Firefighting: The Reactive Maintenance Trap

Ed Ballina
Hello, I am Ed Ballina.

Alvaro Cuba
Hello guys, Alvaro Cuba here.

Ed Ballina
Welcome to the Manufacturing Meet Up Podcast. We talk to you about kicking back the downtime on the plant. We tell you funny stories, most of them true. And we’re happy to be with you one more time.

Alvaro Cuba
Always true from our perspective.

Ed Ballina
And perception is truth to the eye of the beholder, right? Fun stuff. So our hat, what do you have on, amigo? I got to take a closer look at that.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah. This is my surf hat. Yeah, this week I’m trying some waves. So fun stuff. I am.

Ed Ballina
Are you really? I am impressed.  Wow. That’s a lot of fun. So mine was from an outing I went to with a company a number of years ago down in Florida. Beautiful, beautiful resort.  I attempted to do something like hitting a golf ball. Didn’t work very well. So that’s my whole story. But I’m thrilled about where you’re at and what you’re doing. Great time of the year.

Alvaro Cuba
How about yours?

Ed Ballina
As you may be able to tell, it’s cold in Pennsylvania right now. So. ⁓

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, great. Sorry to say that, 75 here.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing. So hey, team, we have an interesting topic today, right?  That many of us have experienced in our, in our lives probably more than once. And that’s the whole discussion about when you have an environment where you’re always firefighting, there’s usually two or three, what I would call maintenance heroes, that everybody goes to. Everybody’s got that hero you’d call at two o’clock in the morning when everybody else has tried to get your line up and running and you get this poor person out of bed to come in. And by the way, that becomes a habit. That’s a needle that is tough to pull out of your arm. So we’re going to talk about that. And not to say that we don’t value people that are just incredibly capable, but that comes with a price. ⁓ Alvaro?

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, it’s a great topic, firefighting, like an addiction, you said it. So we’ll break down what is about it, why the addiction, and we’ll talk about  some culture, process, tech that can help you to break with it. But before we dive in, just please subscribe, hit the button at the bottom of your screen so you don’t miss the conversation and you can join us anytime.

Ed Ballina
All right, well, team, you stuck with us past the opening segment, so I think we’ll take that as a good sign. Let’s dive right into this.  And we typically try to break things into three categories. You’ve heard us talk about people, you’ve heard us talk about process, and you’ve heard us talk about technology. So in keeping with that pattern,  I’m going to kick this off and talk about the people aspect of firefighting and the hero syndrome. So hero trap, the hero trap is popular because it works kind of. So what happens is in most facilities, if you are still in the days of breakdown maintenance, maybe you do a little PM here and there, right? But you’re, you’re still suffering from unscheduled maintenance shutdowns.

There usually emerges, if you’re lucky, two or three key technical people in your plants that are the go-tos, right? So when you’re running regular and things are okay, you know, the support that you have on shift may be perfectly adequate, but when something really breaks down and after two hours, your people are scratching their heads, you call Joanne, the PLC expert that really knows. And these people, you may wake them out of bed, and they’ll jump on a computer or they’ll come in. I mean, they’re awesome, right? And this by no means is a repudiation of those people and what they bring to the party. But when you depend on them all the time, there’s a couple of things that happen, right? One is you overtax the heck out of that person, right?  They may be working 70 hours a week. You may be calling them off hours and on weekends. 

People are willing to make that sacrifice short term, right? Help a business emergency out, not long-term. You’re also not building capability in the rest of your organization because you got a crutch. You know, this guy, when I was in paper making, if I had a DC drive problem, I’d call, I mention his name, I’d call Jerry. Jerry was insanely good, but I had a tendency to over lean on Jerry and not really invest in increasing that knowledge. I mean, we used to joke, right? What happens when person X  gets hit by a truck tomorrow and people are like, ⁓ that would not be good. Not to get morbid, but,  it is also very rewarding. If you’re the “Jerry”, right? You come in and you know you can fix this problem. The adrenaline pumps. Everybody cheers you. Jerry, Jerry, go Jerry. And Jerry starts up your line and you love Jerry. And I always want to reward that devotion and capability.

But folks, if that’s all you do, you’re perpetuating a losing strategy. So, Alvaro?

Alvaro Cuba
Actually, it’s a culture, you create a culture of firefighting. You promote the people who are the heroes in the story. But the problem with that is that it perpetuates itself. So nobody is willing anymore to put the hard work and it becomes exactly the opposite to excellence.

It’s called invisible excellence, because who are you going to credit for problems that doesn’t happen? And I remember when I just started my career, I learned this the hard way. I was in the service area versus the production area. So we were always the villains, always screwing things. Steam is not, air compressor is down, water. And then the production guys were the heroes. They were saving the party. And at that very beginning, I started thinking, this is not fair. This is not helping. I was in the middle, but it was clear that we became two teams. It was our problem, their problem. And it was confirmed when I advanced and…it was confirmed when we started working with the Japanese people and focusing on excellence, they were saying, hey, your people is a slave of the process, is a slave of the machine.  Why? Because it’s always firefighting. It’s always on top of that. So you have to  let that go and put the hard work now easier with all the technology and we’ll talk later on technology, but you have to let it go because the crisis mode that is driven by the firefighting is not sustainable. Ed said it, it burns people, but also the results are not there. Your results go up, go down, go up, go down. You really don’t have real growth, real progress. You are not predictable. So…That means you don’t advance. The only solution is take the hard work and change the culture to a culture that rewards excellence.

Ed Ballina
You know, Alvaro, I met people like you in my career, if you had just sent me maybe steam once in a while or a little bit of pulp, I could make toilet paper, but you know, back there, what do you mean my batch isn’t ready? Come on. I come in and have steam. So yes, unfortunately the utility guys. Yeah. Yeah.

Alvaro Cuba
And that’s only the beginning, the people side. But Ed, what about the process side?

Ed Ballina
So on the process side,  there are also root causes that drive this firefighting behavior.  One is people can typically point to a symptom of a problem on a line, right?  You can point to the reason why my packer doesn’t run right because I have downed cans coming to the infeed, right? And then somebody says, well, you know,

If you just put a little, you know, little spray of water on the infeed, it’ll let them slide better. And they, and you know what, they’ll try it and it might work and it might work a little bit. And before you know it, there are four water hoses spraying the infeed of this machine because they’re chasing the symptom when they need to be thinking about why is that can tripping now? It wasn’t tripping three weeks ago or two days ago. And then get to that root cause that is so important. You may find you had a rail that became, that came loose.

That every time a can comes out without any other cans around it, it knocks a thing down. But here you are adding more complexity, right? So that lack of questioning to the void and questioning to root cause leads to people putting a lot of unnecessary equipment on machines that never gets taken away, right? Sometimes you look at a machine and you go, what’s that photo eye for? Well, that was for the…Yeah… So it worked? No. Why is it still on the line? Well, you know, we didn’t have money to, you know, site clear everything. So it creates this environment where this firefighting keeps you focused on small little issues and you don’t get a holistic picture. Maybe you suffer from a lot of bearing failures in your facility and you can chase down, well, this one could have been an important installation. This could have been. You may find out that when you look at this holistically, you have a lubrication problem, okay? You do not have a proper lubrication technique and it impacts every piece of rotating equipment in your plant. So  don’t whackamole. That’s a lot of fun to do at the arcade, right?  But not in the shop. To use the analogy, put down the shotgun and take out the sniper’s rifle, okay? So. 

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, a couple others, and Ed alluded to that, but trying to focus on the end game, the total outcome of the plan. That’s typical when operations and maintenance are fighting. Why? Because each one of them have their own set of KPIs, their own set of, and they both can be winning and celebrating but the entire result of the company could be zero improvement or even going backwards. Nope, the finger pointing and all that. So one of the important things is see things holistically. The other is, and Ed said to that,  it’s hard work. It’s not in Spanish, we have this, “así no más”. “Leave it like it is. Yeah, yeah. Next time, next time.”

You have to put the hard work, you have to fix, go do your root cause analysis, do your five Y, your fishbone, get to the true root cause and then fix the root cause. Then it will not repeat itself for a long time.  KPIs. Think about KPIs that…involve the entire process. I love one, Mean Time Between Failure because it involves engineering, maintenance, operations. If all of them don’t work together, your mean time between failure doesn’t expand, doesn’t grow, doesn’t move or get worse. And the final one, and it’s something Ed mentioned several times, and it’s in the culture of any excellence program is this shift meeting, daily meeting,  weekly meeting, monthly meeting with all together and with all the data in front and everyone sharing the actions and the logs and all that. So those are some good practices, but it starts with what we said at the beginning.

It starts with culture and then goes into putting the hard work into the process.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, there is so much that you were saying that just resonated with me and I was like, I don’t have enough time to talk about all this. So I think I’d like to propose that we do a full podcast one of these days on what I would call, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, these nested management processes, right? In order for you to be successful in a plant, you have to do things great daily, weekly, monthly, and annually. And so it’s what you’re talking about. But one of the big dangers that I see with companies is this, what I call the stovepipe approach, right? Companies bop back and forth between centralization and decentralization. I’ve been around long enough to see this ball bounce back and forth every 10, 15 years. And at the extreme of functionalization, you have really, really capable functions that do nothing but fight with each other and that destroy the business. And on the other side of decentralization, you’ve got a thousand billion SKUs because everybody does the same thing and they’re huge. They want to do what they want to do in the marketplace, they’re inefficient. So somewhere in the middle. But moving ahead. 

Alvaro Cuba
Totally agree. And let’s do that episode. I think it would be of big interest of our audience. So let’s do it. So guys promise we’ll do it. But for now, let’s jump to the third part, which is tech and help us Ed, a couple ideas.

Ed Ballina
I agree. Yeah, technology. I’m a technology buff, so I love this topic.  So if you’re firefighting,  why don’t you utilize the amazing technology that we have available today to help you get out of that?  There are some facilities. You know, it is so absolutely crazy what you can buy today for 2000 bucks. Okay. I’ve been having conversations with a company that makes a handheld sonic meter for a little bit over $1,300 that will show you where your leaks are in a plant. $1,500. We throw more whatever away in an hour than the 1500 bucks, right?

An attachment you can put on your cell phone. I don’t recommend them because the clarity is crappy, you can buy for $300 an attachment to your phone that turns it into an infrared thermography camera and one that you would have paid $50,000 for 10, 15 years ago. So why are we doing this? Well, you know what? Some people when they’re early adopters, right, get gun shy. They’re like, oh yeah, no, we tried that already. Oh, we tried that infrared thermography camera that looked like the Betamax.

Well, yeah, it was 25 years ago, dude.  You know, they’re like this big now. But you, as manufacturing people, we don’t like change and we have to be risk adverse because our processes do not like change. And once you figure out what the sweet spot is for something, you want to try and maintain that. Right. So this is new technology that comes in.  People are afraid of the new technology. Maybe they’re not as comfortable with digital devices, although, frankly, with these things now, that’s almost gone in terms of a fear, but it’s still there. And then you can’t just buy the latest WYSIWYG that came out. You have to invest in training and capability development for your people, right? So all that gets bundled together to say, ⁓ you know what?  Yeah, I don’t even do oil analysis, but I mean, who cares? You know, they don’t give you the right answer anyway. No folks, embrace technology. Two quick tips.

Invest in some really really cheap infrared thermography cameras. There’s a bunch of them three to four thousand dollar range. It’ll give you amazing information. Just go do that and you’ll be surprised. 

Alvaro Cuba
Machine health is the other quick and good news. You don’t even need to invest on it. Zero investment because you pay as you go and you pay from your maintenance budget, one, two months, at the three or four months, you’re already paid back. So, and once you have the machine working properly, then you build…production health on top of it and then the entire line health. But totally agree with Ed. And just from my side, a couple, just th e one thing in technology is you need to change your mindset and the mindset of your people. And for doing that, there is two things. One is how you convince the CFO. Well, think about on, it’s clear what the cost of investing is. What is not clear and nobody tells it is the cost of not doing it. So imagine that every accident costs, every quality defect costs, spare parts, rush, spare parts cost, inventory.

We don’t put those into the business plan. And that’s for the finance side, but also very important for the change management, the same thinking into your people. So what’s in it for me, as we always say, no? So if you go into this culture of excellence, then how your life in the plant changes, how easier it gets. How much you grow, how much you learn, how easier your processes get. In Ed’s and my self time, it was hard work to get to excellence. With this technology, it’s much, much easier. So those are some ideas guys for you that we did in culture, process, technology. So wrapping up Ed.

Ed Ballina
Yes, sir. They both come together. I mean, all three come together to deliver just phenomenal results. So you heard Alvaro say, start small, right? Pick an area, be specific, keep track of your results. This is one of the things, frankly, supply chain, we’re not good at this, right? We’re more of, I fixed that, it’s running.

Oh yeah, tracking how many hours are saved? Listen, I’m just happy we got product out the door, not some quality, right? No, we shoot ourselves in the foot and we joke a little bit. We poke a little bit at CFOs, right?  And I have had the luxury of working for some amazing, and with some amazing, CFOs. So I don’t mean to, you know, to put them on the spot, but they’re right. You took a mortgage out on this, right? They don’t want to hear that. They want to know how you’re making it up and how are you going to pay for it? So please, please keep track.

Also, and I know you won’t, but don’t take this as a slam on those heroes. No, those people are truly heroes, right? Continue to reward them and continue to praise them, but then start praising the person that found that bearing that was going to fail in two weeks and cost your line to be down for a month and a half. How about that, right?  You got to reward what you expect. 

Alvaro Cuba
Right. And we have to reward everyone. That’s the key of excellence. When you work end to end, when everyone is involved, when you do the right KPIs, you sell it, everyone wins. And once you pass that hurdle, it fits itself into better and better, no? It’s just need to pass that. And now with technology, as we were saying, it’s much easier than in the past. So it’s a culture change. It requires change management, but that’s why we are there, no? We are humans. We can do that individually with our individual leadership. Or if we are a supervisor or a manager, we can all help and change. So let’s go for it and let’s quit firefighting and go for excellence.

Ed Ballina
Now, let’s work together, right? I think a key message of Alvaro, let’s work together. And the analogy that I would make is I remember people saying, my God, you know, before I had children, you know, how can you, you know, your love grows, right? It’s not like the pie. If you have one child, right? When the second child comes, the pie doesn’t get smaller. The pie just gets bigger, right? You love that child, you know. Just like the other one. It’s the same thing in organizations, right? We fight for my KPI, your KPI. Guess what? If we’re all successful, I’m not taking your piece of pie. The pie just got bigger. We all get to eat more. Right? Like that.

Alvaro Cuba
Amen. Perfectly said. Nothing to add. So guys, this we come to the end of another episode. Thank you so much for joining. Please tell your pals, keep listening. Follow follow us, subscribe and like us if you are watching us in YouTube or review us in you are listening in iTunes. More important. We love you guys, keep coming and we’ll do what is best for you and send us your ideas so we’ll do exactly what you need in your plants.

Ed Ballina
Fantastic. So if you like to keep this conversation going, you know where to go. You can email us at mmu@augury.com. We also have a link in the show notes of each episode. And I do want to do a quick shout out. We’re starting to get comments on our podcasts, folks. People asking questions, giving us feedback. Alvaro and I just responded, each of us to a gentleman Sergio from Argentina that had, that gave us some really good feedback. So I want to encourage you to do that. This is how we get more interaction with you. And we tailor the show to really meet your needs. It ain’t about these two talking heads. It’s about you. So join us next time.

Alvaro Cuba
Join us guys, bye.