Machine Health Q&A: Prevention Beats Repair

Ed Ballina
Well, hello, laddies and lasses. I’m Ed Ballina.

Alvaro Cuba
Hello guys, Alvaro here. I cannot have a Finnish accent, so I let Ed to go with that. How are you my friend? What’s happened with that hat?

Ed Ballina
Bad Irish accent. Well, this hat. So my name is Ballina, as many of you know. And what you may not know is the largest city in County Mayo, Ireland is Ballina spelled just like my last name. So we have a sneaking suspicion that even though my family’s from the north of Spain, we might have traveled down from the Emerald Isles. So in respect of my potential Irish forbearers, I am wearing an Irish hat. So there you go.

Alvaro Cuba
And at the end of the show, we’ll celebrate with a Guinness, right?

Ed Ballina
Guinness, I’ve heard, I’ve never been to Ireland. It’s on my bucket list, but I hear Guinness in Ireland is the best.

Alvaro Cuba
I tried it once. So I can tell you after the show.  In my case, guys, look at the hat. I’m in Finland now. That’s why I’m using this hat. Fascinating country. The same as the five Nordic countries. No, it’s productive, efficient, austere and has an amazing welfare state. These five countries, as you know, are the highest rankings worldwide in education, competitiveness, health, equality. So they make it. something more related to the topics and supply chain, like developed countries between 65 and 70 % of their GDP is driven by service, 30 by manufacturing. And in service, guess what? Information and communication technology. So AI, software development, IT consulting, game design, and AI. So related to what we were talking in the last episode.

Ed Ballina
That is terrific.  Seems like you always hear great stories about Finland. So and Alvaro I really like your hat. However, ⁓ some of you may not realize that we have actually become pretty good friends also with Sara So we get pics, we send pictures of each other of like Sara’s vacation. And my friend here sent us one on what looked like  a boat in Thailand. He’s wearing one of the conical, you know, they used to call coolie hats, but you know  and he looked really sharp. I was hoping he would bring that with him for the podcast that episode because that was cool I’ll be it now next one

Alvaro Cuba
Yes. That was in Vietnam. in the next one, in the next one. I use a cool Thailand hat in the last episode.

Ed Ballina
Yes. We got it. We know we can’t give them all the hats in one show. You know, we got to keep them coming back to see what we’re going to put on our heads. So the good news is, Alvaro and I both still have hair. Woo. Anyway, welcome to Manufacturing Meet Up podcast. This is a show where we kick back. We talk about efficiencies and our experiences on the shop floor. We share them with you. We joke and we have a good time along the way. So let’s get started. But Alvaro’s got a really important message.

Alvaro Cuba
Yes. OK. Please, this is a reminder, click the button at the bottom to subscribe and don’t miss the conversation, don’t miss our episodes. So do it now and hope to hear from you in every episode.

Ed Ballina
Great, so today I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun, because most of you can recognize this happened to you somewhere in your career. And these are machine health horror stories. And we have a plethora of them, but we gotta get this down. So the one that I will tell you about was,  I instituted…

Alvaro Cuba
It’s Halloween time, by the way. So that’s why, what’s the scary stories and dark sides and all the nightmares. Yes, all related to the Halloween month.

Ed Ballina
Nightmare. Yes. The Halloween theme. Thank you for bringing that up because I completely, see for me Halloween means something different because I was married on Halloween. So I’ll be celebrating 43 years of marriage this Halloween. Somebody got the trick. Somebody got the treat. So anyway, I’m going to start talking to you about some of our my most experienced machine health horror stories. So a number of years ago, I instituted an infrared thermography program, an inspection program, with a gentleman had come out of the electrical industry and we outfitted him with a camera. We trained them and the very first plant that he went to visit, he found a bad electrical connection on a huge oven that’s used to the shrink wrap on packages that you’ll see in the marketplace.

And the equipment had been online for a number of years. Infrared thermography showed that one of the legs had a bad connection and might have burnt up within two to three weeks. And had that happened, that line would have been down for months because those ovens are massive and they take a long time to fix and to produce. And we estimated his business saved us a million dollars.  So that was a huge, huge win. That would have been catastrophic for that line. that was my, it’s not vibration, but it’s predictive maintenance. We got plenty of vibration ones too.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah. And by the way, we are tackling that. This is an Ask Me Anything episode. So this was the first question that you get. We’ll tackle three questions. It was, what is your worst experiences  in machine health? And one… I remember two things. One is when something masks the problem that you are having. So we had a huge deodorizer in a salad oil deodorization process. It’s a huge equipment with an agitator going all the way down and a huge motor upside.

It was steam and we completely misread what we were putting in and it ended up failing. And these failures that can cost you 15 days with the equipment out  and the other related to what you were saying in an oven,  in an oven you normally measure some of the motors, the ones that, and if you miss one, you generate a fire, no? Because it’s on top of the oven temperature, you generate additional temperature. And if you have oil at some point, you generate that. So those are kind of scary situations to be in. More scary is the time and the money that you have to invest afterwards to fix it.

Ed Ballina
And the potential for injury, right? Every one of these failures has the potential to hurt people. And we put a lot of controls in place and PPE and all that. But when equipment fails, it is not predictable. And it could throw pieces of metal. It could generate fires,  generate fumes that are bad for you to inhale. So failure is bad. 

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, and on the positive, if you really have in a cheap way, which is machine health, because it’s basically you pay by month, you don’t need to invest in anything. You can put all the sensors and you have AI behind it, just telling you where and that it’s going to fail tomorrow. It’s telling you it’s starting to deteriorate.

So you have this time and normally it tells you even how much time you have. So you can plan a downtime and you can fix it. So then you can save a lot of money and a lot of these horror stories.

Ed Ballina
Yeah. Agreed agreed Now you’re going to talk about the dark side of reactive maintenance. That sounds, that sounds a little spooky. It is Halloween. So run for it

Alvaro Cuba
Okay, moving into…And it’s basically for me that the darker side is the firefight. No, when you enter in the firefighting, no, the huge amount of data, no insight, for instance. And then all the time things are failing and you are trying to chase it. And as soon as you fix this, you- the next one is coming to you.  You have cascade failures. One thing start failing and then the next and the next. And if you don’t follow all the different things, if you have a line, just one stops the entire line. Then the other, so it’s not one equipment failing and then you need to deal with that equipment. You need to stop the entire line, stop the entire production. Those are the dark sides, reactive maintenance, plus even imperfective, the amount of time that you try to collect data and try to make sense of the data. So you invest huge amount of time, but the results, the benefits are…not there really, no? And you continue firefighting.

Ed Ballina
And that is painful, right? Because you continue to, it’s like Groundhog Day. You visit the same place all the time and it’s the same problems, I’ve used the example in the past of  a person running a packer. And this packer, right, is down every seven to 10 minutes because you’ve got down containers coming to the infeed. Packers don’t handle down cans or bottles or anything very well, right?

And here that operator,  he or she is out there every day, every 10 or 15 minutes, shutting the machine shuts down. So now you got to go and stand up the can, maybe you get some gaps and we’re continually, that’s a form of reactive maintenance, right? Something fails, I go fix it. I go lift up the container. Great. We got to step back and find out where’s the container falling.  

Not to go too far off the topic, but I spoke to a packer company that is talking about installing cameras all the way, about a hundred feet before the end feed of the machine and all the way through the loading process and out to the other end. And their, the promise is the equipment will start seeing cans or containers fall at a certain point of your line. It’ll start warning you to say, Hey, out of your 10 last down can issues, nine of them, we saw them in, you know, come across this plate and topple and fall down. Imagine the power of that. Now you can go after that plate that is malfunctioning or the rail that isn’t right and fix root cause, not just become part of the equipment. You now become a bottle or can stand instead of a packer operator.

Alvaro Cuba
And not only fix, because the reactive come you to fix. The predictive brings you to plan. No, in the other is oops, it happened. Let’s fix it. In this case is it’s going to happen if you don’t do this so that you can plan even if you need to stop in your terms, not in the machine terms. So.

Ed Ballina
Absolutely. No, absolutely. The first example is purely reactive, right? But imagine if it’s all connected to AI and the machine starts learning that when it sees just a little bit of wobble on these containers coming across this one particular part of the line, 20 % of the time, they wind up falling. So now you can go to Alvaro’s point and go, what’s wrong with that? How do I fix it? How do I keep it from ever happening again?

So maybe you go to dynamic strength transfers instead of stationary dead plates, just food for thought.  But also moving along, right? There’s been like some really executive nightmare scenarios with this stuff too, right?  That’s the thing keeps us up at night.

Alvaro Cuba
That’s a third question. Yes, that was a good one because the first two were related to plants and operators. This is more related of executives and the plants, the nightmare that they have because of the plants and the nightmares we have because of them. Yes.

Ed Ballina
Lots of nightmares. Nightmare on Elm Street. Another Halloween theme.

Alvaro Cuba
You wanna, give it a try first.

Ed Ballina
Yeah. so what are the machine health KPIs like a CFO looks at it, right? And then make, make cause them to sleep at nights and maybe more importantly, which one should they really be worried about? Now that sounds a little preachy, but I will tell you that a lot of times, I see CFOs really focusing on what they would call discretionary costs, right? And for some reason, repair and maintenance costs are bucketed into discretionary. And I’m here to tell you folks, there’s nothing discretionary about R&M. You have got to invest in repair and maintenance in order to drive all of the other parts of your P &L that are much more impactful. So my one thought for a CFO, don’t look so much at what we’re spending on maintenance. Look at the effectiveness of that spend and see how your line efficiency is going up, your waste is going down, et cetera.

Because unfortunately, this is a time of the year. If your fiscal calendar is the same as the physical calendar, you’re entering into Q4. And if your numbers are not looking good, more often than not, they’re not perfect. This is where you start telling people to burn the furniture. You got to bring the year in. It’s the end of the year. Don’t spend any more money. And that is so, I understand why it’s done, but it is so harmful to the organization, right?

Because on one side we’re preaching we want efficiency, we want low waste, we want great out of stock performance. And on the other side we’re saying, but don’t spend $25,000 rebuilding your filler.  Wait till Jan 1. That has all kinds of negative connotations. And you’re really hurting your business and you’re really hurting the morale your people on the floor. So a little bit of advice for a CFO.

Alvaro Cuba
And two, but two things to what Ed is saying. In the past, to go after, for instance, machine health that we were discussing previously, it required to go to the executives, to the CFOs, because you needed to invest capital. Now, most of the AI solutions are software as a service. So it means it comes from your own budget in maintenance, you can manage. And the times in the last episode, we were talking about very concrete case, six months payback. And there are other cases, three months payback. So if you have the budget for the year, your budget that you control, and you are going to have the payback in three or six months. So even within the fiscal year, it’s in your hands. So you can go for it. You can invest, you pay by month. So at the end of the year, you are going to show even more savings than what you promised and it’s under your control.

Ed Ballina
It is one of those, it is one of those we’ve mentioned this before if you have, if you’re certain and you’ve done the work that says this is the right thing to do, beg for forgiveness instead of ask for permission. Now don’t use me if you get fired if you do this, right? So be legal and all those good things, but sometimes you just kind of call your shot, right? And the organization should be willing to allow some amount of experimentation and personal decision-making right? It’s like my head is on is on the line for the budget of this facility and it’s P&L. Okay Allow me to run the business that you’re paying me to run and make my bets. If I don’t deliver then you have every right to come back to me and and ask for redress. But at least trust me enough to let me make these decisions to be honest some of these subscription fees folks if you can’t hide that in your budget. ⁓ I mean if you can’t put it somewhere where it doesn’t call out a lot of attention that you’re doing something weird…

Alvaro Cuba
You don’t need to hide it, you don’t need to hide it because the ROI is three to six months.

 Ed Ballina
Yeah, yeah, yeah. People just have to present the business case and have people trust you that you’re on the hook to deliver the savings, right? At the end of the day, that’s what people ask for.

Alvaro Cuba
If the benefits, if you spend more, but in three months you recover it, that’s it. And the other thing is once you do that, take the time to calculate the ROI, the financial driven ROI, the cost, the benefits, the time, do the calculation, because that is going to give you a lot of opportunity to go with other projects. And as soon as you say, hey, look at the project and look at my ROIs, then you build the trust and then you can accelerate the rollouts of these new technologies.

Ed Ballina
Absolutely. That credibility that you build just enables you to build on that and make bigger bets. Listen, if you deliver for the company, they’re not going to, they’re not going to clip your wings. We’re not going to say that’s easy. And sometimes you may have to demonstrate right, here’s a return and Alvaro’s point of capturing the ROI and the savings is frankly our biggest challenge. I think because this stuff does work, but sometimes we don’t have the systems to be able to assign that change to this particular activity, right? And that is important because sooner or later, the banker, your CFO, is gonna wanna know how you have been paying the mortgage.

Alvaro Cuba
And we all know as part of the nightmares, no, we always hear,  okay, we invested, where are the results? Or how can it be so difficult? No? Or no, no, no, I don’t have the money, but I still expect the results. Those are the nightmares that not they are having, but we are having.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, yeah, it’s so hard.

Alvaro Cuba
And what we discussed, solve this, no, because building trust, being able to pay from your money, get the payback even within the fiscal year allows yo u to move and to have the possibility. And then you can demonstrate that you are doing the right thing and then you can roll out faster. So making the lives of you and your people easier and everyone can sleep better at night.

Ed Ballina
Everybody does well. And that is, you know, in most of these businesses, you’re handed some initiatives from headquarters, right? That they have maybe came out of their center of excellence work. And most of them are really pretty good, right? Great ideas to go execute. But also look for the answers on your shop floor. And don’t just wait for headquarters to give you, you know, their initiatives. Develop your own.

And if you can show the success, I have seen many times where these grassroots ideas are created in a plant. They skunk work it, they make it work. And when they bring it up to the leadership team to look, wow, that’s a great idea. And you did it kind of a little bit MacGyver-ish. We can invest resources to make it systemic, to get IT involved, clear all these hurdles so that it is now accelerated. So that is the real potential.

And I love to see these grassroots initiatives because a lot of times these are people that we  celebrate as  we had a couple of these, the trophies behind you and all this other stuff. People love that and we celebrate those successes and when they come from the shop floor they have such meaning, such meaning. They stick.

Alvaro Cuba
Great. Yes. So three questions from you. We hope you enjoy the spooky and  Halloweeny answers. And  just please chime in. I’m sure you all have examples. You have your own takes in any of these three questions. So some of your peers or colleagues ask these three questions, chime in on your takes and also continue sending us more questions. Yes, absolutely. So great way to finish this episode. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for bringing your pals. Please subscribe, like, or  leave us a review. And more important, continue to share with us and with your pals so we can grow this meet up.

Ed Ballina
Awesome. And if you want to keep the conversation going, you know where to reach us. mmu@augury.com. You can also leave comments on our podcast page and all that. And we look forward to seeing you next time. Never know what November will bring. Have a great weekend.

Alvaro Cuba
Take care, bye guys.