From Reactive to Proactive: Ricky Smith, CMRP

Ed Ballina
I’m Ed Ballina.

Alvaro Cuba
Hello guys, Alvaro Cuba here.

Ed Ballina 
Welcome to the Manufacturing Meetup Podcast. This is the show where we kick back. We may nurse a beverage or two and talk about what really happens on the shop floor. By the way, don’t think badly. It was a warm cup of coffee. Okay. It’s been cold in Pennsylvania, but you know what? This is where we tell it as it is. So,

Alvaro Cuba
As you can see, I’ve been in Colorado. So where have you been Ed?

Ed Ballina
Well, they make the most amazing boots. They’re made in, well, they’re out of Bozeman, Montana. And since I’m wearing all kinds of like camouflage stuff, I thought it would fit today. So.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, it fits perfect, mine is 50 % camouflage.

Ed Ballina
So you only see half of Alvaro. Alvaro is not very wide to begin with, right? So you don’t have to camouflage much. Me and the other hand, I need extra leaves and branches to hide me

Alvaro Cuba
Please don’t listen to him.

Ed Ballina
We’re excited to come to you again. And we’re really excited about today’s guest. His name is Ricky Smith. He’s got 30 plus years of maintenance reliability experience. He’s author of a number of books, loads of articles, just got done watching one of his YouTube videos. Folks, one of the best 10 minutes of your time that you can spend if you want to understand maintenance reliability.

He makes it simple and easy to understand. He teaches in person through online workshops and he runs the consulting group, World Class Maintenance. And just a couple of takeaways from what I’ve seen of his work so far, very focused on reactive versus proactive, Big on planning, right? How do you plan your way to success? And the key is reliability. And he rounds all that out by saying he is a devotee to Deming and TQM and the total quality approach. And it’s great because I happen to have been born in that era as well. So can’t wait to really dive in.

Alvaro Cuba
As Ed said, folks, we have a lot to cover with Ricky, but the biggest question, and we want to center the discussion in firefighting, the cost about it. We all experience that.  It’s very difficult to avoid and the cost is big. So we want to focus on that. But first.

Hit the subscribe button at the bottom of the screen and don’t miss these conversations. And with all that, let’s get started.

Ed Ballina
Well, hey, Ricky, welcome to the show. We’re so happy have you here.

Alvaro Cuba
Great to have you. Yes, very excited.

Ed Ballina
You know, we read, obviously, Alvaro and I have been reading some of your books. I watched also some of your videos and it is we couldn’t be more aligned. So we’re just going to jump into this since we’ve already given you a bit of an intro and ask you, let’s start off with understanding the problem. Right. So when you walk into these facilities and you get to experience what’s happening on the floor every day, I’m sure in some of the places you walk into, they’re still back in breakdown slash firefighting hero mode. What does that look like and what is it costing them?

Ricky Smith
Well, costs, if you look at maintenance costs of the percentage of replacement asset value, it’s three times what it would cost if you were proactive. It costs you lose a lot of money. So if you look at RAV, world class maintenance RAV, if you Google it, you can come up with it. It’ll show you. It’s not what I created. It’s what’s been seen around the world.

Ed Ballina
I’ll just say I was blown away by the metrics that you showed in your video. I think it was about 10 minutes long. All the KPIs for world class versus breakdown. I mean, numbers are telling.

Ricky Smith
And with the KPIs too is having scorecards. That’s something a lot of companies don’t have. You know, when I was the main supervisor, what I did is I put a screen up where my guys can see it when they walk into the shop in the morning, they on shift, they can look at it and say, this is where we’re at. Yeah. We know the score in the game. You know, yeah. yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. You got to know what’s good. What good looks like.

Alvaro Cuba
And good benchmark also help. Yes. And what’s the north? Yeah. Ricky, when you talk to a lot of plant managers, they think they are doing just okay. And we know most of them are firefighting. What they are missing.

Ricky Smith
I tell you, it’s all about the money. That’s what it comes down to. Like I’ve done with work with companies before the same company, you know, it started moving in the right direction and one plant, the next plant, so we get it in the right condition. Things are moving forward. And then the next one you go to and the next one and the next one, you know, so you start improving overall. Cause some of these companies only owned by an individual.

Alvaro Cuba
Many of them, yeah. The mean size, the small size.

Ed Ballina
You’re talking to the person that’s running the checks for the waste and the downtime.

Ricky Smith
Right? Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a lot of a lot of rework that companies run into and rework has to be when you have to go back to a problem again and again. I mean, this rework is the number one cause of it is maintenance, planning and scheduling lack of effective planning and scheduling. So people say, what is rework? You know, that’s why I have to explain it to them.

Alvaro Cuba
But if there is money involved and incentives and all that, why they are missing the point? Why they are not going back to the scheduling and planning?

Ricky Smith
What do you think? Start with the five whys first, and the five whys will help you. Okay. And if it doesn’t match, then you need to go back and do the five whys again. Maybe you need to get a bigger crowd. Trying to pull everybody in thinking the same way. We were thought about that.

Ed Ballina
Different viewpoints. That’s the value of diversity. in experiences, right? When you get people looking at things from four different angles, it’s amazing what they can see. So you kind of painted a picture of what it looks like when you walk into these plants and you establish, the plant managers don’t think it’s quite that bad in some of these places.

But walk us through an assessment, because I’m sure, you one thing is you walk in and you eyeball the place and you go, wow, this place is on fire. That’s the starting point. And then from there, you look at, you know, some sort of an assessment that allows you to diagnose where the plant is at and more importantly, how to get them to where they need to be Embroiled in this whole thing is the fact that you’re probably going to tell this plant that they’re not as good as they think they are. And that sets you up in a bit of a quandary right from day one.

Ricky Smith
Exactly. Exactly. Yes, don’t embellish it. You know, that’s what I always tell them. Don’t embellish it. You know, follow where you you are where you are, then you need to do something about it. OK, you need to have a plan, you know, to move forward. If you don’t have a plan, you’re not going to know where you’re at. It’s like going. You got to drive from, you know, California to South Carolina and you got two days to get there. Good luck with that. You’re probably going to get lost, you know.

Ed Ballina
You gotta wait till the sun comes up so you can feel it behind you warm and useful. You know it’s the other way.

Hey, there were two terms I just want to drop here that were funny as heck that people have used before. One is don’t put a lipstick on a pig and the other is if your baby’s ugly, call your baby ugly and move on from there, you know. So just…

Alvaro Cuba
But going back to the assessment, so what are the couple critical things that you do in the assessment?

Ricky Smith
When the assessment, you look at different categories, you you assess the equipment, you assess the technicians, you know, everybody needs to be assessed on where they are. But if you don’t, if you got one step in the process, could be we haven’t trained the technicians properly, or we don’t have repeatable procedures, then we can have some real, you know, really, if we understand that, then we can bring things up very quickly.

Got it. The thing is, we’ve got to give people knowledge so they understand how to make those next steps, not just talk about it. You’ve got to prove it. The proof of concept, I always say.

Alvaro Cuba
That will give the plant managers clarity on the size of the opportunity, where the issue size and the size opportunity. How about management? How about the CFO? Because, you know, plant managers can move, but they need help and they need money. So how you convince a CFO to go after this?

Ricky Smith
Well, I usually don’t talk at a CFO. You know, I talked to the maintenance manager or the engineering manager. That’s who I work with. You know, but what they do is they’re the one communicating that to the plant manager. Because typically, unless I’ve done something really great, you know, if I want, I won’t see the plant manager. Okay.

Ed Ballina
They’re translating what you’re giving them into some sort of metrics so that when the CFO says, why are you spending half a million dollars on this additional a year? They’ve got some backup, you know?

Ricky Smith
Well, you need to have those scorecards. If you don’t have the scorecards up, people won’t know if we’re improving or not.

Alvaro Cuba
those scorecards will help them to do the ROI and normally a good ROI with a good assessment normally helps to move the CFO.

Ricky Smith
Yeah. When I was a maintenance supervisor too, one of the things I used to do too is that every month, whatever, we had a real serious problem over the month or over the week. Every week we would get together and I’d buy donuts. So all my technicians would show up. Otherwise they’re like, I’m in a hurry. We’ve got a schedule. It’s 30 minutes schedule and I’d buy donuts. Okay.

So what was one thing that we had that we had a problem, you had a problem with last week and how did you, how did you do it? Come and bring it back to a restored state. What did you do? What was the problem? How do we solve it?

Ed Ballina
We’re great learning. I mean, and you know, people are proud of that kind of stuff. yeah. And by the way, your your  bribes change in different places, you know, donuts in one place, pizza in another’s. If you’re, you know, in Massachusetts it better be Duncan. Right. Or D’Angelo’s.

Ricky Smith
That’s right, Dunkin’ Donuts. That’s With the cream inside.

Ed Ballina
That’s a big hit. So that kind of transitions to, you know, right around this topic to talk about a real story, right? Because we found that our viewers, listeners, we, we can talk about, you know, philosophical theoretical, but it’s their stories of the application on the shop floor that really, really drive interest. So if you could give us a, you know, an example of where you had a plant that was firefighting, you worked with them and they were able to succeed and maintain better performance and what it did for them financially and you know, morally, et cetera. Morale standpoint, I’m sorry.

Ricky Smith
You know, one plant that was at, you know, they were totally reactive and they didn’t even feel like they felt like they were in reactive mode. So we had to talk about money first. How much money are you losing? You know, so they know the trend. The maintenance manager knows what the trend is and cost. Is cost going up? Is it zigzagging up and down high points? I mean, come on, get down and focus on whatever’s going to give you the first quick win.

That’s what I always tell them first, quick win, and then we’ll move forward from there. But if you don’t have the knowledge that’s required on each step, then you need to go need to think about how we’re going to do that. And then one of the things that can help it with is repeatable procedures. As long as they can read and write English good, we’re good.

Ed Ballina
And even nowadays with new technology, hey, you know, we’ve got voice systems that deliver the content in almost any language you, you need. So we’re even surpassing that these days, but very interesting to hear you talk about, uh, Deming and all that, cause I was an early Deming guy in P&G, and you’re talking about Ishikawa diagrams, right? People, process, raw materials and all that. uh, yeah, some of that stuff may not sound sexy, right? But my God, it works. It’s proven, you know, in time that you apply this concept, you get great performance.

Alvaro Cuba
So moving on, we have talked a lot about the proving the problem and everything you talk and all these tools help them to understand. So it comes the, aha, now I got the problem and even I get the size of the problem. So what now? What’s next? How we start breaking the firefighting.

Ricky Smith
Well, one thing is to train all your maintenance technicians and maintenance leadership. The fact, even in the store room, to understand what the five whys are. So if you, if you Google five whys, Ricky Smith CMRP, you’ll see what the five whys are. And most of these things come from the military a long time ago. They’ve been around a while.

Ed Ballina
So a question that we get very often, and I think all of us have encountered this in the past, when does it make sense to build versus buy? So for example, when it comes to vibration analysis, I experienced it in a huge paper mill. We had our own vibration technicians. There were company employees that were amazing. When I went into beverage, I realized I couldn’t afford that. Our plants are kind of smaller.

So that’s where I found, for example, Augury that could relieve me of all that and still provide me the benefit. So that’s a build versus buy. How do you make that determination  when you’re facing these kind of daunting situations?

Ricky Smith
We need to try to solve it first, those defect severity versus asset criticality. You correlate those together and they help you understand where do I need to focus that.

Ed Ballina
So almost like a rate of return calculation on your effort, right? Here’s the Pareto, here’s my bigger hitters, and then make sure, because you’re right. We always struggle with having finite resources, being people, dollars, or whatever. So if you don’t focus your efforts, you never move the needle.

Ricky Smith
Yeah. And you also in reactive, if you’re really reactive, a lot of your good people go to work somewhere else, especially if a new plant shows up close by. Why do they do that? Cause they’re going to suck all your people out and put it in their plant. Cause they’re to pay a little bit more money. Like I, when I went to work at Alumex, that I worked at Exxon at first, I mean, making good money. But when, when Alumex came in, oh my gosh.

Ed Ballina
We experienced that facility we had. It’s bad. They come in, they have shiny new equipment, right? And they give their people another dollar an hour. Yes, it gets nuts.

Alvaro Cuba
And Ricky, one more on that one quick. If you find that you need to do all these kinds of things, advise them to do it themselves, to hire a consultant, to hire someone to help them to do it. It’s a combination what to.

Ricky Smith
I’ve, training is the best thing. Better than hire somebody to do it. It’s better to take training. There’s an organization that I’m a member of called Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals, SMRP. I tell people all the time, once you become a member, it is very inexpensive and it’s owned by the members. So when I’m looking for a problem, I got mine in PDF, by the way, so I can go and Google it. I mean, get on my, on my PDF and look at it and say, I need this. And it’ll show me the solution on what it is. And the cost is very low. Like I say, very low. I’ve been a member and I’ve been a CMRP since 2003. Wow. And I still pay it every month. One of the things too, is the store room. How many places do you think have problems in their maintenance store room?

Ed Ballina
Almost all.

Ricky Smith
Only the best, only the best are doing well. Okay. They got a secure store room. They got min, max, and then safety stock, safety stock statement for safety stock is you will always have it. Even if, you know, like I, one time we had a problem at a plant that was working with multiple plants. They had a problem in like, we can’t get there.

Ed Ballina
And there’s so much.

Ricky Smith
We can’t get these certain parts that they needed and they couldn’t find it. So they call me. I said, okay, this vendor that I know has got the parts. Okay. I called them. They got the parts. Okay. And I told them if they, if they really need it bad, then we’ll put it on Delta airlines. There’s a flight flying out four o’clock in the afternoon and fly it to Germany, the fly to Germany, pick it up and bring it back. Okay.

Ed Ballina
It’s those is those kinds of actions, right? That really drive. I don’t know. Hard for me to to put it to terms, but we had a problem where we needed a part. It was sitting in Texas. It was over the weekend and people are telling us we can get a truck there. I happen to have my transportation guy with me and I was a little cocky. I told the guy you realize we own the third largest fleet in North America at PepsiCo, right? Hey, Brian, he goes, got it. Double team truck, he goes, I’ll have it there in 18 hours. But it’s like making it urgent, right? And not waiting for the next sessions.

Ricky Smith
I think Delta Dash is still available now too.

Ed Ballina
Yeah. Yeah. There’s, there’s,

Ricky Smith
A lot of airlines have it that they’ll fly it out that day if you get it to airport on time. It’s going to cost you money, but that’s okay. How much money are losing by having a plant down?

Ed Ballina
I paid $10,000 to have stuff air-freighted from Germany and it was a bargain based on what I was losing per hour on the line. You pay a price, but okay.

Ricky Smith
So that must have been from Germany. Must have been servo valves.

Ed Ballina
No, we deal in bottling equipment  and  they had some parts that had failed that were almost proprietary to that filler and it was sitting in Regensburg, Germany and it made it to the US in the next flight out. So we do what we got to do. So far we’ve talked about the problem.  You’ve guided us through kind of the solution and now, man, you got to pay the bank sooner or later. So help us figure out how to sell this thing because, you know, there’s always the hesitancy for people to approve expenditures because many of us have been bitten by thinking, you know, somebody pitches a great idea and we trusted it and we said, sure, here’s, you know, this investment. And two years later, you start looking for the return and it’s non-existent, right? Or it’s not, the line didn’t start up on time, et cetera. So you said this typically starts at the top, absolutely. But, and the “why” is probably the dollars and how big they are. First you have to show it to them. But when a maintenance manager comes to you and says, you’ve given me a great program here, but I can’t afford this. I’ve got $170,000 of deferred maintenance. I don’t even know how to tell my leadership about this, right?

Ricky Smith
How much money do you lose by hour when we’re not meeting production’s expectation? Well, the asset owner, which is whoever owns the company.

Ed Ballina
Right.

Ricky Smith
It’s all about the money. Cause if you track cost, you can track, if you trend it, you can think about it. How can I track this one? You know, like planning and scheduling, what’s the benefits of that? Can I track that? Sure. Absolutely you can.

Alvaro Cuba
And doing the right way shouldn’t cost that much. And then immediately you start getting the benefits and some savings, then you can start using those savings to speed-roll the situation.

Ed Ballina
And sometimes you need a little bit of help, right? You make a big, big deal about planning, which I completely support. I was in a location, in a region where we had no planners. And during planning, I told each of the plants, I want you to put a planner in your plant. They were like, we don’t have a budget for that. No, I just gave you the budget. I said, now I’m going to take it out of your bottom line, right? But the bottom line includes waste and labor and all that.

And one the problems you find is when you talk to the maintenance manager, they’re getting killed on R&M costs and they’re not necessarily seeing the benefit of waste reduction and maybe even output because it flows into different buckets. And that’s one thing I think we need to cure. We need to, to your point, make the point holistically, not just in one bucket because you lose them.

Alvaro Cuba
How do you manage when you go as a consultant to these plants? Those discussions are difficult.

Ricky Smith
It’s not with me.

Alvaro Cuba
But what do you tell them that other consultants don’t?

Ricky Smith
Yeah. I don’t, you know, I don’t tell them anything that’s not the truth. Okay. That’s the thing I don’t, you know, say, yeah, you could probably do that. No, no, I can say you’re not going to do, you can’t do that without doing this, this and this. And then make sure you can continue to do it. This, this, this over and over again, do it the right way. But it starts down at the technician level and the next step after the technicians, I want to do that. I’m going to talk maintenance leadership. And sometimes it’s the owners of the company that I have a conversation with.

Ed Ballina
You know, it’s a one takeaway that I’ve gotten from the interactions. If, I was a plant manager and you came into my facility, one thing aside from your technical ability, I really enjoy about you is you would tell me if my baby was ugly. It’s up to me to accept it. Okay. But I love that because sometimes you get the window dressing, right? Cause they’re trying not to upset this person and upset that person. And you get a washed down version of what’s truly happening now.

Frankly, if you’re a good plant manager, that should not be a shock to you because you should be spending time on the floor understanding what your shop floor looks like. So enough pontification on that one. So we always try to leave our folks with three things they could go out and execute right now as a result of this.  So all great stuff. If you boil down to three things, people could go and make a difference with Ricky, what would they be?

Ricky Smith
Three things, once they assess the current state of maintenance and reliability. Where are the problems at? Then the other is it needs to be having formal training. That’s the big one. And then measure what you manage. You gotta have good KPIs. That’ll tell you everything.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah. Well, guys, here you have it. Those three, very simple. It seems simple, but you have to go after that. You have from Ricky, first hand, so much experience. So go after those three.  Ricky, where can the plant managers and people in the plant can learn more from you?

Ricky Smith
Yeah, they can, they can Google me on the internet. You know, Ricky Smith, world-class maintenance, Ricky Smith, CMRP, but the CMRP only, otherwise Ricky Smith, there’s millions of them. CMRP and then maintenance and reliability. And you can, you can find a lot there. And then my website is www.worldclassmaintenance.org. And I put, there’s a lot of articles on there all the time, but there’s also training that’s coming up that people can go ahead and log in and pay their fee for the training and be ready to go.

Ed Ballina
Terrific.

Alvaro Cuba
Thank you for that. I’ve been in the website and guys, go. It’s very simple, very easy. There is the training coming, all the experience. So take advantage of Ricky’s experience and just go for it.

Ed Ballina
I would just say he’s easy, really easy to find.  I had no problem finding Ricky after I clicked on the backyard mechanic who was changing oil filter in his car. That was a different Ricky. But anyway, really, really, would encourage you listeners, just invest 10 minutes of your time and watch his YouTube video. I think he’s about two or three years old that I just got done watching it. It’s amazing how much information and how much knowledge Ricky is sharing in that YouTube video. really appreciate that.

Ricky Smith
You’re welcome. Thank you. Are you on on you guys on LinkedIn?

Ed Ballina
We both are.

Ricky Smith
All you got to do is all you got to do is all the connection I have. I got like, don’t know, 10 or 11 or 12 groups. So you just go in there and just say, you know, you want to join and I’ll see you I’ll see you on there. Sometimes, sometimes I write an article after some stressful experience at a plant, you know, and I’ll write it and I’ll post it the next day, you know,

Ed Ballina
Those are always good to read.

Ricky Smith
Thanks.

Alvaro Cuba
That’s the best way because you had it firsthand. So guys, you have all this information in the screen, so use it to reach out to Ricky. And we want to thank him so much for being with us and being so helpful for everyone in the plant. Friends, that’s a wrap up for today’s episode. Thank you so much for joining us in the manufacturing meetup. If you have enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe. Like us this episode if you are watching on YouTube and leave us a review if you are listening in iTunes. And please share the podcast with your friends. We can grow together and you see how valuable is for you, let’s make it valuable for all your friends as well.

Ed Ballina
So if you want to keep the conversation going, right, you know what to do. Email us at mmu at augury.com. We’ll also have links to Ricky’s books and, and website in the show notes and have a great day and see you next time.

Alvaro Cuba
See you guys, great having you in the show.