Part 2 of Maintenance Management Re-envisioned: From Cost Center to Strategic Advantage

[00:00] Tara Holwegner:
Welcome back, Get Smartr listeners, to our Part 2 episode of my interview with R. Keith Mobley. If you listened to Episode One, Part 1 of our interview, you’ll remember that we talked about our current approaches to maintenance and reliability. We talked about some management philosophies, and we were just getting into Life Cycle Asset Management—how it is not maintenance, but a culture. It is a philosophy.

So, just like literary epics, we’re going to start in medias res. We’re going to jump right into Episode 2 where I have just introduced the topic of LCAM—Life Cycle Asset Management—as a philosophy. And we’ll see where Keith takes us from there. I’m not going to share any spoilers. I want you listeners to come along with me for the ride.

A special thank you to Keith Mobley for spending so much time with us—you listeners and with me. It was really a joy to film these two episodes. So with no further ado, here you go, listeners: Part 2 of my interview with Keith Mobley.

[01:00] Tara Holwegner:
At the top: Life Cycle Asset Management is not maintenance. It is a culture. It is a mindset. It is a—

Keith Mobley:
Philosophy.

Tara Holwegner:
A philosophy.

Keith Mobley:
Well, you know, I encourage people to read all three sections of ISO 55000. It took years to put that program together.

It came off of a British standard—

Tara Holwegner:
PAS 55?

Keith Mobley:
Yes. And it took even longer. I was the only advisory board member for the fifteen years it took to develop that beast.

[02:00] Tara Holwegner:
Yeah, okay.

Keith Mobley:
But it didn’t go far enough. ISO 55001 gives you the overview—it says, “Here’s what it would look like.”

Tara Holwegner:
Yeah, it’s high level.

Keith Mobley:
Then you have one that says, “Here’s the software, the information systems you need in place to support it,” but it doesn’t tell you what you need to do. So it truly is hollow because it doesn’t have any meat to it. What we’ve had to do with this major Spanish re-envision is to put the meat to it.

Tara Holwegner:
So let me pull on that thought. Let’s say our listeners are thinking, “Okay, I want to do that. I’m in. I want the philosophy.” What are some— First steps? Knowing what you said before—like, if you’re in maintenance or part of a corporate reliability program—you can only do so much. You can only be the master of your domain, right? But what are some things people can do to start on the path of doing the right thing the right way?

[03:00] Keith Mobley:
Funny you should ask that. There are sessions 7A and 7B of this year-long course.

7A is Maintenance Management for Industrial Plants. 7B is for Facilities.

Tara Holwegner:
Like hospitals or—

Keith Mobley:
All those other centers.

What we do in that session is take everything learned in the first six sessions and boil it down. So, okay, you don’t have unlimited resources, you don’t have corporate buy-in, you don’t have a support structure—what can you physically do?

Then we try to condense it down to things within the span of control of the maintenance manager. But let me try to answer the question.

[04:00] Keith Mobley:
The first step is to clearly enunciate and define—not just for yourself in maintenance, but for the rest of the organization—three things: Your mission statement: This is the reason we exist. Your value statement: This is the way we’re going to do business. Your vision: Where you want to be at the end of this journey.

You’ve got to put it in terms that production can understand—what’s in it for them—and that executive management understands what it’s going to do.

Tara Holwegner:
You’re declaring it.

Keith Mobley:
It’s like what we used to call the elevator speech.

Tara Holwegner:
Yeah, your pitch.

Keith Mobley:
Where everybody can understand, starting day one: “This is what we’re going to do. Here’s the value we’re going to add to the organization. And here are the things that will govern how we do business.”

[05:00] Keith Mobley:
That’s the first step. Now, that sounds really difficult—it’s not. Because it is what you want it to be. I use a video in the training course called Managing for the Future. It says, “How can you manage something you can’t measure, see, touch, or feel?” It is what your mind tells you it can be. So take the blinders off, get rid of the baggage, and define: “Here’s the way it should be.”

Tara Holwegner:
Here’s the way it should be.

Keith Mobley:
And get that into terminology that is your elevator speech. It can’t be War and Peace.

Tara Holwegner:
Something everybody can latch onto, work toward, and be proud of. It’s time for maintenance to stop feeling like they’re servants—

Keith Mobley:
To production.

Tara Holwegner:
—and take pride in the value they bring to the organization.

[06:00] Keith Mobley:
The second thing is you’ve got to know where you are. There’s no way around it—you’ve got to do an assessment. It can be a self-assessment, or you can hire a consultant.

Tara Holwegner:
Yeah, you have to know your current state.

Keith Mobley:
If you don’t know where you are, where do you start?

Tara Holwegner:
It can help you prioritize.

Keith Mobley:
And then that goes back to your budget. If I know what I need to do, then I can get the resources. Now I can build my sustaining budget—my activity-based budget.

[07:00] Keith Mobley:
By the way, you mentioned zero-based budgeting, and I snapped at you. Jimmy Carter, when he was president, is given credit for creating zero-based budgeting.

Tara Holwegner:
Are you serious?

Keith Mobley:
Serious. He told all government agencies to start with a clean sheet of paper and justify every penny. You literally start from zero and build up the budget.

[08:00] Keith Mobley:
The Carter version required you to do that every year. It’s labor-intensive. The way we teach it is activity-based—you only build it once.

We know the assets, the equipment list, and define all the maintenance tasks. Then we determine the labor needed by skill set, and how much indirect support—planners, schedulers, supervisors—you need.

[09:00] Keith Mobley:
You build it from the bottom up. The difference is, you don’t throw it away next year. If assets are removed or added, you adjust. You don’t redo all the work.

Tara Holwegner:
Yeah, it’s tedious.

Keith Mobley:
But it’s the only way to right-size the budget. If leadership says it’s too much money, you can show them: “Which assets do you want me to run to failure?”

Tara Holwegner:
Exactly. Help me prioritize.

[10:00] Tara Holwegner:
If you have a Life Cycle Asset Management culture, all the pieces fit together.

Keith Mobley:
I’ve never, in 60+ years, talked to anyone who would intentionally make a bad decision.

Tara Holwegner:
People want to do the right thing.

Keith Mobley:
But thousands of bad decisions are made every day based on bad information.

Tara Holwegner:
You have to have the data.

[11:00] Tara Holwegner:
Now I’m going to talk about technology.

Keith Mobley:
I knew you would.

Tara Holwegner:
Everyone’s talking about digitalization, IoT, machine learning, AI, Industry 4.0.

Keith Mobley:
We’re about to make another mistake. We haven’t been talking about gadgets—we’ve been talking about foundation.

Tara Holwegner:
But let’s talk about the gadgets.

[12:00] Keith Mobley:
Let me take you back to the mid-90s. I was asked to teach two workshops at a hydrocarbon conference in Houston—one on equipment reliability, the other on computerized maintenance management.

Before the CMMS session, I talked to five guys from Chevron. They said they had implemented five CMMSs in three years.

Tara Holwegner:
We see that.

Keith Mobley:
A VP goes to a trade show, sees flashy CMMS demos, and thinks it’ll solve all their problems.

[13:00] Tara Holwegner:
All you need is a system. You don’t need good planning or discipline.

Keith Mobley:
And we’re at that point now with AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, digital twins—you name it.

My personal belief: never apply technology until you’ve mapped your processes and understand what you need.

[14:00] Keith Mobley:
I’ve helped develop predictive analytics and digital twin systems. They’re only as good as the systems they support.

Tara Holwegner:
Garbage in, garbage out.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. That’s why 95% of CMMS implementations fail—they don’t achieve expected results.

Tara Holwegner:
Because people can’t get the insights they want?

Keith Mobley:
That’s not the problem. CMMS forces you to do things the right way, which is different from how you’ve been doing them.

[15:00] Keith Mobley:
So people ask vendors to modify the system. I always ask: if your old way worked, why are you buying a CMMS?

It creates the discipline to do the right things at the right time. Same with predictive analytics—it’s not just predictive maintenance on steroids.

Tara Holwegner:
It’s about understanding performance.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. You need to know what normal operation looks like, then monitor deviations and failure modes.

[16:00] Keith Mobley:
You need to understand causal factors and forcing functions. It’s not simple. Right now, most tech uses simple fault trees. For example, if vibration exceeds a threshold, there’s a 90% chance of failure in 90 days.

Tara Holwegner:
So what do you do with that info?

Keith Mobley:
In legacy systems, it goes into the backlog—behind PMs, emergencies, and legacy tasks. If you have time and money left, you’ll get to it.

[17:00] Tara Holwegner:
So people can’t take full advantage of the tech.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. Technology is great, but only when paired with best practices.

Tara Holwegner:
What about 2035?

Keith Mobley:
We could get there. Some organizations will—maybe 3–5%.

[18:00] Keith Mobley:
But it depends on consultants and leaders breaking the legacy mindset. We have a responsibility to help clients understand what best practices really are.

Tara Holwegner:
We have to break the mindset.

Keith Mobley:
Yes, and we as consultants have to do it first.

Tara Holwegner:
You’re the trusted advisor.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. If we don’t leave them better off, we’ve failed.

 [18:00] Keith Mobley:
We’ve got to do our part. We’ve got to set the right vision.

Tara Holwegner:
You knew where I was going.

Keith Mobley:
We’ve been working together a long time.

Tara Holwegner:
If you could embed one idea into the mindset of every executive managing capital assets today, what would it be?

Keith Mobley:
Do the right thing.

[19:00] Keith Mobley:
It’s crazy. I was at an integrated steel mill, sitting with the executive leadership team after an assessment. I showed a slide with their total output from the last year. The president said, “That’s wrong.” He pulled a different number from the same system. Then the VP of Finance pulled a third number. We ended up with seven different numbers.

Tara Holwegner:
Wow.

Keith Mobley:
If you can’t agree on how much steel you made, how do you run a business?

[20:00] Keith Mobley:
Another steel mill had 57 steps in the production process. Each step reported yield. When we added them up, they were shipping 150% more than they brought in. Everyone was tweaking numbers to look good.

Tara Holwegner:
That’s corporate America today.

Keith Mobley:
If I could get executive leadership to take the blinders off and look at what’s really going on—

[21:00] Keith Mobley:
People aren’t maliciously skewing numbers. The systems are broken.

Tara Holwegner:
It’s about culture. Life Cycle Asset Management includes people—human capital.

Keith Mobley:
It’s a cultural shift.

Tara Holwegner:
And it has to come from the top.

Keith Mobley:
Yes.

[22:00] Keith Mobley:
One more story. Before I joined Life Cycle, I had my own consulting company. We had 350 professionals. We were doing what became your RX. We started fast. A major corporation hired us to transform a plant spending half a billion dollars a year on maintenance.

[23:00] Keith Mobley:
We had no policies or procedures. Everyone was direct charge from day one. We were all living in hotels. I kept hearing complaints. So I called an all-hands meeting.

Tara Holwegner:
What did they say?

Keith Mobley:
They said they didn’t want to work as hard as I did.

Tara Holwegner:
Oh wow.

Keith Mobley:
I told them to find another job.

[24:00] Keith Mobley:
That’s the difference between my attitude and most managers today. Managers are so afraid employees will quit, they won’t confront them or set expectations.

Tara Holwegner:
So employees carve out their own roles.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. The Type A’s will add value. The rest will float.

[25:00] Tara Holwegner:
That goes back to the mission—setting expectations and building culture.

Keith Mobley:
We’ve talked about a lot today.

Tara Holwegner:
We’ll break it into a couple of episodes. We talked about LCAM as a philosophy, the role of leadership, ISO 55000, mission, value, vision, and the 52-week plan.

[26:00] Tara Holwegner:
And budgeting that makes sense—not just arbitrary numbers.

Keith Mobley:
Two more things.

Tara Holwegner:
Please.

Keith Mobley:
The 52-week plan helps because workload and work hours aren’t uniform.

[27:00] Keith Mobley:
Vacations, holidays, sick leave—they’re all variables. If you look at your plan over 52 weeks, you can load level. You can’t do that six weeks out.

Tara Holwegner:
Makes sense.

Keith Mobley:
The other thing—every employee, including you, needs a clear line of sight to how their job impacts corporate profitability.

[28:00] Keith Mobley:
Without that, they don’t understand the value of what they’re doing. Every time a technician turns a wrench or an electrician troubleshoots a circuit, they’re adding value.

Tara Holwegner:
If they don’t see that, they feel like they’re wasting their time.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly.

Tara Holwegner:
That’s so inspirational. You are important. You’re helping the success—or failure—of the company.

[29:00] Tara Holwegner:
And whose job is it to help them see that?

Keith Mobley:
I do. I’m the manager. It’s my job.

Tara Holwegner:
That’s right.

Thank you for preaching, Keith. This has been a delightful time with you.

Keith Mobley:
I welcome the invitation.

Tara Holwegner:
You heard it here, listeners. We’ll put some resources in the episode notes.

[30:00] Tara Holwegner:
Keith Mobley is on LinkedIn—connect with him there. Maybe we’ll have announcements about Life Cycle Engineering and Keith Mobley in the future.

Thank you, Keith, for joining us.

Keith Mobley:
Thank you.

Tara Holwegner:
And thank you, listeners, for joining us. Until next time—let’s stay smarter, people.