The Reliability Roadmap: From Operational Reliability to Digital Transformation

0:00

Tara Holwegner: Hello podcast listeners and welcome to another episode of Get Smartr, an LCE podcast. Today I’m coming to you live from LCE Corporate Headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. But we’re here today to talk about global operations. So around the world many industries are facing a common challenge, improving performance. Most struggle to optimize operations and improve asset performance so they look to advanced technologies as a way to improve their plant performance and better manage their assets.

1:00

Tara Holwegner: But in today’s episode, we want to talk about what really does it take to move a plant from fifty-five percent to ninety-five percent availability. So in this episode, we’re gonna talk about what it takes to truly transform an operation at the plant level and at the IT infrastructure level. So to improve performance, data use and analytics, how can you do that both for operations but also for asset maintenance?

2:00

Tara Holwegner: Our guest today is Bruce Wesner, Senior Managing Principal at LCE. Bruce has over forty years of maintenance engineering and operations management experience. He brings deep cross-industry experience including leading major operational reliability transformations, overseeing capital investments to ninety million annually, and delivering significant increases in manufacturing capacity performance and technological solutions. So welcome to the podcast, Bruce.

3:00

Bruce Wesner: Hey Tara, good seeing you.

Tara Holwegner: Yeah, thank you for being here. So Bruce, for a decade, you were a consultant with LCE, you were implementing reliability excellence for a diverse range of industries. Then you went back. You left LCE, you went back to industry as the owner of that type of change. You went to a place where reliability wasn’t really a tangible concept, that the organization didn’t understand the value of reliability. So can you tell us what your first priorities were when you looked at that site that you wanted to transform?

4:00

Bruce Wesner: I think the biggest thing going from a consultancy perspective back into owning the actual package and process that we were going to transform the organization — what I found, the best thing to do is really just assess where they’re at. Really understand where their biggest opportunities are, where they have losses and where their organizational risks are that need to be addressed. We can’t boil the ocean so you gotta be able to focus in on the right things.

5:00

Bruce Wesner: So that’s where I started, was really just doing a high-level assessment of the organization. That’s where I found that in critical processes, this window and door manufacturer was actually performing — and I’m probably being generous — around fifty-five percent equipment availability on single-point failure assets. So what does that mean? You walk up to the piece of equipment forty-five percent of the time, it’s not running.

6:00

Tara Holwegner: Working.

Bruce Wesner: Yeah, and hey, guess what? I can’t make product to take care of my customers. So it’s a big deal. And so that’s where I started, really trying to understand, on the other side, how are we collecting data on asset performance and really understanding, does the organization collect the right data in order to be able to make decisions for the business?

Tara Holwegner: So having an understanding of the current state of the operations and where their operational risk is, really understanding how the operation is working and what the potential gaps and risks are — that was the first step. And I bet you saw a lot of opportunity there.

7:00

Tara Holwegner: So you’ve spoken to me before, Bruce, about the role of building a vision and the role of a transformation map. So can you talk to me about the role, if it played one, of an asset management policy, of setting up a policy and setting up a transformation map that shows you the way to the future, that shows you how to move from current state into a future state of better performance?

Bruce Wesner: The asset management policy really is a guiding framework for the organization to really understand where we’re at and what does the future look like. You mentioned transformation — the technical part of change is easy, but I think the hardest thing is getting folks that are going to own it and going to sustain it to really understand their part of that change.

8:00 Bruce Wesner: So what the asset management policy really does is it tells us how we’re going to acquire equipment, how we’re gonna maintain equipment, how we’re gonna utilize that equipment, how we’re gonna dispose of them at the end of their life cycle. It aligns with operational activities and strategic goals and really sets the accountability for asset care and ensures sustainability, cost-effective management throughout that asset’s life cycle.

Tara Holwegner: It sets the stage, it sets the framework for accountability and sustainability.

9:00

Tara Holwegner: I love those two words, but also the vision of the program as a whole, and then how are we all gonna work together to get there? I think that’s so important that you mentioned that the technical part of change is easy. It’s about identifying the gaps from the current state and then prioritizing and resourcing, right? But it’s having people engaged and seeing how we could all work together for that future state, and that’s where you’re really gonna get those people behaving differently. So when did you start gaining momentum?

10:00

Tara Holwegner: Because I believe you were working in a multi-plant operation, so if they’re all in the same industry, they may have similar assets or processes. How did you know that you were getting momentum, or how did these other sites react to what you were doing at that primary location?

Bruce Wesner: The biggest challenge, really, was understanding what the most critical assets were and really focusing time and attention on those right out of the gate. It was funny because the organization and the maintenance teams felt like they were doing all the right things, even though they were a hundred percent reactive in order to be able to take care of the business.

11:00

Bruce Wesner: So really it was trying to teach folks to understand what’s important. Being able to get data out of the maintenance management system was critical. First off, getting the right data going into it was critical. We gotta capture how much time we’re spending, how much material we’re using on these assets, and then be able to data-manage out of that and really understand what the priorities are based off of asset criticality and business risk in order to be able to have the business perform.

12:00

Bruce Wesner: I think having folks across the organization want to be part of what we called operational reliability was fairly easy. Once — and I’ll use a pretty cool example — the maintenance team, when I first got there, said, “Nope, we understand what we’re doing. You don’t need to tell us.” And I said, “All I’m asking is, give me time to show you there’s a better way, that you can walk up to a piece of equipment and have all of the information you need, all the tools you need, all the material you need, so that you can get in and get out of that asset safely and turn it back over to operations to be able to perform.”

13:00

Bruce Wesner: Over the course of the first year, some of the more seasoned technicians kind of circled back through my office and said, “You know, we owe you an apology. You made our life easier.” And when you hear that, that tells me we’re heading down the right road, because you gotta have people bought into it and owning it. And they did, and it only just took off from there. We couldn’t spread our reliability engineering team out enough in order to be able to cover the business needs, but it was kind of neat — we had standardized equipment, so once we did an asset type in one place, we were able to extend that work.

14:00

Bruce Wesner: I call it rip and reapply, so that we could cover more ground faster. And it was significant because at the time we were doing this, it was pre-COVID. During COVID, the whole window and door industry went nuts. We couldn’t make enough. And so if we wouldn’t have done the things to drive operational reliability and create availability of that equipment to perform, we never would have been able to keep up with the demand. Our business grew, and overall performance was phenomenal when you saw the visual data that reflected performance.

15:00

Tara Holwegner: And that’s what I want to go back to — the actionable data. So when you’re getting good data in, when you’re getting good data out, you can actually show improvement. You can actually show the value of the improvements and the progress, and have a better understanding of what the challenges are and then show your progress and the team’s progress on overcoming them. I also loved what you said about what your team experienced when they understood what reliability really means. It means having the tools that you need when you need them, it means getting to do your work safely in a timely fashion.

16:00

Tara Holwegner: It means having your equipment working when it needs to work, and being able to meet your customer demands. I couldn’t imagine the scenario you were discussing about during COVID, if you had only been running at half capacity and people needed it at almost a hundred percent. It’s amazing what this story shows. So I think those are excellent points. And then the sharing of best practices — rip and reapply — to other sites that see that there’s a better way. And there’s probably a little bit of, maybe not competition, but, “Hey, we can do that. We could maybe do better than that.”

Bruce Wesner: Healthy competition is a good thing, you know.

Tara Holwegner: It is.

17:00

Bruce Wesner: Yeah. And what’s cool is being able to walk into an organization that really didn’t have some of the staff trained for the right things — we didn’t have a reliability engineering team, we didn’t have a maintenance planning and scheduling team. And if you don’t have all of those really critical pieces of the puzzle, it’s hard to be able to perform. The value of the reliability engineering team — and we grew it from internal, we didn’t hire anybody from the outside — it was really neat to see those short-term wins that created long-term success.

18:00

Tara Holwegner: I think that’s wonderful workforce development, growing your own community of practice around the reliability discipline. Then they become evangelists for the rest of the organization and leaders, as well as the core of getting the work done in maintenance planning and scheduling. Did you identify that as a core need when you were doing your initial assessments, Bruce?

Bruce Wesner: Yeah, I think that…

Tara Holwegner: We don’t have the people doing the right work that we need to get where we wanna go. Is that am I paraphrasing correctly?

Bruce Wesner: You’re right on. So it goes back to the Good to Great book — do we have the right people in the right seats on the bus?

19:00

Bruce Wesner: We had really good people, but were they really providing value? I look at it from the standpoint of being able to show folks that there is a different way that actually makes their life safer and easier, and getting the organization all pointed the same direction. I think one of the other things that kind of just happened over time is my span of control changed. Every year I kept getting more, and really what we did was we connected all of the technical teams so that we were all communicating and collaborating with each other to get everybody pointed the same direction, and not have things working against each other.

20:00

Bruce Wesner: And I think that’s what was so awesome to see happen — more people wanted to be involved and more people wanted to be part of the journey.

Tara Holwegner: Yeah, because they experienced it. And something that you said before, which I wrote down and I always keep near my workstation, is “maintenance matters” and “maintenance is strategy.” And to bring it outside of maintenance to make it more asset management, to make it more reliability, to make it operational reliability — I mean, it’s all connected. But people need to see themselves as contributing as part of that, right? Contributing and moving towards that strategic goal.

21:00

Tara Holwegner: So I want to talk about some challenges. We’ve been talking about the work and some of the success, but what was one of your biggest challenges to realizing this operational reliability journey?

Bruce Wesner: First, it’s all about teamwork, right? And I had great teamwork within my technical teams. And we were all pointed the same way, but it’s really a partnership with operations. Our goal for the engineering services group — what we called it — was to be the trusted advisor and the ones to assure that equipment was available for operations to perform.

22:00

Bruce Wesner: Culturally, operations was always chasing trucks, to get stuff on a truck, to get it to a customer. And so the challenge was that operations was so used to being very reactive that we would plan and schedule and coordinate with them when we were going to do work, but yet they wouldn’t give us the asset. So it was interesting that when we did our compliance conversations and said, “What was PM compliance for this week,” the numbers would be horrible. And it was like, “Well, we couldn’t do the work ’cause we didn’t get the asset to be able to get in and perform the maintenance.”

23:00

Bruce Wesner: And so over time — and this was a change management thing — having operations own the PM compliance numbers was essential. And once they started to see that, and once they started to understand how many times they had deferred the preventive maintenance work and what it cost them, the asset wouldn’t be available because it would break down because we didn’t get in and do the work when we needed to. So finally they started to get an understanding, and once they owned that KPI, the teamwork and the collaboration grew.

24:00

Bruce Wesner: You know, the old saying is “operations pays the bills” because they’re producing the product that’s gonna go out. But if you aren’t doing the things to make operations successful, you’re not going to win. And that’s what was really cool to see. Going from a consultant role to actually owning it — at the end of the day, if it failed, it was all on me, because I structured the team, I structured the program and the process. But it was fun seeing how all the pieces of the puzzle came together and the organizational success was huge.

25:00

Tara Holwegner: Under your leadership. And I think that’s another important point to call out: changing KPIs and holding people accountable is a major shift, a major change, and it has to be supported. Can you talk just a little bit about the need to have that sponsor or sponsorship at your level to lead through this change work?

Bruce Wesner: It is all about having support from the top. It’s gotta be made important, and we gotta have the leaders be out there asking the right questions to have the organization know that we’re not wavering, we’re gonna stay the course, and we need to drive and sustain in order to be able to be successful as an organization.

26:00

Bruce Wesner: The amount of growth that we experienced over the nine years I was there was crazy. We were acquiring businesses and we were organically growing. We added robots — we didn’t have a single robot when I first came, and when I left we were running probably over eighty robots in the facility. So just from a technology perspective, that’s a big deal.

Tara Holwegner: Absolutely. Let’s dig into the technology part of this journey for a little bit. When did you know that you were ready to add the robots or add technology to the site?

27:00

Tara Holwegner: And how did you decide which technologies would be right for your team and for your processes?

Bruce Wesner: I think as we saw performance improve just on getting what I’ll call legacy assets sustained and performing, then it came back to really looking at, are we buying the right assets, are we buying the right equipment, based off of reliability? If equipment isn’t made to perform the way that we’re going to run it — we were an anomaly, we run the organization twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and some of this equipment was not made to run twenty-four seven.

28:00

Bruce Wesner: So we had to work with the OEMs in order to enhance preventive actions, predictive actions, and try to work to get more early alerts in place with technology. With the Industry 4.0 sensors and things like that, we could start to see performance hitting an upper or lower control limit that we needed to engage before that asset really failed. One of the other technical challenges was that the entire industry right now is struggling to have good technical staff. People just aren’t going into the trades.

29:00

Bruce Wesner: So you’re bringing folks in that maybe didn’t have all the tools in their toolbox to perform at a high level. What did we have to do? We had to bring them in and we had to teach them. So we used augmented reality headsets on very critical pieces of equipment to really do a precision maintenance plan that actually video-taped it and said, “You do step A first, step B,” and work our way through it. When you’re changing a mixing track on an IG insulating glass machine, it’s a twenty-thousand-dollar mixing track, and so if you mess it up, it’s a bad day.

30:00

Bruce Wesner: That technology was a good way to teach and train, and then there were little video adders in there saying, “If you didn’t know how to do it, watch the video,” and truly understand what right looks like. It was a great way to see the organization grow and advance.

Tara Holwegner: Absolutely. Not only are they learning along the way, but you’re also reducing the risk by having the instructions right there to support performance and protect the asset. So that’s fantastic to hear the progression from the upskilling and reskilling that you had to do to reach a certain point, and then using technology with your legacy assets and their life cycle.

31:00

Tara Holwegner: And with some capital investment, being able to bring in technology and meet your workforce where they’re at, but also having stable processes in place to support that. Just fantastic results. And for our listeners, two things I love: the name of the program, “operational reliability,” brings both sides of the house in. And also fifty-five to ninety-five, on a twenty-four-seven operation. Amazing results. And we are frankly glad, and our listeners should be glad, that Bruce is back.

32:00

Tara Holwegner: Because now he’s able to go to various industries and help others make the sorts of leaps and bounds in operational performance that he was able to do at this window and door manufacturer. So I just want to say thank you so much, Bruce, for joining us on the Get Smartr podcast today. And I want to see if we can summarize and maybe discuss some of our key points that we’ve brought out in today’s story. The first one that we’ve talked about in this half hour together is the importance of education and the importance of change management.

33:00

Tara Holwegner: We talk frequently in the podcast about how we’re not talking about the engineering management of change, we’re not talking about the technical side. We are talking about the people side of change. Maybe you can speak a little bit to that for listeners here as we summarize the episode?

Bruce Wesner: Great question. And again, being an engineer doing this for forty years, I never thought that the people side was gonna be that big of a percentage of time that we spent on. But it’s about getting people on board and pointed the same direction.

34:00

Bruce Wesner: I think the game changer for us was me being certified in organizational change, using the Prosci change management methodology, and we use the ADKAR model. People gotta be aware, they gotta have desire, and if you don’t have awareness, you don’t have desire, you don’t go forward — because for it to sustain, they gotta be owners in it, and you’re gonna hand them the keys at some point in time. So if you get the awareness and desire, then give them the knowledge and the ability to take over the ownership of that.

35:00

Bruce Wesner: And then the reinforcement is: how are we gonna measure whether we’re being successful? Every person on our engineering services team — kind of the ticket to get on the bus was a conversation with me where I had a card book and I’d hand it to them and we’d have this conversation saying, “In order to be able to do this, we gotta do it with and through people.” And so getting them to understand that, and having key people in the organization understand the importance of engagement and people as part of the process.

36:00

Bruce Wesner: At the end of the day, I still say the technical stuff is easy, getting people to own it and sustain it is the hard stuff. I think that’s the most fun thing at this point in my career: seeing the light bulb moment happen with folks as they’re out there doing what they do day in and day out.

Tara Holwegner: Oh, absolutely. And it makes me think of, as we talk about transformation, as we talk about shepherding an organization and its people from very reactive operations into planning and scheduling, utilizing good processes to choose the right maintenance strategy — when we talk about these things, we say it’s a transformation.

37:00

Tara Holwegner: And there’s a transformation map that you’re journeying through, but really the journey never ends. The train doesn’t stop and say, “OK, we’re done with the transformation, let’s continue on.” What I heard as part of this podcast episode is: when we improved originally in phase one, we got our people upskilled and we have some expertise now in these core functions. But then we move on, and now we can get to the optimization, get into seeing how we can sustain effective performance in a labor shortage situation, or better use the data to get even more efficient and effective.

38:00

 Tara Holwegner: So the transformation never ends. We’re always trying to get better, under good leadership, of course. That helps with sustainability because you have to see what’s next. So we talked about the roles that you defined, or the capabilities that you defined that were necessary in those initial phases to see improvements. Can you talk to me about the importance of having the reliability engineer, work management, stores and materials, and operations working together in what they see as standard work?

Bruce Wesner: It’s critical. It’s like gears working together.

39:00

Bruce Wesner: You’ve gotta have the best work management plan, but if you don’t have the right material in order to go do the work, it falls apart. So having the critical spare strategies and maintaining effective inventory levels in order to run a business — that was a substantial part of it. The reliability engineering team, they were the detectives. They were the ones looking at where we started to see failures and repetitive failures. That’s where we needed to spend our time because our goal is availability. One of the key things right now that I’ve seen more and more of is that a lot of the maintenance management systems don’t have good visualization of data.

40:00

Bruce Wesner: Our team struggled to get these maintenance management companies to do the visualization work. Finally, we just threw our hands up and said, “We’re gonna go build our own.” My reliability leader and my planning and scheduling leader got trained up on Power BI and we built our own. And I would call them world class. Seeing it in a visual map versus having to dive through the maintenance management system made it easy. And so that was a game changer as far as being able to drive and improve performance.

Tara Holwegner: A picture’s worth a thousand words and can help you make a lot of decisions.

41:00

Tara Holwegner: And I think you said something really important there about the integration between the different disciplines of the operation and being able to see that you want to have all your gear teeth aligned so that things can move forward. So let’s talk finally about one of the themes that we discussed today, which is around technology. We did talk briefly about it, but maybe you could revisit how some of our listeners who are considering what the right technology is and the right time to introduce it into their operation — what kind of advice would you give to them?

Bruce Wesner: The biggest thing is you gotta pick the right horse to ride — that’s my analogy. We bought a lot of the best available technology there is, but what’s really interesting is you get these OEMs that will build and deliver a world-class piece of equipment, but their understanding of what the maintenance and reliability plan for it should be doesn’t line up. And so I think that’s what’s fun for me now coming back into consultancy: I’m gonna work with those OEMs and say, “You’ve got world-class equipment, we need to have world-class maintenance and reliability plans that come with it in advance of starting that piece of equipment up.” Because in order to get the return on investment, extend the life cycle, and really make sure the maintenance trades are trained up on what they need to do in order to maximize availability — those are critical. And too many times what we see is that it’s a struggle for the equipment users to get that data in, and it takes them months after the asset has gone through site acceptance testing and been handed over to operations before all the i-dotting and T-crossing is done for the maintenance and reliability plan. Getting OEMs to really understand that and deliver the information early so it can get uploaded into the maintenance systems and be ready to use — that is so critical.

Tara Holwegner: I think you bring up a very good point about partnering with OEMs and making sure that you understand what your needs are in that aspect for your operation. I think that is great advice for our listeners.

Bruce Wesner: One other thing, just real quick: part of the model that we used around reliability excellence and operational excellence was really partnering with engineering teams and technical teams with the operations team. But I think one of the other key partners needs to be your OEMs.

42:00

In order for us to win as equipment users, that OEM has to be there to support it. Sharing data, sharing performance of their piece of equipment — it was funny, a lot of the OEMs would come in and say, “You know more about our piece of equipment than we do,” because of the level of detail we worked to in order to assure availability. Finding the right partner OEM to deliver and be there with you for the journey — that was probably one of the biggest game changers. One of the early things that I did was go literally around the world and see all of these different equipment suppliers so that they understood where we were going. And I gave them a shot, saying, “Do you want to be with us? If not, we’re gonna find the ones that want to be a partner.” I think that was really a big game changer in how we were able to perform.

Tara Holwegner: Fantastic point. And it’s been really on theme with the discussions we’ve had in this episode. Operational reliability is not necessarily just inside the site, although the partnership between the technical teams and operations is key. You also have external stakeholders, OEMs, and technology providers that are going to be critical to your success. Look at them as strategic partners in your operational reliability program. And the importance — we talk a lot about the need for education, a focus on the people and on the change management. That takes investment, that takes thought and trust. But the dividends: being able to look inside your operations and find those people who can be the reliability leaders and bring them up from within is a great story about upskilling, reskilling, and workforce development. And then data — day in, day out. But not just having it: having the right data, and being able to optimally visualize it, show trends, show the story of what all those numbers mean, make sense of it so that you can prioritize and make good decisions. And it helps people to see the reasons why. We are asking you to do this, we are changing your priorities in terms of what you’re being measured on, but here’s why, and this is what we’re working towards. So I thank you so much for your time today. And if there’s a listener out there right now who is saying, “You know what, I am dealing with the same challenges, I’m really looking to make that step change in improvements” — what’s the last thought that you would like to leave with those listeners today, Bruce?

Bruce Wesner: I think the biggest thing is we just gotta get the right mindset. People gotta understand it’s a people thing, and making sure that we build a program that people understand — where we’re at and where we’re going. These transformation maps that we built literally looked out over the next three years. We were not able to say we were gonna get there all tomorrow. You gotta make sure you’re picking the right pieces to focus on in order to be able to deliver that success. And as you start to build momentum, people want to be on a winning team. Having the ability to perform day in and day out and win day in and day out — that’s what makes it fun. We gotta be able to have fun, because we spend a lot of time at work, and it’s the old “work hard, play hard.” But it comes back to bottom-line results, and we saw the bottom-line results. It’s a great story that now I can help customers and clients understand. And I don’t care if you’re doing uranium mining or making food products, it’s the same in a lot of cases — we just gotta make sure that we come at it the right way and get people involved to be part of making it better.

Tara Holwegner: That’s right. So you heard it here, listeners: you gotta get the people involved. You gotta know where you’re at and where you’re going. You can build momentum, have fun, because everybody wants to be on the winning team. So thank you again, Bruce, and thank you listeners for being with us on this operational reliability journey. We will have some resources in the session notes, so make sure you check those out. And until our next episode, let’s stay smarter, people.