Lessons Learned from 24+ Modern Maintenance Pros

Transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our webinar today. Lessons learned from over twenty four modern maintenance professionals.

Everyone here understands that maintenance professionals do much more than fix things, as important as that is. They're also really the scaffolding that holds up a business's operation and make a remarkable difference between a business that just runs and one that runs successfully.

With that said, on the path to success, every maintenance expert has to face challenges of all shapes and sizes.

And along that journey, they gain plenty of invaluable lessons learned that make every new hurdle that much easier to overcome.

So we've gathered several of these stories directly from maintenance pros across industries who wanted to share them out with you so that you can learn from their words of wisdom and create your own success stories in your organization today.

And today's speakers include Matt Burtz. He is a maintenance consultant and a very solution driven expert with experience in both the agriculture and food production industries.

He's really grown through the ranks from technician to director of maintenance at Preferred Popcorn, and he knows what it takes to be successful from both sides of the desk.

We also have Kristen Drake joining us who's our VP of customer success at Limble.

Kristen has over fifteen years experience as a customer success executive, and she's been building, developing, and leading higher performing customer success teams.

Her passion is really delivering a stellar customer experience by focusing on customer value as well as engagement.

And just before we dive in, just wanna remind everybody to submit your questions at the bottom of the your screen, and we'll be sure to address them at the q and a at the end of our webinar today.

Alright. With that, I will pass the floor over to Kristen.

Thanks so much, Yuri, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We're really excited about this topic because we get to work with so many amazing professionals across the industry, and we are just really pleased to be able to share their success stories and best practices with you today. So we wanted to kick it off by asking, what does it mean to be a modern maintenance professional?

Something that a lot of us probably don't think about very often, but, really, we're seeing modern maintenance professionals who are leaders in the field transforming their departments and really focusing on efficiency and strategic value for their organization.

So in other words, they're using their maintenance programs to provide more than just reactive repairs. They're helping their organization succeed by pursuing innovative maintenance strategies.

Now this doesn't have to be a manager. Right? I I'm not sure of the role of everybody on this webinar, but it this absolutely does not just sit at the top. We see people who are in, yes, manager or supervisor roles really think about maintenance in a new way, but this also comes from technicians, mechanics, or other specialists because the common thread is a commitment to pursuing an updated maintenance program.

We're really focused on a couple of different things as we're thinking about this. Right? So people, process, and tools and technology, starting with people. Effectively using the skills and talents of your team within a shifting workforce.

Many of you are struggling with turnover and the lack of skilled workers. We hear this a lot from all of our customers.

And so really starting to think about how can you use the tools that you have to get the most from your team and play up their strengths.

On the process side, optimizing maintenance processes to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.

Document your best practices so that these can be shared across the team, helping to upskill even your newest members.

And then tools and technologies.

Try not to be afraid of this. Right? Implementing new tools and technologies can help enable your team to do their best work. Use it to put guardrails around your process so everyone knows what to do when and how. And this will also help you keep a record of your data for audits, reporting, or making future improvements.

In short, all these may modern maintenance professionals are interested in trying new things and working to continually improve their maintenance program. It's something you're doing every day anyway. Right? We're always tinkering. We're always thinking of of ways to make things better. So today, we're gonna go through a few examples on the on the maintenance program side and using a CMMS to make a difference in an organization or a team.

Okay. So we're gonna get started with, Yuri, if you wanna go to the next slide. Perfect. We are gonna get started with Darwin at Poly Excel.

Darwin is awesome. He has such a great attitude through working with his team and all of his experience.

He he just is always open minded about about new things to come. Right? So so he had a big challenge taking on, organizing his company's maintenance program.

Darwin knew that Poly Excel needed a robust platform. They were continuing to grow. And at the time, they the methods that they were using weren't weren't really efficient. Parts inventory was completely disorganized.

Purchasing wasn't aligned. I'm sure a lot of you have probably a similar situation.

So Darwin started to reorganize.

He put together a committee to create a systems based approach to maintaining his machinery and also thought about how to include parts as part of that. Right? It was a it's a big, a big time suck, a big expense, and really making sure that that was a piece of that reorganization.

And, ultimately, they chose Limble.

This really let their team be focused on the same goals and working in the same way. So it wasn't everyone working in their own individual silos and making decisions based on what they thought maybe was best. They were able to put in a more standardized process and track the performance and metrics that matter to them all in one place.

So a lot of lessons learned here. I'll Matt, do you wanna talk a little bit more about that?

Absolutely. Well, thanks, Christian. I I mean, beautiful intro into that. You know, most of us are in the the maintenance world.

We struggle to know where to start. We don't know we don't have a have a a backbone behind what we need. And I want some of these stories that have come in, one of the guys talks about that, I needed something with the bones to handle the organization effort.

And when you are building out your maintenance program, you see this huge goal. You see this I it's gonna it's gonna take a while. And I think that's one of those things that you have to be willing to accept right away. For me, it took me well over a year to really get things kick started and going in the way that I wanted to, but it was a lot of small steps along the way.

And I'll use this analogy throughout the presentation, but I talk about a to z. And we always think I've I'm at a. I've gotta be at z, but we forget that there's twenty four other letters that are in between that. You know?

You need in order to get from a, you have to do b. And if you do b, you gotta do c. And there is a linear progression.

There's other ways that we can talk about it, but but the point of it is is when you have a large project in front of you, start by taking some of those those, small steps. Start standardizing small as well. Standardize the things that that need to be done, in a certain way as you're launching off into a project.

Say that, alright.

I want completed work orders.

That's a standardization.

You start a work order. You get it completed, and then you you have documentation.

You have already begun the process of better decision making because you are starting to standardize how you're doing things. You have a standard form that you're probably already using, a paper document. For us, it was corrective actions, was what they were labeled as. And so those corrective actions had were a piece of paper that had to be filled out a certain way, certain information had to be tracked, and then it was put into a file where everybody forgot about it until it was needed, and then we were all wondering where the file was.

But I I say that because now what you can do is you can go in and have that standardized form digitized. You can make it easier to get that information. Not everybody is willing to pick up a pen, write down something on a piece of paper. Then what happens to the piece of paper?

Does it disappear? I hope not. But we all know that that's what happens. And so those standardizations can be very small, but those small steps can lead to big returns on the backside.

So while the goal is to build a completely functional maintenance program, don't feel like you have to submit everything to get it going right away. Start small. I started with my trucks and tractors. That's what I knew.

So that was a key piece with that going forward.

That's great, Matt. And and thank you for adding your color too. And Darwin, who I think is on today's webinar, appreciate you sharing your story with us. Alright. Now let's let's kick it over to Grove City College.

John, or John, John was new to his role and quickly realized that things couldn't continue the way that they were. His team needed to improve overall efficiency and find a way to overcome a huge backlog of over two thousand work requests. They were overwhelmed and really couldn't take the time to focus on preventative measures, much less address all the open work requests that were piling up. So, unfortunately, this led to a huge issue over the Christmas break. A sprinkler system pipe froze and burst a couple of days after Christmas when the team, as everyone would, be hoping to have some much needed time off. So the pipe fell and came through the ceiling of one of the rooms, filling it with four feet of water, which then flooded three floors of the building and resulted in over sixty rooms having major water damage.

And as you can see on this next slide, John was kind enough to share some photos from the incident. So on on the left hand side, you can see where the water started flooding the hallways. You can see the frozen pipe that caused all of the issues, and then all the damage, on the right hand side as well. So, obviously, not the way that anyone wants to spend Christmas break. And so this event really helped to to show the importance of a more robust system so that the team could get ahead of this kind of issue and hopefully prevent it in the future.

Really excited to share that that John and team worked to implement Limble. And with their detailed reports, streamlined work order management, and customized work request portals, they were able to prioritize and resolve their backlog over the course of one summer. So huge win for the team. Matt, I'll kick it over to you for some of the lessons.

Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, just looking at those that that sprinkler system in there just gives me the shutters. I was in the fire service for ten years, and so I've seen this happen before, and it is a giant mess.

That being said, we're gonna jump right into my one of my favorite topics, Kristen, preventative maintenance.

What can we do to prevent things like this from happening? Can we stop all of them? No.

But what are some things to do to prevent them from happening in the future?

And so one of those things that I like to do with preventative maintenance is I like to bring in experts. I like to bring in people that are knowledge deep in a certain area.

For us, it was pneumatics for a while or it was ventilating. We had a lot of hot air in the plant that we wanted to get out. We had, we were sizing air compressors. I don't know the first thing about sizing air compressors. I know what they do.

I could go out and buy a big one, but is that actually what I need? So don't be afraid to ask for help and bring people in for these projects.

I've talked to Jonathan here before, and this and he is a fantastic guy, fun to work with. And one of those things that, that we talk about with getting things lined up ahead of time, and I talk about this a lot, is know who your vendors could be in an emergency or in a in a deep situation like this.

Do you have people in your area that are a disaster response where they deal with flood, you know, wind damage, tornado damage, storm damage, things of that nature?

Consider reaching out to them if you have a sprinkler system. Consider reaching out to them if you have a lot of water supply in your plant. Bring those people in ahead of time and do some preventative planning. That way, if there is an emergency, you're already in their back pocket.

They're a lot easier to get ahold of. You know who to get ahold of, and, hopefully, you can mitigate or limit the amount of damage, the extent that it is. Fire departments are the same way, I while we're talking about that. Preplan with your fire department.

If you have hazardous materials, if you have, large structures, sprinkler systems, they love to get out of the station. Believe me, these people love to come out and they love to see what you have going on, and bring them in and do some preplanning with them for emergency response. That's a form of preventative maintenance.

Listing where your, first aid equipment is, is a form of preventative maintenance, AEDs. All of these things can be built in with that. You know, the other thing I like is I I asked, Jonathan about this deeper of I said, tell me more about your story about why are you asking why. What does this mean? And and his background was he wasn't originally in maintenance.

He it was something that he moved into. And so he naturally was asking why. Why are we doing this? And a lot of times, the responses that he would get were, well, that's just this is how we've always done it.

But is it good to keep doing it this way, or should we consider an alternative? So if you have some of those things in your processes, in your standardization, maybe ask why are we still doing this? Maybe this was a process that was relevant ten years ago, but now because we've changed so much, maybe we're doing work that we don't need to be doing. This is one of those ways that you can actually free time up for yourself to move into other projects.

And lastly is pushing through those growing pains. Your maintenance program requires maintenance. I'm sorry, folks. That's that's the hard way to put it, but, it it's true. And and by constantly tweaking and making things better, your program becomes more responsive, more in tune to the things that you need it to do.

It's I I can speak to it. Jonathan's telling it here in his story. But, you know, as you push through, you'll start seeing the resulting benefits of implementing those changes, and they will reward your efforts. It it will pay off in the end.

I promise you. Just stick with it. Keep making the changes that you need to, and keep making those tweaks. It's what we do.

Right?

Absolutely. Well and and I wanna just, harp on that point, the find someone who asks why and and challenges because I think, you know, we talked a little bit already about starting small and making sure that you're continuing to grow. Like, getting that initial group of people who are open minded and who will proactively help to think differently to to take the initiative to find a better solution, that's just going to get you off on a on a really great path.

Yeah. Totally. I definitely agree.

Awesome. Alright. Let's let's go to our next lesson learned, Whiskersh and Cheese.

Joe was the operations director here, and he was doing an awesome job with Limble as his maintenance system. So we were kind of doing all all of the basics. Everything was was running up and running as, initially talked about. And so his next goal was to tackle downtime and how to reduce downtime in his plant.

He worked with his Limble customer success manager to talk a little bit about this, and Joe was a little bit overwhelmed, I think, probably, like like a lot of us sometimes feel. You know, he didn't realize if if there's one specific machine or problem. He's like, all the time, everyone just keeps coming to me with issues. The whole plant is affected.

There are fifty different problems a day. I just don't know where to start. Right? Kind of a kind of a feeling I think we all get some some days.

Right?

We because we had a lot of the data already in the Limble system from from there using it for a couple of months, we were able to pull that information to see if we could come up with some ideas of where to start. Right, we don't wanna try to tackle everything at once. It can be too much. So if we can focus on making the biggest impact first, that's where we wanna start.

And, Yuri, if you go to the next slide, you'll notice that there were four feta cup machines that were accounting for about eighty percent of the downtime in the plant.

Joe didn't even realize this. He had no idea that it was the same machines over and over that were causing the issue. So we decided to dig in a little bit further to understand what about the work that was being done on this machine, you know, could could potentially be resolved or or be updated so that that we didn't have to continue to have downtime.

So if you go to the next slide, Yuri. Thanks.

They found that there were two specific issues.

One was low temperature issues related to the heaters.

The the, temperature in terms of the FetaCut machine continued to to go low, so there were always people looking to fix that. Right?

Easy replacement. This is the power of having visibility into the data. As soon as they saw it, Joe knew that they were able to to make that replacement and basically take that downtime off the table.

Then the second piece was around activities where they were adjusting the molds. So you can see there are a lot of, there are a lot of tasks that are related to this, either adjusting the mold by itself or when they were doing other work at the same time. And as soon as Joe saw this, he knew the issue.

The locking mechanism for these molds drifts over time, and the team just had to constantly make those manual adjustments. He didn't realize how much it was happening and that the machine was coming offline for for each of those adjustments. Right? So Joe was able to talk to the machine shop to make an additional part for the clamp so that it had more strength and didn't shift over time.

So just by looking at the data, drilling into those particular machines, and then looking at the completed tasks that had happened in in the past couple of months, Joe was able to find eighty percent of the downtime in about five minutes, which was pretty crazy.

And then it only took about four days of work to proactively resolve those changes. Huge, huge win for this team.

So let's talk about the lessons learned.

Absolutely. Yuri, if you don't mind, I'd actually like you to back up a couple slides here to that one that showed the one more right there. This is this is the one that I just sit here and look at in the red box is that planned versus unplanned downtime. This is a metric that's really easy to track.

The I I have a saying. I used to have it on a sign in my office, and it was it was it was a note to my customers.

But it was it said warning. If you don't schedule time for maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you. And this is a prime example of that here. Think about when if you notice, if you have an issue with a machine and say, okay. We are gonna solve this. The line is gonna be down for an hour while they're making this change. Or, for us, that was the case when they were switching varieties of popcorn.

And so I would try to make that potentially unplanned maintenance now be planned. Now the all the other plant workers were able to continue to do what they had planned to do, and we could come in and hopefully get the repair done, in the time frame that we had to work. Or if we didn't, at least it really reduced the amount of unplanned downtime with that.

And so by look by just keeping track of this this simple metric right here of planned versus unplanned, it's incredible the amount of productivity that you can build into a day. If you can coordinate when you work on that piece of equipment, being able to catch it before it completely breaks down, is very important. Preventative maintenance helps to catch a lot of this. You know, we can make those tweaks and adjustments during planned downtime versus unplanned. You can go ahead and go back to the, results or the lessons learned. Appreciate that.

But so, yeah, another thing that's important is data trumps memory. For me, we talked about this just in a little bit in the in the backstage before we came in.

Having good notes, having good documentation, because what ends up happening is going, I worked on this two years ago. I kinda remember what I did, but I don't really remember what I how I exactly solved the problem.

Having good documentation, we're gonna hit on this again in another story coming up, so I don't wanna give too much away with this. But making sure that you log all of the data can actually give you good information to make decisions from. Like you said, Kristen, you know, he, five minutes of looking at the data, they had four days of downtime to try and adjust this, you know, but, ultimately, it led to a lot of uptime. And if the equipment is running as it's supposed to, what does that do? Boost productivity. Boost profitability.

So that maintenance department that looks like a giant expense, all of a sudden, you might still be spending the same money, but it doesn't look near as big compared to the stack of cash now that you're hopefully bringing in with that.

Well and the data sorry to interrupt, Matt. But, I mean, I think the other piece there too is the data really makes it easy to communicate that. Right? Like Mhmm.

If you're just, hey. I I have an anecdote or I feel like this is happening. Right? Like, it's a lot harder to get the the investment or the time or the resources to make those changes.

But if if you can clearly show, like, look at all this downtime that this is causing, we need somebody to help us fix this. Right? We need more people to to work on it. Whatever the situation is, it just helps you make the case, that much more clearly.

Yeah. Exactly. If you have that data that you can go to your general manager, your plant manager, whoever it is, and say, look. We have shown consistent documentation as to why this piece of equipment is a pile of junk.

We need to do something. It's costing us more than what it would take to replace it. Let's let's try to make this happen. And then you have you can also include, supporting documentation.

I've made new projects or plans an asset in Limble. This is a a pro tip here for you, but make your projects an asset. It makes it a lot easier to track where you're at. It's going throughout the process.

You can keep track of your bids, your quotes, anything that you have in there. Give yourself a central landing spot. It'll help to, make the case if you need to. And then you can improve what you don't know you need to improve.

If you don't have analytics to say, well, you know, we've had five percent of planned downtime versus ninety five percent of planned downtime. You don't know if you're chasing your tail or not. So it's hard to make good decisions off of that.

Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much, Matt. And on to our next lesson learned, from culture supporting life. So Jay was working at a plant in the past that didn't have a CMMS in place, and we know there are there are a lot of folks in this situation, right, trying to to just work through with, I mean, even paper paper and pencil, and Excel or or other types of systems kinda cobbled together.

He had a lot of old school systems in place that they were able to kinda get by, but only really because they'd been in place for a really long Limble, and it had been decades of just doing the same kind of thing, the same process over and over.

And this this was working for their long standing employees, but was really a challenge as they started to bring new team members on board. Folks were looking for additional technology, didn't have the information that they needed. Yeah. Go ahead. On to lessons learned.

Again, like we talked about, giving yourself something that you have structure and standardization with. Kristen, you and I, we how many people did we talk to in Chicago that, we bumped into, and they're like like, so what do you guys do? Well, we're, CMMS.

Oh, really? Yeah. We have blah blah blah blah. Rattle it off. And it was like, it's so old.

It's so archaic. We can't get out of this. And and, like, it's clunky. It's hard to use.

It's hard to train new people.

Your your CMMS should work for you, not against you. It should be it should help you do your job, not make it more difficult.

So the and that is a that's a key statement that you can make, if you're in the process of trying to look to move out of something old and something new. Talk about the data that you can't track.

Like, I'd really like to know what our planned versus unplanned is. But in order for me to do that, I've gotta create an Excel spreadsheet. And in order for me to create Excel spreadsheet, that's gonna take a lot of time.

And so already, it's going backwards. And so having a CMMS that can actually help you track what you want to track. I think when I chose Limble, I went through six or seven different programs, before I found Limble. And some were some were decent. Some were very clunky and hard to use. But one of the things I liked about Limble was that you could customize the data that you want to keep track of.

Mileage, hours, something as simple as that. Make, model, serial number. You know, if we gotta make a phone call to a parts department, you know, they're gonna wanna know, hey. What was the year? What's the VIN of this vehicle?

You know, you can have all of that in a central location. You don't have to go out and lay a hand on that piece of equipment and go, oh, I'll get back to you in fifteen minutes. And then when you call back, now you're number three in the queue for the phone line to try to get parts.

Having that accessible on my phone was important because I was just as much a technician as I was the maintenance director.

We were small enough to where that was that worked, but we we were getting large enough to where we needed to expand at the same time. We were kind of in that middle ground. And so that really helped us to move to the next stage because, because we were moving out of and, again, I'm leading into some more slides. Moving out of that reactive, reactive phase into a proactive phase where we were actually ahead of the game instead of behind.

So being able to track the metrics that you want, is is very key, I think, in order to making your CMMS work.

Yeah. And I think, Matt, the other piece too is, like, working with your team as well because to your point, there are some kind of older systems that are really difficult to use. And if you're not familiar with technology, if you don't have the capability to kind of make those configuration changes, it can be really tough to make it work for you. So making sure that you find something that not only, like, the super techie, you know, Gen Zer that's just joined your team can figure it out, but also somebody that that maybe isn't as comfortable, you know, with technology.

And I think having that that group behind it and, you know, I'll tout my team a little bit. Like, we've got a an awesome customer success group here at Limble to help with onboarding and training and also via chat to answer your questions in, you know, twenty seconds. Like, we've got an awesome response time, and and, hopefully, a lot of the folks that have, been on on today's webinar or have given their stories will will reiterate, that it's just it's nice to know that there's somebody there to help answer your questions so every level of of technology and comfort, can can be addressed with your new with your new tool.

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that's important is, I each one of these stories, all of these people, they want you to know that you're not alone. I want you to know that you're not alone going through the struggles.

Other companies out there are working through this to try to make things better, to try to make things improve. You know, oftentimes, the CMMS has looked at, oh, great. Another expense in the budget line.

But really for what the expense is, it's pretty negligible as far as what it gives back to you and how much it's not just an expense. It's an investment. Kristen and I, if you guys have been in our webinars or heard us speak, you'll hear us say this time and time again, but it really is true.

That made it easy for me to get buy in from my GM. I was I went to him and I said, look. I'm only looking for me and a couple of users right now so we can get this thing started so we can get it out. And he's like, how much?

And I told him, and he's like, oh, well, yeah. Why are you talking to me? Get it make make it happen. Like, it was that small.

And so, having something like that to begin with and then once they begin to see the improvement, it really helps to help sell to move into growing that out and really making it what you need it to be.

Yeah. That's great. Alright. We better keep going. We're gonna get in trouble for talking too much. Alright.

We've got Randy over, building superintendent over at City of Hanford. He was kind enough to share his story.

As building superintendent, Randy oversaw the maintenance and repair of all city buildings, and he's had tons of challenges over the years from flooding, water well situations, structural problems that closed a whole building for a year. Like, you name it, he's seen it.

But, really, one thing that he called out specifically for us was around some of the seasonal challenges.

So air conditioning. Right? We're all feeling it right now. Well, most of the country is feeling it right now.

Right? It's a hundred ten degrees out, and an AC unit goes down. People just can't work. It's it's a significant problem.

So finding alternatives to keep them cool can really make you a hero, and everybody wants to look good and and save the day. Right?

So if a a part is a couple of days out or if you have to replace a whole unit, being prepared with portables or other options really highlight that you've got a good program going and you are ready for this type of situation.

Delays with ordered parts or unit replacement can cause an issue, and and it really highlights that your maintenance program is too reactive. Right? That you're you're not ahead of the game. And it just throws everything out of whack because you're struggling to to figure out that reactive situation.

So couple of lessons learned from Randy.

So number one, like I talked about earlier, build those relationships with your vendors.

Having a good relationship with your vendor can help you to stock parts, have replacements, have service at the ready, and then you can go into your CMMS and you can label them in your vendors column. One of the things that Kristen mentioned in the opening is new employees, a workforce turnover. How do you bring them up to speed?

One of the things that we've we've probably see when you bring a new employee in is they don't know how to plug in yet. They don't know who to talk to. They don't know where to go next. They don't know what to do.

And if you can give them a tool such as, tying a vendor to an asset. For instance, air conditioning. If you have maintenance guys that are primarily doing HVAC work or oriented in that direction and they need to be able to respond to calls of some kind, put that tool in their toolbox and say, look. For each asset, these are the vendors that you need to call.

I want you to call them. And if, let's say, if the budget's more than five grand, then you need to call me. If it's less than five grand, just get it done. You can have that set up as a PM.

You know, as a air conditioner went down PM, what do I do? You can have it as a flow checklist. Debo and I were kinda talking about this a little bit. Jonathan, sorry, his his nickname, from the Limble community.

But, anyways, we were talking and just being able to have a flow for your technicians to go through so they know what to do so you're not losing time. They're not waiting on you.

With replacement parts, keeping, if you can standardize I know it's not always gonna work this way, but if you can standardize your equipment as much as possible to have standard parts on the shelf, being able to put your hands on the part and put that part into place, will cut downtime significantly. Might be as simple as belts, light bulbs, things of that nature. We were located in the middle of a field, but we were we weren't in town, was where our our popcorn plant was. And so but we would it would it took it cost us time to go get something as simple as belts.

Can you organize those things and keep them on hand?

Spare replacements. If it's a big expensive part that you don't wanna put it in in your inventory, find out who does stock that part or maybe see if a vendor will stock it for you. That way you don't have to carry the burden of that expense. Sometimes that does work. Sometimes that does happen. And then, another thing I like to stress is brand loyalty.

I it can be difficult, especially, if you don't have if it's always hard to get any different vendor in at any given time. But, I've been in in the world of loyalty means something. If you can be loyal to a company, they're more likely to be loyal to you.

So that's also something. And I realized, like I said, that doesn't work all the time. Totally get it. But if you can make loyalty work with a company, it builds those relationships, and it makes it a lot easier to get the service done when you need it to get done.

Yeah. That's that's great.

And I think Jonathan's on the call today too, so he's probably, like, ears are perking up every time we're talking about him. So everybody that's contributed to today's webinar and has joined us today, thanks again for for all of your partnership. We're excited to have you here.

Okay. We can go to the next one, Yuri.

And we have Panorama Mountain Resort next.

These guys had a ton of equipment to maintain. Oh, well, still do, not past tense.

Everything, you know, power utility, vehicle fleets, lifts, everything, is really critical to to having a a functioning resort, but also safety is really important. Right? So safety from, obviously, the perspective of of their guests, but also the regulators needed access. They needed to see records for maintenance equipment, who did what, when.

And their other they had a a solution before Limble wasn't really working. It it didn't fit their needs, and it wasn't flexible enough for what they needed.

So the team worked together. They came up with a plan as a group and really kind of went to the whiteboard and and started to to list out what are the things that we want, what are the critical components, and who are the stakeholders that we need to involve to make sure we're getting everything that we need in a new solution.

So then they found Limble as a CMMS. And in terms of the implementation, a big thing that they really wanted to focus on was starting with a framework that worked for them, keeping it simple, making an initial maintenance plan that was repetitive and streamlined that they knew that they could iterate on. Right? I think that's one of the beauties of Limble that, you don't have to build everything all out at the beginning. Start small, get people comfortable, and you can always iterate on it and build out as you go.

They also then built an onboarding plan for their team. So they actually set up a little practice zone in, in the CMMS, a little bit of a playground, built out some assets for the team to be able to practice in, and then got feedback from that. Right? So it it got people comfortable and, you know, they they had an opportunity to go in and play around a little bit with without thinking they were gonna mess something up. So after a couple of months, the team was already seeing improvements, and and the guys were loving it.

The biggest thing too in terms of impact was they were really able to track their performance. So they were able to see what was working, what needed to be adjusted, and, really find those inefficiencies as they moved forward. So great story with this one. Lots of lessons learned, I think, to go through here.

Absolutely.

You know, I'd say, you know, when you invest in the right maintenance program right away, it can make, it can make such a huge return on you a return on investment. Like, you get more time. You can get more buy into a program. You actually get the work done that you need to.

I think it's so cool that these guys, made a safe zone, if you will, of an environment of where they could go in and say, look. You aren't gonna screw anything up. Go in. Push buttons.

Try it out. Let's see how this works. And that's that's a lot of times what we do as maintenance technicians. We go in, we push buttons, and go, oop.

That didn't work. And so let's try it again. Let's regroup and come back on it. And so, you know, by them coming in and making this area and allowing them to have input into the program, it it makes a huge difference.

People feel involved. They wanna be part of the process, and it allows you to trial out, some different flows. If you have a work order flow that you like, if you have a PM flow that you like going through, it allows them to go, hey.

What if we put a down where c is and put c down where upper a is?

They they actually you know, it's it's an easy change to go in and do, and then they can go through and try it again. We've we've talked about schedules. We've talked about, PM frequencies. You know?

Hey. I'm checking this every week, and I have found nothing wrong every week. What if we change this to every month? Can we do that?

Absolutely. Just come in, couple clicks, and we change it to every month. Now instead of devoting, let's say, an hour every week, now we're doing an hour of every month. We just freed up three hours because we're now we're not over PMing a project.

We may maybe we're not over greasing a project.

You know, you have extra expense in grease. It actually can produce extra problems when you over grease something. So making those initial changes is, it helps to get team buy in. It helps them to wanna be involved, and it it it ultimately makes your program something better.

You know, it it really can help to streamline those and find those inefficiencies that you didn't know existed because you have good documentation.

If one if you have all of these things in place, really, it ultimately helps to make your maintenance program grow.

Yeah. One of the cool things that I I loved about this one too is that because they had everything documented, anyone that was new that was joining the team also was able to see the process, but use that fresh perspective to ask questions too. To say, hey. Why are we doing it this way?

So in your your point, Matt, of, like, hey. We haven't found anything in all of these inspections that we've been doing. Like, why are we doing them so frequently? You know, being able to to kind of think differently about things, it allows everyone on the team, even if they're newer, to see that background and to to kind of think differently.

Well and to your point too, when you have multiple people that are doing the same PMs, it actually allows other people to have the transparency and go, wait. Did they report a squeak the last time it was in here? Because now I got a squeak, and I don't and so you can go back and look and see in through the previous work order history and go, nobody documented a squeak. Maybe we need to look into this, or codes, which I will talk about here in a little bit, of the documentation, being able to go back and look through work order history.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Alright. Cool. On to lesson learned number seven. I think this is our last one with, Matt at Olympus Group. And, you know, challenge here, I I feel like everybody probably has has had this at one time or another, hopefully not too much, but really long workdays.

Poor Matt. He was so exhausted because every day, he was putting out fires. The team was working in a completely reactive mode and had a lot of trouble keeping up with the workload.

So after he got Limble, Matt wanted to start tracking changes and repairs so that his team could be more efficient and be more effective every time that that they were doing their work.

So every time the team solved a problem, they documented it exactly how it was resolved. So Matt had to do a lot of it in the beginning, and was documenting how the issue was resolved. So particular equipment had error codes. Every time he saw a code, he would fix it and document it in the CMMS.

And then after adding that in, as a recurring step, other teammates were able to easily look up how he fixed the issues in the past. So it wasn't all just on Matt to resolve things in the future. He was able to really effectively share that knowledge across the team. So it was super simple for the team to implement improvements, from that. Matt was able to go from fourteen hour to eight hour workdays and go home at at five and have a nice evening with his family, which obviously was a huge win for him.

But professionally too, the the CEO and CFO reached out and said, hey. Wait a minute. What are you guys doing over here? You're you're becoming much more efficient. We want you to look at other plants too. And so it ended up that Matt got promoted to director of three plants, and his career has has just been going gangbusters, from just from some things that, you know, might seem simple, take a little bit of time to implement, but in the end can make a huge impact both personally and and professionally for the organization.

Well, I think the easy lesson learned here is do a good job and get promoted. I mean, that's that's that's my key takeaway.

But only is that easy. Right, Matt?

I wish. Right?

You know, again, I I know we've stressed on this. I don't wanna beat it to death, but documentation is key. We talked a little bit about it in the last the last slide. You know, tracking the information that you want.

In this case, where you could go in and you could track codes, where you know, if you have a a thirteen forty seven dot o seven, code that is always coming up and, you know, how do we solve this? Well, let's see. Bob is the one that always fixes it. Bob's not here.

Bob's on vacation.

You know, I can't get a hold of him. What did he do to solve this problem? So by by being able to go back and punch in thirteen forty seven dot o seven into your code history and being able to pull something up, you can look and see what Bob did to hopefully mitigate that issue.

So having, though, that information, that that historical data to go back to can help you speed you along in your processes to, to solve some of these things.

You know, it's that it's that systematic approach of making sure that you are tracking all of your assets and making sure that you're gathering the data that you want to have in hand. It really helps to boost everything that you are.

And it my my thing was I always I loved how Limble really helped to to get our program going in the right direction. And my the feather in my hat was when my general manager looked at me at my annual review, and he said, I don't think we had a date in the last year that we were broke down for more than twenty four hours. He didn't have to look at the metrics at that. He could see it because he could see it from his side of the desk.

He wasn't an active Limble user, but because I was, because I took it and made it into what we needed it to be, others noticed the performance because they weren't shut down. The, other departments will notice your performance and your efficiencies even if they're not actively using the program. And I and I think that that's that speaks volumes to how well that you can run a department is when other departments go, what are you doing? How are you actually getting this stuff done?

Why are you leaving at three o'clock in the afternoon? You used to be the last one out of here.

Well, my my work's caught up. PMs are done. I'm out of here. See you later. You know? So, it it it can get it get to a point of where you are proactive, not reactive.

Reactive costs so much time, which is what Matt was experiencing here. If you're constantly chasing the next battle, the next fire, the the best way to put out a fire is to never let it start in the first place. And I know that sounds very, cliche, but it's very true. How do you keep those fires from happening?

Spend time with your equipment. Get out on the floor. Listen to it. Smell it. Hear it.

You know, see it.

Don't taste it. It's probably a bad idea.

But, Depending on depending on what you're making.

Right?

He said, well, that that could be true. Yeah. This this popcorn doesn't taste as good as the last batch. We might need to do some PMs here.

Give me that full bag of samples right there. We're gonna go back and PM this. And so but, yeah. And so but just spending time around your equipment.

I I was able I was on the floor every day. It was not that I was looking for anything in particular, but I was talking to the line workers, and I was listening to the equipment. I don't know how many times I walked into the plant, and I was able to detect something was wrong because I was in there every day. Something didn't smell right.

We got something that's getting hot.

We got some whistling noise. We got a pretty good air leak somewhere that we need to button this up before this line blows or something like that that happens. So, but just spending time around your equipment, spending time around your employees can really help to, boost your program in a less than tangible way. It's not like you can go touch this part or you can go touch the money, but having that culture experience with your people can really make the difference.

Yeah. Totally agree. Well and thanks everyone for sticking through it with all seven lessons learned. We have a a summary too that we wanted to go through. Matt, you wanna I did the kickoff. You wanna do the recap?

I can sure try.

Talk to talk to industry professionals. Talk to people that are in it. If you can go to conferences, and meet new people, that's a big thing.

I really loved our time that we spent at the last two that you and I have been at, Kristen. I've it's certainly been eye opening for me.

It just being able to meet new people, hear their experiences, the things that they're working through, talk to new vendors, see what services they may or may not be able to provide you. Sometimes it's surprising the thing like, wait. You guys do that? You guys can actually come and take care of this for me? I didn't realize that this was even a service. Let's bring this in here.

So by by by surrounding yourself with good people, it it can really help to build your knowledge base. It's not what you know. It's who you know. And I I hate to say again, sound cliche, but it's very true. Somebody else might know something more than you, and that's okay.

Start small with your projects. If you have a huge one on the horizon such as building out a new plant, chunk it out. Divvy it up. Delegate, delegate, delegate. If you can delegate the electrical to these people and the plumbing to these people and let them be the experts in that, all you need to do is coordinate and help bring it together and make sure everything stays on track.

You don't have to be the engineer. You don't have to be the electrical engineer. You don't have to be the structural engineer. Let somebody else handle that for you. Use your strengths in the right spots.

The the unforeseen transparency or the unforeseen positive transparency, is something I think that everybody is in awe by. If you guys could go through and read these stories, which you're talking about one of the reasons we're doing this is Limble's release of the big book of maintenance.

And that's a lot where a lot of these stories came from. I enjoyed reading through it, where you can actually go out and you can learn from other people's experiences. Other people are enjoy the fact of, like, wow. I didn't know that this problem existed. Just as you talked about with the with the, cheese cups.

The you know, they didn't really they really weren't knowing where that was at until they step back and looked at the data, and then they made a decision off the data, and it improved their their workflow dramatically.

And the lastly, I wanna say this. Make sure that you remain flexible.

Make sure that you, are willing to pivot as the day comes by.

You know, the best laid plans are usually destroyed in the first ten minutes on a Monday morning. Believe me. I get it. You know, like, alright. We're gonna go out. We're gonna do this, and you're you're gonna go here, and you're gonna go here. And then one phone call happens and everything is destroyed.

But be willing to be flexible in those moments. Be willing to pivot and go, alright. Well, wasn't planning on this. These three workers didn't show up today.

So do what you can. Make the best of the day. And then when you walk out, you can walk out with the confidence of knowing that I put my best foot forward today. I didn't get near the stuff done that I had planned to, but I did the best I could. It's all I could do, and then leave it at work. Don't take it home with you.

It's a great recap, Matt. I think, there are a lot of folks on on today's call who have participated and shared their stories for for this event, the big book of maintenance. And, I think, Yuri, you've got a a slide coming up where the team can download.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So, yeah, thank you both again, Matt and Kristen, for, sharing all these awesome stories and for all your insights.

Definitely, I've learned a lot. And just before we do dive into the q and a and, also share the big book, just wanna point out, if you were inspired by the lessons learned that you've heard today, and want to really put those words of wisdom into action with a game changing CMMS that's going to really help you elevate your organization's maintenance program. Please feel free to reach out to our team and meet with a product specialist today by scanning this QR code here.

And then also, as Kristen and Matt have mentioned, we have a new resource called the Big Book of Modern Maintenance.

It'll really help you dive deeper into how maintenance experts you've heard from today and others have translated those lessons into success stories at their companies and also include specific and quantifiable research results that they've achieved.

So you can also download that here via QR code.

And, a final shout we want to also point out, if you also want to continue to get maintenance tips and any ideas from your fellow maintenance professionals, please feel free to join the Limble community here at community dot Limble dot com where you can, you know, have that as another resource to engage with other experts in the field, and share your own stories as well so others can learn from you and vice versa.

This is the one that I'm really excited about, Limble community. Like, it's it's been fun to get on there and go, alright. This is what I'm struggling with. How are you guys dealing with this?

It's kind of like the the back channels is what I like of between industries of where we can actually collaborate and go, oh, you're using it for that? Wow. That's genius. I love it.

Like, it's it's so eye opening sometimes the conversations that that people go and and and, you know, I I I journal on there. I'm hoping to, to put some, some more information, some more documentation out for you guys as well. There's many other guys that are on there that do the same. We're all there to help each other at the end of the day.

You know? We wanna make sure that everybody has a handle in the maintenance world and has somebody else that they can talk to. And it's it's been pretty impactful on me. And I know that there are several others that have, had a lot of good conversation from it as well.

Yeah. We're really excited to see this grow. A lot of our our customers have asked for a long time, hey. Can you connect me with someone in my industry or someone with with this experience?

Right? And this is going to just be a natural way for everyone to come together and talk through what they're working on. Yuri, we've had a couple of folks actually ask to put the QR code back for the maintenance. Yeah.

There we go. So for anybody that missed that, I think we're we're actually really tight on time for questions, but we can probably, see if there are any others.

Oh, Darwin, it didn't work. Well, you can also get it, from our website as well. I believe we have a link on there in our resources page.

We so so if if that, QR code isn't working for you, you should be able to get it that way.

Yeah. We'll also share that link, in the follow-up email that you'll get with the recording to this webinar. So, so, yeah, stay tuned for that, and you should get that in the next, few days.

And just want to make sure we have time for a few questions.

So let's see.

Let's see if we have any questions here. And, also, feel free to continue to pop those in as we dive in. So, Matt, first question for you. As somebody who has a long history in the field, first, I was curious to know if you have a specific lesson that you've learned that you would like to share, whether it's from your time at preferred popcorn or from another role.

So yeah. I know you've shared a lot of great tips along the way.

Yeah. Just like I learned this morning, I got called in on a project, to help a company out. And, if I would have kept good notes a couple years ago, it would have really helped me out.

But all that to say, it it's it's it's critical. It's one of those things that I've been learning more and more about. Document everything even if you don't think it's worth documenting, because what you never know when things might change on you.

Go in. I like that with the logs on an asset. That was one of the things that I learned was you could go in and then you could keep track of putting in just random notes. It doesn't even have to be a work order on a piece of equipment, being able to attach pictures.

That would that's one of the biggest things I could say is getting organized really helped me to grow, and and it continues to help me to grow. It's one of those things that I'm constantly working on maintaining within myself on that. But good question, Yuri.

Awesome.

And so we've had another person. Gabrielle's asking, that she works for a company that installs photovoltaic systems.

Given their high volume of clients, how can they effectively apply standardization in their maintenance processes while also balancing proactive and reactive maintenance strategies and then, keeping respectable operation costs?

That is a that is a really good question. There's a lot of different things in there. And I I hope that I can answer this well for you, Gabriel.

When you think about applying standardization, think about the things that you have to do first. What are some things that your industry and forgive me. I don't know photovoltaic systems.

But think about it. Are there some standards in your industry that you need to go after first? Is there certain documentation that needs to be done first? Prioritize, I would say, would be a a key to beginning prior to standardization.

So you have primary, you have secondary, you have tertiary. Primary, what are the things that have to be done first? And once you build out a flow for the primary things, it becomes easier to flow into standardizing your secondary things, though, and your tertiary things. The tertiary being the things like, yeah, that'd be cool.

We'll we'll get to it someday, versus the things that have to be done.

And then so take the critical pieces, and and and really sit down and map that out. Write them down on a piece of paper and go, what's important to me? What's important to my workers? What's important to the company? And when you start to do that, I think that'll hopefully give you a good direction, as far as what you need to do.

Proactiveness comes because you have been doing your your PMs, your preventative maintenance. What are the preventative maintenance things that you, again, need to go after first? Are there things that are constantly breaking down or constant problems? See if you can solve those things first, and and become more proactive in an inspection.

Inspections are very simple things to do as far as, is there an expert that I need to bring in that knows this really well that can give me tips and insight advice as to things that I should be looking at on a more regular basis?

And when you start paying attention to those things, the reactive becomes proactive because you're planning to do it. It's no longer unplanned maintenance. Reactive is unplanned. When it switches to planned maintenance, when you are fixing it when you want to versus when the equipment says you should be doing it, that's a proactive change, and that helps you to be moving in the right direction.

So, and and all of that really does help. You're gonna have some expected costs right up front. You're gonna be spending a little bit more up front maybe as far as tools go, maybe as far as expert advice, maybe as parts. But once you have those things in place, those those costs become negligible because now you're instead of operating down here, you're operating up here.

You have more operations and things that are getting done, and that will free you up to be more proactive.

I hope that answers it. It's a big question, but I I hope I get I've got that pointed in the right way.

I would also say because, Gabriel mentioned that there are a bunch of clients, a high volume of clients as well. So I I would also just add, like, creating a template that is a starting point for most, most things could be a good help too. And then that way, if your clients have different configurations or installations that you're maintaining, you can just make slight adjustments. Right? Like, having that template as a starting point, at least, will will get you going kind of towards that standardization, and then you can make any tweaks as needed.

Definitely. Yeah. Kristen, you might be able to answer this one.

Limble now has offline access. Correct? Jean Perry says, do Limble users have to have plant wide Wi Fi set up to support users? I don't believe so. There there's some offline support. Is that correct?

Yeah. You're right. We do have offline mode in our app. And so there are, you can't do everything offline.

Right? Because otherwise, you'd have to cache everything down to your device, which is pretty hefty. But, you can definitely do work within Limble being offline. So if you we have a lot of folks, who are in places without Wi Fi or cell phone signals, like, you know, in the middle of nowhere or in a mine, things like that.

So they use the offline mode to go through that work, as they're as they're working. And then once they come back to a Wi Fi area or to a a connected area, through Limble signal, then everything just syncs back up with the site.

And I know we're just a feather along here, but one last question that we've got from John.

You know, he's looking for any tips.

He's got he says he's an onboard he's was just onboarded as a director of facilities for a high end restaurant with no maintenance program set up of four locations that have years of Band Aid repairs and overlooked. I'm playing role of all titles.

Oh, John. I feel you.

I feel you.

First thing I would start doing would be documenting repairs and cost of repairs and look at replacement. I try to abide by the seventy percent rule. And the and this is something that I I got years of experience with John Deere, and this is, Limble background they in their warranty system, and this is how it works, is if it is if it's seventy percent of the cost of replacement, then they say do a full replacement. And I found for me personally that that was very helpful.

And by seventy percent, I mean that if the cost of labor and the cost of parts is gonna cost me seventy percent of the replacement of new, I should probably consider replacing the whole unit with new. Build some reliability in. If you have a lot of equipment that has a lot of Band Aid repairs, think about the cost of if the cooler goes out, how much food product are you gonna lose? What's that expense look like?

Start attaching dollar signs to all these repairs and take it to the higher ups and say, look. New cooler's thirty grand. I know it's a big expense.

But so far in the last two years, we've dumped twenty five grand into this cooler when we could have replaced it with a new one. You know? And this is I'm just using numbers here, but but those type of situations are real life. That's something that can happen. So if you can start documenting the cost of repair for each equipment, if everything has to be repaired, show what that expense is, and that'll help you to make that hopefully make the case, for changing that out. As far as role of all titles, if you can pull in some good experts alongside of you, help you to help you make some good management decisions, I think that that'd be a huge help.

Alright.

Well, I think we're a bit over time, but thank you everybody for joining today. Thank you to our speakers for all these great insights and making this a really engaging conversation.

As a reminder, everyone, you will get a recording of the webinar, to your inbox within the next few days. And so thank you for attending and for hope you have a great rest of your day.

Thanks all.

Thanks, everybody.

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