got another 15 balls he's trying to handle, and so that's just one aspect of what he needs to provide. When you give that to a technician, yeah, they have their PMs and their work schedules, but you can also schedule them to work on vibration or lube or whatever their subject matter expertise is, and they love it. They get a great sense of pride in and that's why they became a craftsman, to become an expert in something. And if you provide training and certification, it's a great motivator.

PS: Great advice, and thanks for your insights as always. So this is our 17th episode of Ask a Plant Manager. We started this in late 2023 and we're barreling down 2025 already. So we've been talking to this audience for a long time, and we thought maybe it would be nice to add a new piece to our podcast where we talk a little bit about ourselves and our own work experiences a little bit. And we do that some in the topics that we address, but I just wanted to give a little more subjective and personal thoughts, and let our audience get to know us a little better. So your game, right? Joe.

JK: Yes.

PS: All right. So our question for today is, what was your first job, and what did you learn? Or how did it influence you? And I'll start us off today, and then you can go, and I want to talk about a couple early jobs that I had and how it relates to my career now. So I was a babysitter at an early age, but I won't count that. So my first actual paying job with a company was working for a local land appraisal business. This owner had a very small business that he ran out of his home. And I would make maps that went with his appraisals, basically showing the land structure. And I drew these maps by hand on graph paper with colored pencils. I don't remember exactly what year it was. It was early high school, so I think like ’94 or ’95. Email was just become a thing we were all using. But I was still drawing paper maps, so it's somewhat weird to think about now.

And I want to mention a second job, because it relates to this paper to digital transition. So during college, I worked with my dad during the summers. He was an electrical engineer at a manufacturer that makes equipment for electrical and telecommunication industries, electrical tools, connectors, testers, meters, things like that. So I worked in the drafting department, and the engineers had already switched from paper to digital at this point. They were designing in CAD, but they had all these old drawings, just huge filing cabinets full of their engineering drawings on paper. So I was taking all those old engineering drawings, and these were huge vellum paper drawings, and I would have to feed it into this giant scanner and then I could pull it up on the computer, but a lot of the symbols and the numbers wouldn't transpose correctly. So my job was then to compare the old drawing to the one on the computer and make them match. It was a terribly boring job, but it was very cool because I got to ride to and from work with my dad.

But it's interesting when I think about my own career now. I've worked in magazine publishing for more than 20 years at this point. Publishing has gone through such a transition related to this paper to digital move, especially in the last 10 years. So very early on, I learned to be flexible and to be open to change. I think we've had to be very scrappy in this industry, and learning early on to think outside of the box has been important for me and my career, and always looking to what's next, because the world is always changing. So Joe, what about you? What was your first job and how did it influence you?

JK: Your speech made me feel a little bit old. I remember paper drawings like that was just yesterday. One of my first jobs, other than shoveling snow and grass cutting, I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant when I was 16 years old, getting $2.10 an hour. I remember getting that paycheck. And then I transitioned to a gas station where I pumped gas. It was a full service. They had full service back in the 70s. So that's my first job. But my first real job, I got a degree as an engineer, and I was a maintenance engineer at a massive aluminum smelting rolling complex. At the time, we were about 5,000 employees at a large steel mill. I worked in some place called the row grind shop, which is where we process the all the mill bearings and the rolls. Everything is big, heavy, massive equipment. And I'm 22 years old with a mechanical engineering degree. I didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea. And you got all these craftsmen out there operating these machines. They were machinists and tool and die makers handling all this equipment. And I learned really quickly that I needed to get out on the floor and just talk with these people, watch and observe. I had good observation skills, good people skills. What I've learned in that job is that all the information and knowledge is in the mind of these people. They know the process. They know the problems. They know what's not working right. They know some possible solutions. And all I needed to do was talk to three or four of them, observe for a few hours, and then, articulate some things to upper management in a way that I can get some downtime or get some financing. So what I learned very quickly is to go to the floor, to go and see, and you can see that riddled through everything I say today is go and see, go and see, go and see.

And you know what's cool is, I passed that on to my kids. And my kids happen to, all four, be engineers. But when they get their first job, I’d say, go to the shop floor. Go sit with the operator. If you've got a problem that you're there to fix, go sit with the operator and watch the equipment run for eight hours. See him or her experience the problem and how they resolve it. And I guarantee you're going to learn a lot more than what somebody says, ‘Here's a project. We've got a recovery issue, or we got an intermittent problem with this bearing.’ You're going to learn so much more talking to that operator, talking to the mechanic that fixes it, talking to the electrician that has to reset something. Go on the shop floor. It's a totally different world out there, and you don't have to rely on your own skills that you may have learned in college. The information is out there on the shop floor.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.