6 Steps To Kick-Starting Your Preventive Maintenance Program

Transcript

Well, hello everybody, and welcome to today's webinar.

Six steps to kick start your preventive maintenance program.

So this event is brought to you by Food Safety Magazine, and it is sponsored by Limble.

I'm Adrienne Bloom, editorial director of Food Safety Magazine, and I'll be your moderator for today's webinar. Thanks for joining us. Now today's presenters will be Kristen Drake, vice president of customer success at Limble and also Matt Burtz, maintenance consultant.

Now I'll rejoin Kristen and Matt at the end of the webinar to help answer some of your questions that have come in throughout the presentation. So don't forget to submit those questions in the q and a and chat section of the webinar console. Also, today's event is being, recorded and archived on food dash safety dot com.

Alright. With that said, I'm excited to turn it over to today's presenters, Kristen and Matt. Take it away, guys.

Thanks so much, Adrienne.

Really happy to be here. And as as you mentioned, I am with Limble and so excited to have Matt joining me here today who is going to tell his story from preferred popcorn.

Matt, do you give us a little bit of background?

Absolutely.

So, I'm Matt Burtz. I, maintenance consultant. I used to be a maintenance director for Preferred Popcorn, and, I'm just gonna share with you guys, my experience, building a preventative maintenance program. And, hopefully, we can, we have I'm sure there's a lot of commonalities that we have and and, hopefully, can help you get your, maintenance preventative maintenance program kick started too.

So moving right along, we're gonna jump right into what are some of the core challenges that we faced at Preferred Popcorn.

We had, a lot of different things that happened on our end, and I'm trying sorry. I'm trying to get it blown up just a little bit bigger on my end here to see.

Have a little there we go. That's my fault here on my end. Alright.

Yeah. So we had a brand new plant with which which meant we had new benchmarks.

We had new things to figure out, things, that we weren't sure what was gonna break or how it was gonna break. Everything's new, so it should stay running. Right? But we all know that things break down along the way. And, we had, some parts issues. You know, a lot of this happened right in the middle of, COVID, and so we wanted to make sure that we were utilizing the parts that we had on hand and that we were making effective use of those parts and then that, we had a good parts ordering in place as well.

Making the case for resources, you know, we always get told as, in those of us in maintenance is fix it, but don't spend any money.

And so how do we how do we do that? And then how do we justify making another expense, if you will, into something that's known as a CMMS or computerized maintenance management software.

And so, how can we why does making an additional expense make sense?

And one of the key things I wanna make sure that we talk about that right at the get go is it's not an expenses, it's an investment.

And we'll look at more of that as we go through here too. And finally, the one of the other pieces that we wanted to clear up was lack of visibility.

We had a lot of different departments within the company, you know, especially between, operations, food safety, and, maintenance. And we wanted to make sure that everybody was looking at the same screen that we were all helping each other out through the whole process. And so we wanted to make sure that, we weren't doing extra work that another department was already taken care of. We wanna make sure everything was documented effectively and correctly, especially when it comes time for audits. I know it's that that a word that tends to make a shiver a little bit. So, Kristen, did you have anything else you wanted to add with that?

Yeah. Well, I I was just curious too a little bit around, moving you know, I think a lot of our the customers that we're working with are talking about challenges in staffing and hiring. Right? And I think from a poor documentation or not having things in one place, that lack of visibility is also a challenge as you're changing staff or finding new folks to join your team, right?

And so I think that that was another piece that that, it is a really big impact, especially right now with a difficult time getting skilled workforce.

Definitely. And where turnover, it happens a lot. You know? How do we how do we pass things along to, those that are, coming in behind us?

You know, if we leave, how can things stay running and stay efficient? So, you know, we talk we'll talk about that as we get into assets and collecting everything. So one of the things that we've looked at, you know, we we knew for us, we needed to get organized. Organization was key.

We needed to get it wasn't that we were doing things wrong. It was that the company had grown. And with growth, we we need to continue to grow other departments as well. And so my main or my general manager and I, he we had a great working relationship between each other.

And, I went to him and I said, hey. I need something. I need some software to help me manage this, to get through this. And I sat down with him, and we began to have the conversation of, food safety needs to know this.

I need to know how to coordinate with what's happening on the floor. Things are getting lost in emails. You know, somebody say, hey. I emailed you to this three weeks ago.

I'm like, oh, yeah. I remember, but it wasn't at the forefront.

Notes, well, so and so, Bob said that this needs fixed. Well, the message from Bob never got to me. So we really needed to figure out how can we be more efficient. So that meant bringing in some level of software. And we jumped right into, some of our goals as we sat down to try to figure this out. We we wanted to increase uptime. We wanted to make sure that things stayed running.

If a lot of times we don't think about the fact that, we know that we breakdowns cost us, and I say breakdowns cost us twice. Number one, the the cost of repair that it's gonna take to fix that piece of equipment, you know, whether that's bringing in contractors, we do it ourself, parts. But the other piece of that is the downtime that we're not in production. What is that, what is that value? What is that if we're not creating product, if we're not packaging product, to to sell, what is that cost of being out of production?

So how do we increase that uptime, so that we're not having that expense?

The other part was improved compliance. You know, like I said, talked about, we had a brand new plant. It was a lot bigger and so we needed we wanted to make sure that with our growth that our compliance was continuing to grow. We know that when we go through these food safety audits, they're always gonna find something.

And what we what we hope that they find is that it's something very small, and we we wanted to make sure that, that our compliance continued to grow as well. They wanna see growth. How do you continually work to defend your product that you're putting out to market? It's not just a matter of we want repeat customers because they like our food, but they also like it because it's safe.

They see our name, they see our product, we wanted to be safe with that.

Yeah. Matt, I think that's a really big one because especially in this industry, right, it it's absolutely critical to make sure that not only are you following the standards, but that you're keeping track of all of that. And that if you do have an an audit triggered, you have everything to be able to share. Here's our documentation. Here's the process that we've done. Right? And having everything in separate emails or pieces of papers floating around your office is not exactly the easiest way to go through that.

Absolutely. And so software, that's where we went to. And so we went to we I tried a spreadsheet, and this is my favorite. You know, I've I've been thinking, alright.

I'm gonna make this maintenance spreadsheet, and I got this Excel document. I'm gonna go out and do this one PM on this piece of equipment. This is what the book said. And I went out and I filled it all out, and I took this piece of paper and said, what am I gonna do with this?

I'm gonna put it in a folder, and it's not gonna be visible to anybody else.

I'm gonna put it in this folder, and it's gonna live in this folder until somebody asks for it. And then what do I need to do to go back? Do I is it easy to access? Do I even remember that I have the folder? So, again, we jumped right into needing, a a better level of software beyond spreadsheets.

And we started, once we had our CMMS in place, we talk we did a, criticality analysis. And what I mean by that is we started with, things that were critical to the operation that absolutely could not break down. We all have, things in our operations that, like, this is number one. This absolutely has to be held together.

The others, sometimes this piece is also the piece that you know the best.

If you aren't sure what's critical in your operation, start with something that you know really well, and work to develop it with that product because that's gonna make the rest of the process easier.

We wanna you know, the goal is not to be at a hundred percent PM right out of the gate. It took me over a year, to get there, but it was a good process. It takes time to develop it. And we start with that one item that we know really well, and we develop a flow.

We we figure out what it's like to put that product into a CMMS, how to view it, how to analyze it, how to work with it. And then as we develop that flow with that piece that's either critical or that we know really well, we becomes easier to apply that flow to pieces that we're not as familiar with. That piece of equipment that, that gets used sometimes, but now I have a process in place to add that piece of equipment that's gonna match, the harder pieces along the line. And so, you know, triage it.

What's what's the worst case scenario if this breaks down to what's we can get to that at some point. So start working your way through the flow of that nature.

Yeah, Matt. I think that's a really critical piece because especially as as a lot of folks are getting started with Limble, in my experience, it can be overwhelming. Right? And so to to go into this thinking about, hey.

Let's just start with what's gonna make the biggest impact. Let's keep it keep it small, get people comfortable with where we're going. Right? And and I think you had a lot of success with that.

Yeah. And that's so for me, my background's in ag equipment. And so I started with, we had outdoor equipment. So our operation was, you know, we had the popcorn outside the plant in the bins. We needed to get it in the plant so it could get back. And so I started with the pieces that I knew really well was trucks, tractors, grain handling equipment.

And so I started with that. It's what I knew and I I demoed it all the way through, in the process. And so the first thing, like, I'm talking about is that asset, that truck or tractor, or, the bagger or whatever it is that you have or the the bottle or the labeler.

Put put your favorite noun in there. But, start collecting some information. You know, one of the first things that happens when we get told, hey. This machine is broke down. This piece is broken.

When we call in for parts or we need to send a PO, we may not be at our desk. Me, I was mobile. I was out on the floor just as much fixing stuff as I was, trying to manage everything. So this had to travel with me, and I needed it to be right here. I needed it to be on my phone.

And so, I went and, I needed to have that information handy. So I did, for instance, if it's a truck, I had the make, model, year. I had the serial number for that machine because a lot of times they're gonna wanna know, like, the at the the last eight digits of, the VIN number.

Beyond that, you know, you can start including your blueprints for the plant. I that was awesome for me because as we were talking about adding pieces of equipment into the new plant, I had the original blueprints, and they're asking me questions. You know, we're talking about air handling. Well, what's the volume of the building? I don't have to get a tape measure out. I don't have to get a laser, out.

I had all the blueprints and it was handy with me no matter where I was at. So it's cloud based. Made it really nice to have all that information. It wasn't just for me.

It was for any user in Limble that we had. Anybody could access it. It's all still there. Even though I'm not with preferred popcorn anymore, that structure is still there, and I'm helping them with that process.

And they can, they can pull all that information at any time that they need to.

And so, you know, moving right into why are we here, one of the next steps, begin to build the maintenance tasks. So we've identified the critical per or the critical asset. We've added that asset and the information about it, whatever information you wanted to capture. This is what I loved about Limble.

Everything was customizable, and it was easy. I could go in, grab whatever information I wanted, and store it. And then when I got into the maintenance tasks, pro tip, if you have an engineering company that designed everything for you, sit down and talk with them. This is what I did.

I spent two days with this company, and that's where we got our blueprints, our part specs, our operating manuals, and we got everything loaded in. They were more than happy because it made their job easier as well.

And so there's your little pro tip for the day out of this here too. But, begin to build out those maintenance tasks, from experience is one way to do it. You can pull them in from manuals, or processes and such that are already in place. So if you have a paper document for how you go through a bagger, take that paper document, and then now you can make it digital.

It's global. It's easy to access and recall for later information, and then it becomes visible. So my food safety guy, he wasn't a direct user to this, but anytime that he had any questions about maintenance that was done to a piece of equipment, he was a viewer. He could go in and pull out the maintenance tasks that have been done to that piece of equipment.

Kristen?

Yeah. I think this is a really key piece because, you know, as we were talking about earlier, Matt, you've got a lot of really experienced people on your team.

So sometimes, you know, it's a good starting point to pull the information from the manufacturer's recommendations, but your team knows your equipment, right, and and how you've been adjusting things and and where you can continue to improve.

So I think it's a really good point of the implementation to get your team involved, right, and make them see that their expertise is super valuable as you're building out your system.

Absolutely.

And right you know, this is kinda the same thing of what we just talked about, but writing those PM checklists.

Keep it simple. Start with easy. And then if as you're using the CMMS, you know, we're talking about you're taking that first asset that you picked out and that you're trialing this whole process.

You've added the information for that one asset. One. Start with one. And then write that PM checklist.

Practice going through that flow and set up that one that that maybe you have that, like I said, that paper document. Take that paper document and make it digital. And then create the PM, walk out to that piece of equipment, and do a step by step flow. Try it out and see how it flows.

If you don't like the order of something, it's really easy to go back and reorganize.

Or if you missed a step, We had a piece of equipment that I was I found that I was, doing over maintenance to it.

The book said that we needed to torque these bolts every so often. And every time that I went to that piece of equipment, the bolts were tight. And I had that checklist set up, I think it was every two weeks, to make sure that those bolts didn't come loose. Well, if those bolts are staying that tight that often, all I needed to do was go change the frequency of it, and then it would automatically come up instead of every two weeks. I think it changed to every three months.

And so it was very easy to go in and make that adjustment. Or if we need to go the other direction, we could easily go, yeah. I wanna check this every month instead of quarterly. You can go back the other way. You know, you can add photos. You can get signatures.

Writing this this checklist can be anything that you absolutely need it to be. We took our paper corrective action forms, and we were able to convert them into a digital form that was acceptable to our our audit company. They loved it. And we were able to capture more information, pertinent information, and that that really stream streamline things a lot.

So then we'll roll right into if I can get it to go. There we go. Testing your PMs. Like I say, go out to the floor. Go try it. See how everything flows right through.

You know, a lot of times, like I say, we've taken that paper. We've filled out that paper. It gets handed to somebody. They've gotta scan it. They've gotta put it in a folder.

Spreadsheets, you know, we can have issues with that of trying to keep things in track. I really opted for the CMMS program. It really was a solid answer for us.

And then finally, once you have that one piece of equipment, let's build it out. Let's take it to the next step. You've you've got a flow. You've got things figured out. Start adding other pieces of equipment. And as you continue to add those pieces of equipment that you're more comfortable with, you're it'll be interesting to see how things grow for you.

And part of it when you comes comes time to launch, bring people in that are gonna provide you good feedback. Don't unroll it to everybody all at once.

Things can go sideways really fast with that. Bring people in that will give you good constructive feedback.

We would we did this with work requests.

Work requests were awesome for us, because that that helped to, bridge that gap that we talked about earlier of making sure that people were heard, that they were understood, that their what they were told mattered. And the reason I say that, it it's part of the culture that we began to create when we when we used the CMMS because they're like, well, I told you that this was broke three weeks ago.

Maybe you did. I I maybe I forgot. I I'm sorry. I don't remember. But now we were actually able to get to people's concerns a lot faster.

And because of that, they were giving us more feedback. And we they were like, hey. This is broke or, hey. I'm noticing this sound.

So we were alerted to more issues because they felt like they were being heard. And so that really helped us to launch our program, because, we we created a good culture where everybody felt like they were involved. Even those that were in production, they would send us work requests saying, hey. This machine's making this noise.

Great. We'll come over and check it out. As soon as we can, we'll see what's going on. So that was critical, for helping to get the get get our CMMS program off the ground.

And then don't be afraid to make adjustments. Don't be afraid to customize it to what you need it to be. I think that that's one of my favorite things. When I I trialed six or seven different CMMS programs, and I wish I'd found Limble first.

And I think if I would have, I wouldn't have looked anywhere else. Shameless plug.

But, but, I I loved how it was mobile. I loved how I could customize it and make it what I needed to be. And as we continue to provide good information for it, it helped us to be able to make better management decisions going forward. Kristen?

Yeah. Matt, can you talk a little bit too about, you talked a bit about how you brought your team on board and you, you know, kind of brought everybody into the decision making and creation process.

How did it how did it work with, with your team in terms of training them on the actual software? Right? Like sometimes people aren't super technologically savvy.

So how did that go as, you know, they started to use the mobile app, for example, to to track, or to look up information that was in the system?

You know, that that's that's critical for you as the manager or the person that's wanting to champion this. Be patient with them.

You know, you've been in it for a while. What makes sense to you, what flows quickly for you may not make as much sense for them. Remember so take the time to show them, continue to work with them. The the the couple guys my my couple technicians were fairly tech savvy, so they bought into it. And, and it but it still took time to develop it and to pull it through. You know, it was those that were on the floor submitting work requests, that, I had to show them how to get into it and open it up. And but once they found out that it was just a simple form that they needed to submit and they didn't have to do anything else, that made it a lot easier.

The the plant manager, he really liked it because he could see kind of what was on our docket or our our docket for going forward.

He can kinda see the things that we had on our priority list that we wanted to get through. So that improved our communication as well. So I brought those in that would give me good feedback right away. And then as those people talk about it, those that are are I would say are less prone to buy into technology in that way, actually found that they wanted to be more part of it because everybody else was doing it.

Yeah. That's great to hear. Well, so drum roll. What were your results?

The biggest piece. Right? So we move into we did find uptime increased.

We were, we were more productive.

My the best kudo I got at the end of the year was when I sat down for my review, the general manager said, we didn't have one day that we were shut down longer than twenty four hours. And that was, that was huge. I mean and and so that ex that we talked about that expense at the beginning of, you know, can we afford a CMMS? That was easily wiped out, because of how we were, how we were performing, moving right into that cost reduced.

Now granted, the if you looked at maintenance as an expense line on the budget, our our expenses went up. I mean, we were we spent more throughout the year, but it was if you look at the overall profit versus what we had spent in we know, is easy to look at and go, we're spending too much. What's happening to the profit margin? Is is the profit margin growing?

We do need to keep it in check. We can't buy all the snap on tools right out of the gate. You know, we can't, we can't get everything that we want, but, you know, we were able to manage our costs a lot more effectively.

Utilizing our parts that we had on hand a lot more effectively. We weren't, we weren't we were located, in a rural area, so acquiring parts, you know, next day air might be five or six days maybe, was part of the issue. So preordering and having some of those parts on hand ahead of time was huge. Or so we weren't having to run for, you know, a couple hours to go get some simple belts. You know, we took our time, we built it, you know, we we stocked simple parts for simple machines, and, our uptime went up, our cost went down. And overall, I talked about that culture earlier, morale improved.

Everybody was was more excited to be involved with that as well.

So by now, I hope you all can see, at least from my standpoint, how Limble helped me. I hope that through this process of giving you an idea of where do I start in the overwhelming world of moving into a CMMS or starting a preventative maintenance program or if even if you have one in place, hopefully, we gave you some ideas of how you can improve your program as well. It's a process. Take your time.

Take your steps. Work through it. And it's it's gonna be an evolving process. It's not that you're gonna be, okay.

I get my competitive this program in place and I'm done.

No. It actually helps you to to better manage. And it's actually you're gonna find that you're gonna have maybe a little bit more free time than what you planned on to actually focus on those projects that you've wanted to focus on.

So Yeah.

And, Matt, I think that's a oh, sorry.

I was just gonna add that I think that that's a great point that as you get into Limble or whatever CMMS, you know, you're choosing, but hopefully it's Limble, you will set it up, but your your business will continue to evolve. Right? And so will your usage of the system. And so, you know, to your point as your facility expands or as you, need to make updates, Limble is super configurable that you can make those changes and continue on to to grow with the system.

Absolutely. And customer support for me, I know that's gonna be probably one of the questions as we get into q and a, and I'm trying to save some time for that.

But customer support was top notch. It really was. And, that's really what helped to make us successful.

That's awesome to hear. Well, our limel team is gonna be at the food safety summit next week, booth seven zero six. So if you are planning to be there in person, please stop by and say hello to our team. But yes, you are right, Matt. We now have a couple of minutes left for questions.

And so we are happy to take those from the team.

Great. So thank you, Chris and to Matt for that great presentation.

And, before we get into a couple of questions here, I'd like to remind you that we'd love your feedback. So please take a few minutes to complete this survey that you see on your screen, or you'll also be redirected to to it at the end of the program if you'd like to complete it then. So let's dive into a couple of questions here. Alright. So this is an idea or a a kind of a question from an attendee, that asks, what about an app that tracks the preventative the preventive maintenance of each piece of equipment, would that be useful? So for example, you could add notes or pictures, etcetera, anything that would help with keeping records.

I invite comments on that.

Yeah. I think so, ultimately, Limble was a record keeping software. So not only was it, you know, it would it would automatically produce the PMs when we wanted them. We set up how often that happened.

But every time that that was filled out, we had a record of it. And so we could go back. We we were having a conversation about this the other day. You know, if you want photo documentation of I want pictures of this every day, and I wanna see how this changes over a period of time, all of those photos were kept, with that asset.

And so they could go in and look at those, those photos in that asset from from beginning to end. So every time you complete a PM, there's a record of it automatically stored. And you can use PMs to, to trigger work orders. If you're going through and you find that, you know, inspect these belts.

Are these belts okay? Yes or no?

If you select no, they're not okay, we you can set that up to automatically start a work order and pull in the people you need, to consider changing those belts.

K. Great. Thanks, Matt. Alright. Another question for you. So how did you get buy in to launch your PM program?

I was in a blessed position. I'm not I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. My GM and I, we had a good relationship, and I know that not everybody has that.

But, ultimately, it was a matter of communicating my needs.

He understood where I was coming from, and he saw where the company was going. He saw where things were were headed in that direction, and we wanted to to show continual improvement.

One thing that was was huge for us, and I I'm not not the salesman here, but the cost factor to buy in and try it was relatively low compared to a lot of things that are out there. And so even if you look at it from a standpoint of of a small amount of risk to the amount of gain that could be had, the buy in was relatively low for us, and it was it was easy, like, well, we'll at least give it a shot, and we're not out anything really at the end of it. And, ultimately, like I said, it wasn't an expense. It was an investment that really helps us down the road.

Yeah. And, Matt, I think that that's a a great point. Like, at Limble, we want to make this accessible to companies of all sizes. Right?

So, if you take a look on our website, we even have a free version that people can use either as a test as they're getting started or as they continue, you know, if they just are a smaller organization or don't need to manage that much. So I think for us at Limble, you know, we are really here to help. You get access to our team via chat twenty four five, no matter if you're paying for it or not. Right?

So we really want everybody to be successful, and and we're here to help you make that case as well to your leadership team.

And with that chat, it's live people, folks. You're not talking to a bot. That's what I enjoyed. Like, you had a good conversation. It was good.

That's very helpful. Alright. Thanks for that answer. We'll take one more question now. Alright. So to provide a little bit of reassurance to, the listeners on the webinar, how do you keep from getting overwhelmed in the process of building out a CMMS?

Slow down and take a breath.

It it it it is. It it can be very overwhelming, especially when, you know, with a larger operation of knowing where do I start.

And as you approach that, I think that was one of the things that Limble was really helpful with.

And that's part of the reason why I'm here is I wanna help you guys with that too. If there's something I can help with, please reach out. But, ultimately, I wanna make sure that you guys understand, start with something you know. Start with that piece that you're familiar with.

I I can't hit on that enough because if you have something you know, it's easier to work with that than to take on something that you don't know and try to try to invent a whole process and not have any idea where it's headed. Build a small outline, you know, create an asset, create a work order against it. This was my piloting process. Create a PM, try it out, test it, tune it, and and then, bring others in for feedback as well.

Great. Thank you so much, Matt and Kristen. This was a great discussion. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for the the event today. But please join me in once again thanking Kristen and Matt for their presentation, as well as today's sponsor, Limble. Now, if you have any additional questions or comments, please don't hesitate to click that email us button on the console, and we'll share them with our presenters so that they can respond directly to you. And if you didn't have a chance to fill it out earlier, you can find that post event survey when the webinar ends.

You'll be directed to that, at the end of the presentation. We always look forward to hearing how to make our programs work better for you.

So we appreciate your time and we hope you found this webinar to be a valuable experience. Thank you so much for joining us today.

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