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ОглавлениеI Just Don’t Think You’re Smart Enough—An Introduction
“We keep saying we have no other course, what we should say is we’re not bright enough to see any other course.” —Dan Carlin quoting David Lilienthal, Atomic Energy Commissioner, The Destroyer of Worlds podcast
I’m troubled. It’s more like I’m concerned, really. Honestly, I already feel better for telling you this up front, although I do realize that this is an odd way to start a book. You need to know that I am writing this under duress. No, I’m not in any physical pain or jeopardy. No one is forcing me to write this book. It’s just that I wonder if we are capable of doing what we are being asked to do. After all, we haven’t done it yet and that troubles me. Could it be that we just aren’t smart enough?
I told a friend recently that I had started this book in my head eleven times. “Eleven,” she said. “That seems like an odd number.” “It is,” I responded. I wanted to tell her that eleven was also a prime number, but I didn’t want to seem pretentious (it’s an engineering thing).
The perplexing issue with the process of writing this book was getting my opening salvo just right. I wanted to create the perfect thesis, or argument that would bring the reader in. I wanted that one hook that would result in half of the readers proclaiming, “Oh, hell yeah!” and leave the other half asking, “What the hell?”
The thesis statement is key to piquing the interest of the reader. I think the message in this text is important, and I know this book will help you with asset management at your place and at your pace. The goal is, through typed words, to connect the message to the intended recipient. Let’s face it, a good book that is not read has the same effect as no book at all. I wanted to write a compelling argument. It was the way I was taught and the way I went on to teach others.
Years after attaining my Ph.D., I began teaching as an adjunct faculty member for a few local colleges and universities. My first graduate class was a graduate level research course. Completing this research course was a requirement for students before writing and defending their Master’s Thesis. I told my class that one of the first things they needed to give consideration to was developing their thesis statement. “Have a bold and compelling statement," I told them. “Have a thesis statement that triggers an immediate response from the reader. Nobody wants to read a vanilla paper. Average papers don’t invoke passion and don’t get read. Get your audience to disagree with you or boldly agree."
To get my class in the mindset of writing an awesome thesis statement, I held weekly debate sessions. Just short twenty-minute discussions. Short but impactful.
Each week I would introduce a current event topic and tell the class to be ready to debate it the next week. I divided the class into pro and con groups. When we met again, I said something along these lines, “Guys, I decided to switch you up. If you were the con side of the debate I’m going to ask you to argue ‘for’ the issue, and vice versa.” This went on every single week. It didn’t take my class long to realize that in order to make an effective argument, for or against, you need to be able to argue both sides of the debate. Know your competitor’s stuff better than they know it was my point.
How did the chapter heading of this introductory chapter make you feel when you read it?
“I Just Don’t Think You’re Smart Enough”
If I did my homework, that statement made you a little curious as to what was coming next. Let me tell you where that line actually came from.
One of my first consulting assignments was at a sugar factory in the Deep South. I was there with the president of Marshall Institute, Greg Folts. Prior to this assignment, I had been wrestling with a nagging thought. Remember, I was brand new to the consulting gig. My quandary was, “How does a maintenance manager feel when their boss calls in a maintenance consultant?” I had no experience with this. I had only ever worked with one consultant, and I was the one who called him in.
Through the mastery of his years of knowledge and experience, Greg completely and sincerely laid out a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) strategy for the potential client. This approach would absolutely deliver what the client wanted and even provided some things Greg knew they would have to have, but they had yet to discover that they would need. On the way out of the plant manager’s office, the maintenance manager lightly grabbed my arm and leaned into me and whispered, “Please help me.”
Here’s what I discovered right then and there. The maintenance manager and the plant engineer almost always know what to do. Their biggest obstacle is convincing everyone else that it is the right thing to do. We are going to get that alignment right during the course and content of the book that you now hold. The twenty-first century is not a time for maintenance versus production. This is a time for asset management, and that means everyone!
Years later and now a more confident consultant, I was alone and pitching a plan to a plant leadership group. The plant manager was clearly not a person who valued teamwork and felt that all things equipment reliability related were solely within the jurisdiction and responsibility of the maintenance department. At the end of my presentation, he said, “I just don’t think we can do that.” Admittedly a little frustrated, I said, “You know, I agree. I just don’t think you’re smart enough.”
That woke some people up.
The plant manager explained that he didn’t mean that they weren’t smart enough to do what I was suggesting, it was more of an issue of ‘his’ willingness to engage production in what was traditionally a maintenance responsibility. He didn’t think production would do what I was asking them to do. Production was not motivated, in other words, and thus, not capable. This was the first group to ever hear my famous “Unless it requires us overcoming the laws of physics—inertia, the speed of light, or gravity— it is all within our capabilities” speech.
After all, it’s not rocket science.
Give that point some serious thought. Unless the solution to our problem requires us to overcome the laws of physics, everything we need to be successful is within our control. It’s often no more, really, than time and money.
If we say we can’t do something, we are really saying that we aren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it.
The epiphany you should be experiencing at this time is to have the metaphorical scales lifted from your eyes and see that almost anything we will be asked to or required to do is within our capabilities. We just need to come together in our organizations and facilities to understand what is being asked, and determine how we are going to respond. The good news? We always seem to have something to practice on because we always seem to be evolving.
Our newest challenge is to understand and implement ISO 55000, Asset Management. ISO is the moniker for the International Organization for Standardization, a global fraternity of national standards bodies. ISO 55000 isn’t new, although with this title it has only been around since the beginning of 2014. Remember that global fraternity I just mentioned a few sentences ago? The birth of this standard, ISO 55000, came from the publication of PAS 55 by the British Standards Institution. This new standard has some history of application and success and almost nothing in the documentation can be argued against, although we may try. The paradox is that it all makes such common sense. As we know, common sense isn’t always that common.
But haven’t we seen this movie before?
I purposefully started this chapter by mentioning that I was troubled and concerned. I went further to reveal that I was writing this book under duress. Let me explain.
I’ve been in maintenance for a long time, and I have the hairline to prove it. In fact, I would put my bona fides up against anyone’s to prove that I am confident in what I say and do. I spent eleven years as an aircraft maintenance officer in the United States Air Force, sixteen as a plant maintenance manager or plant engineer, and seven as a reliability consultant. I believe I’ve consulted or worked in every industry you could name and on almost every continent. No, I take that back. I’ve never worked in the whaling industry in Antarctica. But I’ve been around.
Throughout my thirty-four-year career in maintenance and reliability, there has been a common thread. This thread ran through the military, private industry, and almost all the plants and facilities I’ve consulted in. What is this common denominator? Constantly convincing operations and organizational leadership that we need help with equipment maintenance and reliability. We need access to assets to perform proactive and corrective maintenance. We need money and resources to do our jobs. We need production to stop running equipment into the ground. Why doesn’t anyone else care about the state and the upkeep of the company equipment? Why isn’t anyone listening?
Imagine the surprise of all professional reliability and maintenance experts when they realize that all we needed to do was to publish an international standard to get people hopping to our rescue! Read that last sentence with a dramatic eye roll and as sarcastically as possible.
I asked earlier, haven’t we seen this movie before? You don’t have to go as far back as W. Edwards Deming to begin to see the concept of asset management taking shape. Seiichi Nakajima alluded to our combined interest in asset performance and reliability in his introductory book on Total Productive Maintenance as recently as 1972. Of course, there have been numerous offshoots of this work, some as recent as 2018 (a point that is relevant depending on when you read this book).
The point? With all the knowledge of all the maintenance managers and maintenance supervisors, and all the collective wisdom of plant engineers and reliability engineers, why is there only interest now on a grand scale for asset management? Because ISO 55000 is not a maintenance book, and it’s not written by maintenance people. It is for those ‘other guys.’ Please, please, please keep this in mind. ISO 55000 is not a maintenance book and it is not written for just maintenance people. It is time for others to step up and get involved in asset management.
My fear, and the honest reason I am concerned? Your boss, or your boss’s boss, is going to assemble a committee, read through ISO 55000, 55001, and 55002 and decide that maintenance needs to up their game. The ‘brass’ might think that in order for your company to be in compliance with the ISO 55000 standards it will take more work from the maintenance department and it will quickly become another maintenance program.
But wait, now we know this isn’t the way to execute asset management, and we should be smart enough not to go down this road again. After all, we know how that movie will end.
In early 1995 I started my civilian career at a manufacturing plant in rural Illinois. I was hired to be the plant engineer, maintenance manager, and maintenance supervisor. This was a metal working facility; they made copper-bottom pots and pans. I’m sure you know the company.
Shortly after I began, our parent company, Corning, committed our company to becoming ISO 9000 certified within a year. There was a lot of office buzz about what ISO was, and what 9000 was all about. I had absolutely no idea what ISO was, and I couldn’t research it easily because the Internet didn’t really exist in 1995. Not in my little plant it didn’t.
We were told that the ISO 9000 certification was a means to ‘vet’ us to our customers. Through this quality standard, our customers could essentially do away with any incoming inspections for quality. And likewise, we would no longer have to inspect incoming raw production principal supplies from our vendors who were also ISO 9000 certified. I don’t think it ever really worked out that way to be honest, but we were successful for our part.
For maintenance, our ISO certification meant that we had to spin up a calibration lab for the tools that the tool and die makers used to make our die sets. Think about that for a minute. We were a global company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Corning (a huge company). We made the die sets in our machine shop that made the pots and pan products we manufactured. All this work was executed daily and we didn’t even have calibrated tools for our die makers. How on earth did we even function back then?
I was responsible for creating an ISO 9000 certifiable tool calibration lab. Again, I was fresh out of the military and I had no idea what ISO meant. We did learn that the certification audit was going to simply be a review of our processes and a confirmation of whether or not we were compliant with our own processes. The mantra was “Say what you do, and do what you say.” Ok, that was simple enough.
My plant was a union plant, so I had to post for a calibration lab technician and the job went to one of my machinists, a lady named Paula. I wasn’t surprised; Paula’s employee number was 3. The other two had died, so she was the odds-on favorite.
Paula did an exceptional job pulling this all together and the details she had to master as a tool maker rolled right into what we needed to keep the calibration paperwork straight. We got certified on our very first attempt. A vetting company came in for the audit and they were amazed at our processes and amazed that we actually did what we said we do. The audit cost $25,000, in 1996. It would have been a tough sell to have to repeat that audit.
I want to share two fun stories regarding our attempt to get ISO 9000 certified. I mention these stories for two reasons: they are interesting and fun, and they show that work can be interesting and fun. If you and your company are going to make a run towards ISO 55000 certification, don’t forget to have fun and learn something along the way.
Paula and I discovered that we had to have ‘standards’ for our machine shop, and that those standards had to be tested on another set of standards, and those standards had to be traceable all the way back to the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). When I say ‘standards’ I don’t mean processes, I mean that we had to have steel blocks of exact measure to calibrate our micrometers and calipers against. Our steel blocks had to be confirmed and certified against the absolute exact standards of the United States.
Paula and I set out to find a calibration lab to partner with. We located one in Chicago and made arrangements to visit and possibly set up a contract for services. For some reason Paula asked if she could drive, and I was in no hurry to drive up to and in Chicago so I had no problem with her request.
On the way out of town, Paula mentioned that she needed some gas, so we pulled into the small gas station on Main Street. I got out to pump the gas, and noted that Paula had pulled her car up to the gas pump on the wrong side. The gas tank door was on the other side of her car. I told Paula this and she said, “Sorry, let me turn around.” Paula went on to execute the most beautiful (I am not making this number up) seventeen point turnaround you have ever seen. She pulled up to the exact same pump in exactly the same orientation. I had not moved one inch. “There,” she said. I shook my head.
In Chicago, we found an eager little calibration company that wanted our business. During a tour of their facility, my interest was captivated by a bell jar sitting on a pedestal in the exact center of their shop. Inside the container was a perfectly smooth, brush metal item roughly the size and shape of an old Zippo cigarette lighter. I was transfixed by this metallic object. I asked the owner what this metal item was and he told me that it was three inches. I asked, “Three inches of what?” “It’s exactly three inches,” was his response.
I had never seen such a thing in my life. I was looking at an object that was precise to 10 millionths of an inch. I’m still fascinated by that experience to this day.
Here is my hope for you, the reader. We may or may not know each other. I would sincerely love to meet and get to know everyone that is interested in advancing the profession of maintenance and asset reliability. We are a small fraternity so we need to work together, but my immediate hope for each of you is that you have great success in this journey towards asset management. Also, that you travel down your own path and at your own pace to become wildly successful. However, do it in the spirit of enjoyment, and have fun. Don’t forget to learn something along the way and share it with others.
Helpful Hints to Get the Most from This Book
In 2018, I completed a bucket-list level ambition and published my first book. My first offering exceeded my greatest expectations and I was very pleased with the work that I had created. The feedback from my first book was 100% positive.
It was during the creation of that book, The Reliability Excellence Workbook: From Ideas to Action that I hit on a method, a genre of book writing. In essence I had stumbled upon a workbook format that delivered exactly what I was hoping to achieve. At an SMRP (Society for Manufacturing and Reliability Professionals) annual conference in Kansas City, MO in 2017, I met the lady who would eventually become my publisher. When Judy Bass asked me to tell her about my book idea, this is what I told her: “I want to write a book that is as if you and I are sitting around a dinner table, drinking coffee, and we are just talking about stuff and I’m sketching out some thoughts on a napkin.” That is literally the first conversation Judy and I had.
That first book delivered on my idea, completely. I wanted a book that allowed me to introduce an idea, ask what you thought about it and we would both generate some anecdotal stories to support the concept. I’d share some world-class principles with you and together we would start to piece together a comprehensive maintenance strategy for you at your location.
I’m adopting that same theme for this book. I have broken down the concept of asset management into the working elements that I believe are relevant. I am a constant learner, so I will interject points of view from other authors, making this a bit of scholarly work. I’m going to ask you what you think, and how things are back at your place. This will be a workbook of sorts because I want to give you space to jot down your thoughts. Throughout this text, we will be working side by side to put together the strategy for how asset management could and should be implemented at your location.
Mechanically, you will be asked to fill in the blank spaces. I’ll highlight those spaces in light gray so you will have some indication as to where to record your thoughts.
I ask that you let others participate and record their ideas as well. I think everyone in your organization could benefit from this level of discussion and engagement. There is a lot to share and discuss.
This is a very shareable book in the sense that we are going to touch on the major elements of asset management. It is interesting, and absolutely essential, to first determine what an asset is. This should surprise most of the people reading this book. If you truly gave it some serious thought, you would conclude that although we might label something as an asset, we certainly don’t treat it like one.
Since this is a book on asset management, and we are focusing on industrial assets (manufacturing, service, and facilities), we will eventually be narrowing our discussions down to capital assets, essentially the equipment we utilize to provide the product or service. I call capital assets the ‘stuff that makes the stuff.’ That is an easy way to differentiate capital assets from human assets (the people who make the stuff) and financial assets (the money to make the stuff), and so on.
The aforementioned ISO 55000 standards will be reviewed in the text of this book. Much of the three books (55000, 55001, and 55002) are open for interpretation, similar to my story about my introduction to ISO 9000. Remember, “Say what you do and do what you say.”
Once we’ve begun to put some framework around our interpretation and intent towards capital assets, we will create roles and responsibilities around the assets and begin to nip at an actual asset management approach.
Many of you reading this book will be interested to know that there is a section on Bill of Materials and Spare Parts. This is a greatly untapped topic and one that I personally believe we need to get smarter on and quickly.
Production has a key role to play in asset management, so we will be spending a great deal of time exploring exactly what is needed there.
As you can see from just this short teaser, there is much to discuss on the topic of asset management, and the intention of this book, and specifically the format of this book, is to drive a larger strategy on how we are going to work together in our facilities to make all this happen. I believe the layout of the book and key learning ideas will contribute to your success.
I need to make a very significant remark considering the remainder of this book and the manipulation of physical assets. For this book, I will be referring to the assets of a company that help to generate revenue. For manufacturing plants this is very straightforward; I’m talking about the production equipment. For facilities and services, I’m talking about the assets that allow a facility to be of use (roof, walls, doors, boilers, chillers, etc.) and possibly any vehicles or transportation equipment. We will discuss the term organizational objectives later in this text. One of your organizational objectives might be to be compliant with EPA laws and be good stewards of the environment. In that effort, there are many physical assets that would be used to fulfill that objective. I really just want this book to focus on the assets that allow for revenue generation. I believe that each organization has, as a core objective, to be profitable. That will be a focus of this book. The asset management processes in this book also adapt to the non-revenue generating assets as well (sprinkler systems, backflow preventer, etc.), so please use them. I really wanted to call out this significant element because I wanted you, the reader, to know that business isn’t just about making money and I certainly don’t mean to imply that it is.
Every chapter in this book will end with a review of the chapter’s main points. These synopses will form segments of your overarching approach to asset management located at the end of this book. Depending on the particular dynamics and circumstances, some of these chapter abstracts will fit, in the end, to outline a strategy for a commitment to asset management at your location.
In the end, you will be able to review, edit, compile, and pull together the thoughts and ideas to form a very obtainable vision for the future, and make a conclusive argument, on any merit, for a purposeful drive forward. Promise me that you will have fun reading and working through this book, because I intend on having fun while I write it.
