Ryan Chan: Hi everyone welcome to Masterminds in Maintenance, a podcast for those with new ideas in maintenance and reliability. I’m your host Ryan I’m the CEO and Founder of Upkeep. Each week I’ll be meeting with a guest who has an idea for how to shake things up in the maintenance and reliability industry. Sometimes the idea failed, sometimes it made their business more successful and sometimes their idea revolutionized an entire industry. Today,  I have with me Rob Kalwarowsky, an experienced reliability engineer, an event speaker, a coach, and creator of Rob’s Reliability Project, which offers the maintenance and reliability community with audio-visual information for how to spread the word about reliability. I’ve been his guest on his podcast previously and now I’m so excited to welcome you Rob to our show this time. 

Rob : Yeah thanks for having me, Ryan. I’m excited to talk it up with you today.

Ryan:  Oh so let’s get started. Let’s jump right into it. Could you help start us off maybe by sharing a little bit more about you,  yourself, your background, and really how you got started into the reliability space. Yeah so I am a mechanical engineering graduate from MIT. I have an undergrad in Economics as well and actually started my career working as an economist for about a year. 

Well yeah and then you know I kept looking for kind of mechanical engineering jobs and I found one in at Tech Resources in Western Canada, a big mining company. So, when I moved out there, they put me in a reliability engineering role with Jeff Smith, who was actually my manager. Now, he teaches for Reliability Web. So that’s really where I started working in Reliability and since then, I’ve worked in Reliability consulting and now I’m working at Enbridge as an Asset Manager in obviously in oil and gas space. 

Ryan: That’s huge,  so it’s down sounds like you started your career actually as an economist and then you got yourself into the reliability world. is there anything that you would take away from working in you know, being an economist to how that relates to anything in the reliability space? 

Rob: Actually, there’s a fair amount like I think of as reliability people. A lot of what we talk about, or a lot of the projects that we do, it’s good to quantify benefits. It’s also good to quantify costs and some of those benefits, they’re not necessarily hard benefits. Like hey, you’re gonna save $10,000 cash, sometimes it’s safety benefits, or it’s environmental benefits,  it’s you know, even stuff like corporate reputation. And so, having that kind of insight and how that all works. Plus, understanding cash flowing in that present value all that stuff, it’s really helpful.

Ryan: Absolutely, that’s super interesting Rob, where you approach Reliability with the Economist hat on as well and you take a lot of those learnings and bring it over to what you’re doing today. That’s that’s really really cool. Kind of transitioning a little bit,  you know people I would say have different definitions of reliability and that kind of depends on what space you’re in and you know, what you’ve done in the past and what you hope to do in the future. Rob, what does reliability mean to you? 

Rob: I have my reliability mug I don’t know if you can see it I can move it close. It’s a mug with the actual equation for what reliability is. All right, so if you’re looking at it from a math standpoint, it’s essentially the probability that your equipment will succeed over this given period of time so you have to understand what’s the function, how does functionally fail, what’s the operating environment, and then what’s the duration. So that’s the traditional if you look up Reliability on Wikipedia, that’s what that is. Yeah to me it’s to me I’m more I guess I’m more along the asset management side of it. I really just think is how do we add value to our company and how do we make our equipment run more effectively so we can do that. Yeah like a lot of what I talk about reliability like some people will call that can you know continuous improvement yeah they’ll call it, you know, like whatever technique you use and whatever technique you really whatever background you come for at the end of the day, we want to make more money. We want to run a safer operation. We want to have less bottlenecks, we want to be more environmentally friendly, like all these things are important and you know if you’re using RCM or you’re using Kaizen or Six Sigma. Like I don’t really care, yeah it’s always about improving, being better, and I think it’s actually very interesting that you bring up this point of you know, there’s so many different terminology is whether it’s process improvement or whether it’s you call it reliability, whether you can call it maintenance. Essentially, you’re right, the bottom line is like we are trying to improve. We are trying to be better. We’re trying to make equipment our entire business run more effectively and efficiently. I also feel that you know maintenance reliability gets a bad rap for this idea of maintaining the status quo. We’re really it’s kind of the opposite of that right like we’re improving our processes or improving our day-to-day operations, so that we can be better. It’s not just about you know, maintaining status quo yeah and that’s kind of a misconception I and I also think a lot of us we come from. Companies that have a reliability program and you know, you’re reporting to the maintenance manager and I think that’s where you you get pulled into the day-to-day maintenance stuff.  This failed today so I gotta bring it back to running, well reliability we’re in the business of what’s tomorrow, what’s next year, and I think that it’s not just a maintenance thing like if we’re getting into the design of the plant,  we’re getting into our storeroom operations. What type of equipment we’re gonna buy to maintain the function that we need, like all these things, how do we even operate it; that’s another big thing that we should be touching on. Yeah these are not maintenance functions, but I would consider it as reliability person I would consider it good things to do as a reliability engineer.

Ryan: Absolutely. how do we begin to change this narrative for people to move away from like thinking about reliability from just this idea of you know, firefighting and maintaining status quo, how do we change the perception?

Rob:  I think it’s just stuff like this. I think it’s conversations that need to be had. Yeah, I think that it’s communication and you know, like I find engineers as a whole myself included, which is funny because I run a podcast and I do all this stuff, but we’re notoriously bad communicators and and I think that that’s part of our bottleneck right is weak. We fail to communicate effectively to the shop floor and to our upper management and so that’s why we don’t implement stuff the best we can. 

Ryan: Yeah absolutely. All right, so you know you’ve done a lot of work in this space and in reliability. What’s the future look like for this industry in your opinion?

Rob: Yeah I love this question because I asked it on my show as well. I just really think it’s an interesting thing to talk to people about and see where their heads are at and for me, obviously, I think you know Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning is going to come more deep into the space. It’s kind of on its crest right now, but I don’t think people are really getting the value they can out of it. That’s a separate debate for a separate day. I also think that you’re gonna start seeing things pop up like Augmented Reality Virtual Reality,  where they can be used to help people. Not like people in the field, you know, with their job where they can see the work orders on their safety glasses or they can hear instructions in their ear. Those types of things they’re sort of coming but right now we’re still in the infancy of what that will look like and you know it’s just gonna build out. And you know 10 or 20 years from now I think it’s gonna be really cool.

Ryan: I guess the second question is where do you feel like we are today. If you could share some stories, some inside, or some examples that you’ve seen, where have you seen the best reliability programs today and what did those look like?

Rob: The best reliability programs I’ve seen, the one thing that kind of identifies them to me as they have a champion – an internal champion. And that champion doesn’t necessarily have to be the reliability engineer or the reliability manager, it could be in some cases, it’s it was like a lubricant specialist. That’s all you know,  just like a mechanic who was really passionate in some cases it was a planner. Those are are really huge. And then the other ones are the single plant site type sites. And the other good ones I’ve seen have been they’ve really been large mining companies where they put in a lot of infrastructure. They’ve hired a lot of reliability engineers and they’ve kind of set up their organization so that reliability has its own department and they’re not reporting to maintenance managers, they’re reporting to the reliability manager who has you know enough authority and enough foresight to understand hey we’re looking at the next five years or ten years. 

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m curious, some of the innovation that you’ve seen in the space today, what are you most excited by?

Rob:  Yeah, I mean I really like machine learning as a concept. I actually sort of self taught myself how to build my own machine learning models in Microsoft Azure. And I think that that’s kind of the next step and you’re starting to see it with some of the service providers is they’re starting to understand that the reliability engineer should be the ones that are building their own models. Not just this data science guy who comes from working at JP Morgan who’s gonna just show up and be like give me all your data I’ll run some models and we’ll be good yeah and so that’s kind of what I’m excited about and that’s more in the short term than the long term. I see that being big in you know it could be even big now, but it’s probably big and probably the next two years 

Ryan: Maybe just elaborate on that a little bit more. Does that mean like taking in vibration data and running machine learning algorithms on that vibration data to predict failure? Is that what you’re seeing? 

Rob: There’s that. There’s also I mean a lot of these platforms that have the ability to really take in any type of data that you give it yeah a lot of the wind’s actually that we’ve seen well I haven’t seen them personally but I’ve talked about with experts have been actually on the production optimization side. So a lot of plants, they currently have a SCADA system that has a lot of data that helps run their plant and so by running those and training them on a machine learning algorithm and having the operator kind of it can make recommendations to the operator who’s allowed to still play with it themselves they can they can optimize you know production. I’ve heard to two and a half percent which is significant over a year. 

Ryan: Yeah that’s huge and what I also love about this too you know one is that you self-type. You know how to how to take in all this data using Microsoft Azure and what I also hear from you too Rob is that you know it’s it’s this idea of it doesn’t have to be the Reliability Engineer, it could be the Plant Manager, it could be a Lubrication Specialist, that really becomes a champion. What I’m hearing from you is that anyone can do this right. It’s really about taking that first step. 

Rob: Yeah I mean I’m not recommending everybody go out and learn machine learning. What I do recommend is that you should understand how it works and how to apply it at your site. I think that’s a lot easier than people think, like when we just talked about it, it seems complicated. I need,  you know, a PhD. Like this guy, he went to MIT, like he’s a genius whatever, like I’m not a genius I went on like Coursera and EDX I took a course from Microsoft and you can kind of get started. I just recommend like play with it. It’s kind of no different than when you have your Alexa or your Google assistant at your house like play with it and you’ll find that uses for it and then open. Just let your mind be open for creativity.

Ryan: Yeah absolutely. Very cool and then just thinking forward a little bit, what do you think are gonna be some of the most impactful innovations in this space for the future?

Rob: Well so we talked a lot about the machine learning augmented reality virtual reality yeah not gonna be any of that. It’s gonna be getting back to the grassroots and really going out on the shop floor yeah and talking to your people. I was actually talking to my colleague about that yesterday I was like what I wanted to do is I want to go out to one of the sites and I want to find the oldest guy and I want to buy him a box of doughnuts and I want to sit down and I want to talk to him about this specific piece of equipment and understand what actually he does in terms of maintenance what he looks for. Why he would decide to replace it or versus repair it what types of repairs are common what does a rebuild look like all these questions that like I can’t answer sitting at an office in wherever I am right. 

Ryan: That’s awesome. I that means a lot to me too when you’re mentioning like a lot of companies think that you’re right like I’m gonna just augment our team I’m gonna hire a data scientist to come in and look at all of our data and they’re gonna have all the answer.  I agree with you, Rob, that it’s not going to be the data scientist. It’s gonna be the people that know how this equipment works. It’s gonna be the people that have all this historical knowledge of what happened, when it happened, what makes it tick, and what makes it turn. Those are gonna be the people that will help drive a lot of the innovation in this space and I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily a data scientist you know skilled with looking at millions and potentially billions of records. 

Rob: I think that the reason for the way I’ve kind of got it sorted in my head is I feel like a lot of these data scientists, they’ve come from finance or these different types of backgrounds where they’re dealing with I want to say unconstrained reality. So like the financial markets there’s no box around it, there’s no physics. It’s just like, anything could happen. They’re talking about behavior where we deal with things that are physics constrained the pump can only fail 10-15 different ways, but there is a cap to that. What that number is and especially if we go out and we talk to that old guy, he’s probably seen 12 out of those 15 different ways. So if we can capture that information we’re gonna be way further ahead than waiting for 50 years to see all that data 

Ryan: You’re absolutely right that you know, we’re dealing with the physical world and when you talk about like you know, Finance and Economics, you know there’s an infinite number of ways that things could change, physical equipment, you’re right 10-15 different ways you know. You’re Rob’s Reliability Project – you know the thing that you head up you know you guys produce an incredible amount of a very useful content. I’m curious what do you find some of the most common questions to be in this community? What are people most curious about?

Rob: I think maybe it’s not a question, but the most struggle comes from people who are trying to implement their reliable initiatives and then the people who are trying to change culture. The technical information-  if you want to learn how to you know read vibration analysis, or you know you want to learn how to replace a bearing, these things are very well documented. You can take courses from on numerous different companies right and so that’s not really what people struggle with; it’s the communication. It’s the how do I trigger change which is question that I’ve really been thinking about a lot lately. You know that’s it’s a human aspects and I think there’s a lot to learn about that I still don’t know much about it, but I do think that the big thing is communication. And then, the second tip I would have for that is the communication part you got to speak to your audience not for you. And I think we often forget that as reliability people like will talk about oh you know the vibration the FFT was this I even had one the other day where I was talking about RCM and I forgot that my audience didn’t know what RCM was, so if we got to understand what does our audience understand like a manager who has an MBA and you know has just come in from accounting school, they’re not going to know what the shopfloor guy knows. So when we’re talking to those different audiences, we have to be careful with how we juxtapose that conversation.

Ryan:  Absolutely. So I mean any any tips for folks that are that are trying to to make this cultural change at their organization? Any tips for them on how to make that? What have you learned so far?

Rob:  Yeah so my big tips for that would be get out on the shop floor,  put your boots on, and get out. My favorite thing to do as a consultant was to eat lunch and have coffee with the mechanics. Come on cuz you don’t. You just shut up, just sit there and they’ll tell you everything you need to know. You didn’t have to say anything and then you can put it in a fancy report and charge lots of money right? [Laughter] But that’s really what it is right like, if you want to get back to reliability, you want to actually improve reliability, you have to affect the behavior of the people who physically interact with the equipment whether that’s the operator, the maintenance guy, the guy who loves it, the guy who buys it. Those people, they’re the ones that you have to change and so you have to understand what are they dealing with and then you can’t make their job harder. 

Ryan: Yeah absolutely. You know we’re talking a lot about you know, cultural shifts and cultural changes within an organization.I guess that I would say the next question to ask on that is how do you track it? How do you measure it? And how do you see the importance of having metrics KPIs within a business? What do you look at and how would you explain the importance of having clear KPIs and metrics for your reliability and maintenance team?

Rob:  I’m huge on KPIs now. When I say that, I also recognize that people do tweak their behavior or even some people tweak the kpi’s themselves. So what I would like to say is I love kpi’s if nobody else could see them except for me right and that’s because like I’m a data-driven guy. I like to dive into it. I like to troubleshoot and I like to understand what’s going on in me like at the equipment level and I think that that’s what the true reason for kpi’s is. Yeah it’s not to bonus a guy, it’s not to yell at another guy, it’s about how to understand what’s happening in my organization and then be able to drill down far enough to understand what I can do about it. And so what you’ll see a lot in organizations is kpi’s like you know you’ll have competing kpi’s, so you’ll have something where it’s like let’s say your bonused off of like a storeroom one where it’s like your bonused off service levels. Yeah it’s like the percentage of time I show up and say hey Ryan I need this part how Mike what percentage of time you have it for me but then I’m also maybe on bonused off the opposite of that. You see that in maintenance right so you see like availability their bonus off availability, but they’re also bonused off like p.m. completion so they’re kind of opposites. So you do need opposites, but you have to be careful that departments aren’t competing against each other. Yeah because then that goes back to this idea of culture within the company and the organization. Yeah and then you’ll see the question the next question you wanna ask is if you’re implementing kpi’s is what behavior would this drive that I might not want to happen? Yeah so I’ve seen some sites where they had, here’s a prime example for one, I went to a site and they had a scheduled compliance metric and so they were trying to. So what they did was the planner would issue a work order for a filter change and have it be 12 hours. So the guy would spend 30 minutes, do the filter change, and then do 11 and a half hours of reactive work. But they were hitting a hundred percent schedule compliance. And it’s like what is like that doesn’t help us do anything. Yeah you hit your numbers and it’s green at the end of the month, but you have to really get into those.

Ryan:  Yeah any like tips advice guidance on choosing the right kpi’s? What have you seen work really well?

Rob:  Yeah I think you have to have balancing kpi’s again right, so a hundred percent or zero should never be the optimal amount for a cake and I because you’ll they’ll hit a hundred percent of zero. Regardless, it’s not going to be but it’s probably not what you want. Yeah, the other thing I talk about a lot with kpi’s is leading versus lagging. Yep so it’s a big focus on the SMRP, but it’s important right because the example I always use is let’s say I want to lose 10 pounds. Well if I just look at my lagging KPI of how much weight I lost, you know if I go to the gym today and I eat steamed broccoli and you know roasted chicken breast and I weigh myself at the end of the day, maybe I’ll lose half a pound. It’s probably mostly water weight and so it’s not going to really help me drive the behavior I want. Where if you’reusing a leading indicator which is maybe like time spent at the gym or healthy meals consumed like those types of leading kpi’s they’re gonna really get you to the end result and it also like almost rewards you for doing a good job on the way.

Ryan: Cool that was extremely informative. Switching a little bit, what are some of the  biggest mistakes you see people making in maintenance and reliability?

Rob: Yeah so biggest mistakes I’ve actually done this early in my career. I think the biggest mistake is doing reliability at your desk  and I think that you know it’s back to that sort of machine learning technology. That type of stuff is you know when I came into the reliability space I wasn’t like I had never been really in on a shop floor. I had never really talked to a lot of the guys and I was easily able to you know get into the data, do some optimization, do some failure predictions, and pull out pretty useful information. But if it doesn’t make it to the shop floor, if it doesn’t change how you’re running your equipment, how you’re maintaining your equipment, how you’re purchasing your equipment, it really doesn’t do anything. Like yeah, you learn something, it’s fun, but you didn’t work. You didn’t change reliability. And so I think like as a junior person out there, if you’re listening, go out to your maintenance shop and just find people who know what they’re talking about and just follow them around and just help them and ask questions.

Ryan: Absolutely. I think this really resonates with a lot of folks where you know, at the end of the day, it’s really the people right, like you can only do so much by yourself sitting at a desk you know kind of on this topic what we also hear very often is that maintenance and reliability commonly goes unnoticed. One of the biggest things that we want to do here at UpKeep is really surface what we call unsung heroes, the folks that are maintaining our equipment, making them extremely reliable because oftentimes, you don’t really hear about that side of the coin, unless something really does go wrong. So I guess the question here – can you share a story of how some of the individuals you’ve featured through your project has made an impact on our world or at their business?

Rob: Yeah, so the one I want to give you is actually LaWayne Smith. He works at the University of Kansas Medical Center and he’s been in reliability I think now it’s been about nine or ten months. He kind of came into the role they had five maintenance zones that were each doing their own thing and he’s got them all to sort of buy in. He’s got them all. He wrote and got approved actually you got it approved the other day his strategic asset management policy you got to push through and then he’s also implemented some predictive maintenance technologies at his site. So you know, in ten months, like definitely less than a year, he’s really come a long way and you know it’s, I mean who can’t get behind a hospital, right? 

Ryan: I love it that’s, that’s really awesome and again, what my goal is here is to really surface these stories because again, you don’t hear too much about you know people’s unreliability making a big impact because the impact that they’ve made a lot of the times go unnoticed right- their job, our job here is to be unnoticed. And it’s something we’ve talked about before, but it’s you know, like the ideal scenario,  is we never have a failure and the plant just runs perfectly right exactly and if that’s the case it’s almost like a referee nobody know we knows we were there. yeah everyone plays by the rules right. What’s something you wish more people knew about with regards to maintenance reliability?

Rob: Yeah so I’m gonna take a kind of a different approach here so we talked a lot about the technology, we’ve also talked about the culture change, and I think that there’s kind of those two camps and reliability right now yeah and there’s a third camp that we don’t talk a lot about and that third camp is sort of the math camp. 

Ryan: That sounds fun all right tell me more.

Rob: Yeah there’s a lot of like, if people are listening to you know, the American Society for quality offers the CRE exam certified reliability engineer and it really dives into the mathematics of reliability, whether that’s the Weibull analysis, that’s the Poisson distribution that’s you know, all this different stuff, you can do the simulations, the Monte Carlos, all that stuff. And it’s you kind of don’t see that too much in reliability. Like I see people who do the maintenance side and I see people who do the math side, they never really interact. I think that there is an opportunity there for using that to find significant savings and like I’ve used it in the past and I think that it’s something that people need to learn more about. 

Ryan: Awesome very cool. I mean that’s when you say it I think oh you’re right you know this is how we conduct weeble analyses but you’re right it doesn’t come up every single day, which is very interesting. Like I don’t know if it should come up everyday, I just think that it’s gotta be a tool in your toolbox. You can’t only do root cause analysis and RCM, I think you need to be able to understand the impacts of those root cause analysis from a mathematical point. Like what’s the availability of my plant gonna be like?

Ryan:  Yeah that’s important to know, absolutely. Rob, where do you go to continue learning more and getting better with regards to maintenance reliability? Where do you go?

Rob: Well I talk to people like you! I appreciate that and I again feel like this is a small community. Right, we are all learning from each other and I really appreciate all that you have done for the community.  I think you’ve propelled it quite some bit well I try and that to me right like one of the kind of the reasons I started the podcast was to, like I have a hard time reading reliability books and you know to have conversations like this,  like I enjoy having conversations like this, and so it’s great to just have people on the show who are experts at you know, whatever they do. Whether that’s root cause analysis, that’s RCM, that’s you know AI, and just ask them like what do I want to know and so that’s really how I’ve been learning now. Also, you know I listen to you know three-four hours of podcasts a day so if you’re talking about learning other stuff like recently I’ve been really getting into real estate investing, so you know I like to branch out every once in a while, you know. 

Ryan: If there’s one big takeaway from me and our conversation today and I think one big takeaway for all of our listeners is really like getting out on the shop floor going out and talking to people that deal with these problems every single day go out and talk to the experts in this industry, in this space, of whatever problem you’re trying to solve. That’s where you’re gonna learn the most. And I think that’s a great takeaway for everyone.

Rob:  It absolutely is and one thing you’ll find if you’re listening is don’t be shy. You can reach out, we won’t bite, we’ll give our best answer right and so that’s one thing that you know with my email list has been really nice that people like I say hit me back hit reply like I’m here. And so,  I’ve started having those conversations and those and and it’s great. I mean I got an email yesterday from I think was from Chile and so I’m helping him out with some oil analysis questions and it’s great to have those questions so don’t be shy.

Ryan: So Rob, if people want to connect with you and learn more about reliability and Rob’s Reliability Project where can they go where can they find you where can they reach out?

Rob: If you’re on Linkedin you can’t not find me. But yeah, just Robsreliability.com if you wanna find the email list, if you wanna find some of the top ten podcasts are there. If you’re listening to this podcast as an audio podcast, it’ll be wherever you consume podcasts, so I have Rob’s Reliability Project, it’s available ten different platforms – iTunes, Anchor, Google podcasts – wherever. There’s also if you like the short audio tips if you’re not listening for 45 minutes, I put out a daily 1 minute tip that is called Rob’s Reliability Tip of the Day it is available on 11 different platforms. And then it’s also an Alexa Flash Briefing if you want to start your day off strong.

Ryan: I love it that’s awesome. 

Rob: And then you know for the video picture content, that stuff, just follow Rob’s Reliability Project on Linkedin. Also, you’ll see the memes which have been fun lately.

Ryan: I love the memes Rob, I love it.

Rob: I was a little hesitant about putting it out first, I was like I am not sure how it’s gonna go. But I think people really like them. I like making them. 

Ryan: I love it. Awesome, well thanks again Rob for joining us. It’s been a pleasure. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into today’s Masterminds in Maintenance

Rob: Thanks for having me Ryan.

Ryan: Alright, take care.