A Modern Maintenance Success Story

Transcript

Well, again, thank you for joining us today. Welcome, to Limble's webinar today with it entitled a modern maintenance success story. Today, we have the privilege of hearing about one of our customers, Sergeant Aerospace and Defense's data driven maintenance transformation.

And I would imagine that everyone here probably understands, that maintenance professionals are, by definition, problem solvers, and with access to modern tools and the right data to inform decision making. Honestly, people in this profession can transform maintenance into a critical driver of their organization's efficiency and productivity. That's really why Limble has, the tagline that we do. It's we believe it to our core. We're empowering the unsung heroes, the people that honestly you don't even know are there, unless you have a problem. And when you do have that problem, you are really glad that they're there. And so today, we're gonna hear from sergeant aerospace and defense's journey to success that also led them to become recent winners of Limble's twenty twenty four innovator award.

They were selected specifically for their innovative approach to implementing a modern and data driven maintenance program. And they were able to elevate it to new heights, enabling them to to really focus on and surpass, many of those the the goals that they had. And so today, we're gonna unpack the actionable strategies, the data, the tools that sergeant aerospace used to empower their maintenance team, empower their unsung heroes to overcome existing challenges, and ultimately to enable continuous improvement so that, they could take and so that you that are attending today can hopefully take some inspiration and drive success even in your own organizations.

With all of that said, allow me to introduce our guest today, Ross Ferguson.

Ross is a maintenance engineer at Sergeant Aerospace and Defense, and there, he assists with maintenance strategy. He helps oversee the the health and safety program at his facility.

He attended the University of Arizona. Go, Wildcats.

He received a degree in management information systems with a minor in information science technology and the arts.

And then prior to attending college, Ross served in the United States Navy, which I believe, he'll talk about here in just a moment as a, as a whole maintenance technician second class onboard the USS Iwo Jima.

And personally, thank you for your service, Ross. Just, as a military kid myself, grateful for that. And, we also, want to highlight that amongst a high vol volume of nominations, Ross actually recently won Limble's maintenance hero award, for the innovator category. And it's this is really well deserved on his part because Ross has taken really fresh approaches to old problems that many maintenance professionals and maintenance teams face, and he implemented creative solutions at sergeant aerospace that have elevated their maintenance program in so many ways.

And, honestly, we're really excited, that we could help celebrate and recognize all of his amazing work and accomplishments at Sergeant Aerospace. So congratulations, Ross. And, to introduce myself, I am, an account executive here at Limble, also known as a product specialist. And I I I love helping to solve unique customer challenges with really just simple innovative solutions that improve, maintenance operations and make their lives easier.

So before we dive in, and go too much further, I do wanna encourage everyone, please be willing to submit questions. There should be a button there at the bottom of your screen to submit any questions that you have, and we're gonna have some dedicated time at the end of our session today for q and a. And so we'd love to encourage you to do that so that we actually have some, some questions to answer.

So in today's webinar, we are going to be discussing several things. We're gonna be discussing the challenges that sergeant aerospace experienced before limbo, steps that were, taken to overcome them. We're gonna be talking about outcomes and impact on the maintenance program, and we're gonna, obviously, specifically be talking about how a CMMS or computerized maintenance management system can help. And so with all of that said, first and foremost, Ross, thank you for being here today. Really glad to have you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me as well, and and thank you for that introduction. I appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Now let me give just a quick background on the company that you work for, Ross. For sergeant aerospace, for more than a hundred years, this Tucson, Arizona based company has distinguished itself as a leader in various commercial and military manufacturing, marine, and industrial sectors.

The organization specializes in the design and production of highly specialized bearing and hydraulic actuation assemblies.

And in addition to contributing components for various types of aircraft, sergeant has partnered specifically with, where Ross's background, the US Navy since the nineteen fifties to support the construction of its nuclear submarine force. So kind of a cool fun fact about what they're able to have their hands in. And then more recently, sergeant, sergeant's workforce of more than four hundred had begun experiencing challenges as a result of their really just outdated and inefficient maintenance management system.

And so before we go too much further, Ross, I would love to actually just I've talked a lot at the beginning here. I'd love to kind of pass put the ball in your court. I think it'd be great as we start off for a lot of our attendees, to hear about yourself, your background, and really how you got into maintenance to begin with.

Sure. Absolutely.

Like you had said, my maintenance journey started, during my time in the navy. So when I joined the navy, that that first year that I was on board, I served as a maintenance person just doing maintenance on all the various pumps and piping systems and things that that my, work center had owned. And after about a year, I I stepped up. I was tired of doing the maintenance. I I wanted to schedule and and plan all of it. So I took the reins, and, I really started taking over that program and and really diving into the scheduling and, the planning of all of it. And, that experience really helped me, when I was applying here at Sergeant.

During my interview process, they did mention the CMMS and how that would be a project that I could be working on if I started here. So, and that's what ended up happening. I I got hired here, thankfully.

It's been a great two years that I've been here. And, when I initially started here, I was on the software and automation team, and that's what, drove me to start working on finding in as a new CMMS.

So you were hitting the ground running from day one with this particular project then?

Absolutely. Yep. Day one, they said we we talked to you about this in the interview. Let's let's get started.

I love it. So how soon after you started were you on the phone with with Limble specifically, and then how soon after that before you actually got it, got it across the finish line for your team?

Yeah. Absolutely. It was, I'd say probably about a week or so after I started, you know, having to do all the orientations and onboarding and whatnot. I really got to to dive in and start start my market research then.

Limble came up pretty quickly. It was, definitely at the time when I was when I was looking. It was an emerging, product on the market. And, when I started working with you guys, initially, it was very good. The dedicated customer support was amazing, and it really just stood out amongst all the other during the whole, assessment period for all the other CMMSs that we were looking at.

Well, that's awesome. I'm glad to hear that. Glad it and, obviously, glad it worked out, and we're here today.

So Sure.

Well, Well, now I'd actually like to really dive into the challenges that you experienced when you first started in Sargent Aerospace's maintenance team. I'd love for our attendees here for at the webinar today to hear about what gaps you were seeing as a newcomer, specifically, what some of that maybe low hanging fruit was that you saw that you could come in and really get some early quick wins, as well as opportunities to tackle issues that that you could see having a more, long term impact.

Yeah. Definitely. I don't wanna yeah. For sure. And then, I mean, one of the challenges that you specifically had mentioned as we were kind of prepping for today was the the the slow outdated CMMS.

It sounds like this was really an underlying all encompassing issue that created several other challenges. And before we go any further, I mean, these are actually pictures from your original system. And if that says anything of this, you know, nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties software, I would love to hear kind of about that particular challenge and how you solved it.

Yeah. Absolutely. Like you said, this interface kinda gives me dot com era vibes a little bit. But, yeah, we we were using the CMMS at Sargent for about, I'd say, ten to fifteen years prior to switching over to Limble. So it was something that, we had used for a long time, but but was very old. And, I remember when I first started, I I looked on the website to try to find information on the CMMS, and I couldn't even access, the Internet web page that would had had crashed. So and with the website crashing, the application would crash as well a lot.

It was just very slow, very unreliable, and it just caused problems down the line for us.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, that makes sense, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that. Just having a a system that you can't depend on, is a is a big problem. Would you say that that was probably one of the more lower hanging fruit things that could be solved pretty pretty immediately with the new system?

Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. The I think just with some of the, components of this application in the CMMS, there was a lot of room to grow with it, especially as we were moving along. So it certainly highlighted an opportunity for us to make a change and and really, see what kind of impact that would make here.

For sure.

And then one of the other things that you had mentioned was the lack of visibility, and and insights from from data. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit as well. And I believe this is a picture of somebody on your actual team.

Yes. Yeah. That's our maintenance manager, Rick. And as you can tell, they would print hundreds of pages of work orders and all kinds of reports, weekly to to go through, and it took forever. I remember they would tell me that they'd come in in the morning, fire up their the CMMS application, try to load a report, and go get their copy. You know? And they'd have to wait a significant amount of time just for that report to load.

So that caused a lot of issues and, just a lot of disruptions with a lot of our operations.

The old CMMS did have a lot of canned reports that we used, but it was and then it had some custom, customization capabilities to it. It it was just very limited and not very flexible with what we were able to do. So we really felt like our data was kinda going into a black hole essentially where we had all this all these things that we could track and we wanted to track. We just weren't really able to get what we wanted with our last CMS.

Okay. And then I've how were you I mean, were you able to track things like your mean time between failure, your mean time to repair, those kinds of things? Were you able to track that within your CMS, or how did you how how did you track some of those key metrics that are important for so many folks that are in in the production space like you guys are?

Yeah. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track those with our old CMMS. So either they weren't being tracked at all or it was something that we had to do, with that some kind of outside application, whether it was Excel or or something else.

So, yeah, it it, it it just really disrupted a lot of our operations that way.

Yeah. And I remember one of the things that you'd mentioned when you and I met offline was also the the overdue PMs, which I've I've talked to a lot of folks in the industry that you that are using systems that where that's just that's an issue. Because you speak to that at all as well?

Yes. Absolutely.

Like I said, with that data going into a black hole, we were we were losing a lot of visibility and access to to things that we wanted to see, and and that really created an opportunity for things to kinda get lost in, within all of that.

So it it contributed to a larger backlog for us, lots of overdue PMs because of it.

So it was really just a a really big disruptor in a way for what we were trying to accomplish here.

Yeah. For sure. And I think a lot of folks can relate to that.

Another prominent challenge that you had mentioned was the lack of dedicated support and the high costs of trying to get that support.

Speak to that a little bit.

Sure. Yeah. Like I mentioned, when I first tried to access the website, the the picture on the screen is pretty much what I saw. There was no no way for me to kinda look into the the program or reach out to anybody, with any information about it. And, during our time with our old CMMS, we had to rely on an outside contractor to help us with a lot of those things.

And a lot of times, he we would have quarterly or or or semiannual visits with him. And he would come in and make sure our system was running right, that our data was being backed up, answer any questions. But without that, that support kind of at our fingertips with the website or any other option, we kinda had to wait until he came around. You know, we we could reach out, but, it was really hard to get things accomplished, unless he was on-site working with us to do that. So having that that consultant, it was just another expense for us on top of what we were paying with the CMMS, just because we weren't getting the kinda support that we were we really required to get what we wanted from it.

You really had to you actually had to hire someone else just to help advise you on how to operate your CMMS because it wasn't intuitive enough in and of itself.

Right. Yeah. Absolutely.

And and the CMMS company did not have a team of people that you could call or a dedicated person assigned to you or anything like that.

Unfortunately, not. Yeah. And especially when I look look for information.

Right. That's right. And so and did that even would you say that there was even elements of that that affected your ability to be efficient in your production because you're having to solve problems with your CMMS as opposed to actually just being able to get back to get back to the line?

Yes. Absolutely.

It it it was a a came into a point where we were focusing a lot of our resources on trying to fix the CMMS rather than put those resources to actually fixing and maintaining our equipment.

Working for the CMMS rather than CMMS working for you.

Yeah.

That's not that's not ideal. Okay. Understood.

Well, thanks for sharing all of those great insights, Ross. And I I mean, really, what I'd like to do now is dive into what next steps you took to address all these challenges, after gathering all that initial intel. And it sounds like, man, you came in just drinking from a fire hose too. Like, it's just day one, and you're talking to see my message. You're hearing about all the problem. I'm sure you're getting complaints from everyone, telling you about all of the things they don't like and making sure with a lot of pressure on making sure that the next system really is is checking all those boxes.

So after doing that, that was you you know, you're operating on an old system, all the struggles that the team was facing with it. Would also love to get into how you rolled out changes across the team and help drive adoption of the new CMMS. And the primary reason I'd love to hear that from you is because I think one of the main things I hear on a at least a weekly, if not a daily basis when I'm talking to, you know, potential customers of Limble, or people just on the market for a CMMS in general, whether or not they come to Limble, is their biggest thing is, well, I've got I've got some older guys on my team, or I my team's used to doing it this particular way. Or they'll use the old, you know, cliche. Well, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and I don't know if I'm gonna get the buy in. So we'd love to hear specifically how you how you were able to, get the adoption of this across your team.

Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.

Like I had mentioned, my first project when I started here was to replace the CMMS. So after that first week, it was just a mad dash to see what was out there, see what was on the market, see what could work for us, what couldn't.

And, and and in the past, managers really weren't, impressed with the things that they were seeing. So that was just an additional challenge to truly see what was new and and what what I could do to kinda change their mind, in case that was one, the obstacles that came came up during that time.

But, yes, like you said, it was a challenge initially. You hit on all those points. You know, we were using that old system for years, you know, ten to fifteen years. So a lot of those things that we were doing, a lot of those processes were really baked in, to a lot of the operations that they were doing.

So and, you know, change, it's not always very well received. So, it was certainly certainly a challenge to to make sure that the system that we did, present to them was gonna be something that they would really get a lot of value out of.

When I when I started searching, I I kinda broke it down to about eight or or dwindled it down to about eight options that we were looking at initially and then just slowly started, you know, taking some away, brought it down to top five, picked a couple away, brought it down to top three, and then that's when we really made our decision.

So this whole process, from searching for CMMS to to rolling out Limble, took all about all in about nine months for us.

And, that that all included, exporting the data from our old system, importing that into Limble, training our people, both the technicians and the managers, how to use Limble, rolling it out to the shop floor, especially the work request portal, making sure that all the, nonusers for Limble, were able to submit work requests.

And all this yeah. It went really well. A lot of that had to do with with, Limble's dedicated support team and, just the the help from my team here as well.

And it was the nine months, it was very, a lot faster than estimated.

The consultant that we had, he kind of put a two year estimation time on that. So to be able to do that in nine months, when it when he had come back, it's kind of a last visit and, and just to kinda see how how things were going once we did get up and running. He just had mentioned that he was so impressed with how fast we were able to bring everything up line and just, yeah, just how quickly. And we were able to just get up and running with a new system, against his two year timeline.

Yeah. And to be clear, you don't have to do you still need a consultant to to help you operate a CMMS?

Not at the moment. No. The Okay. Support team with Limble is so good, that that we don't need that.

But I did wanna to touch back and and just kinda tell you why we chose Limble. Yeah. You you know, the the ease of use, I would probably say, was the biggest determinant.

You know, something that that I could present to the team and say, hey. Look. This is how you do this.

And, you know, you get those oohs and ahs with how easy it is to do things that Love those.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was great. Right? So it it it made it so much easier for them to adopt this new system and and get excited about it too. You know, once they really started learning and and getting into it, it was, it started becoming something, that they would get excited about, which I thought was really cool too, that they wanted to be in the system. They were curious about how it works. They, you know, were willing to kinda learn the system and and really kinda make it their own.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And but on top of that, you know, like I said, the the customization with our old system was was lacking a lot. So and Limble's customization is, yeah, leaps and bounds over what we were using before. So to be able to really drill into the data, look and see what we wanna see as opposed to just, you know, some canned reports that might work for most people, but not everybody. Mhmm. That was a huge plus for us, was being able to not only look into the data, but look into what we wanted to see for the data.

Right. Yeah. I I I that's a big one that with a lot of customers that I talk to, especially in your particular industry and in the production space, is there's a lot of systems out there that almost seem to the way I've had a lot of customers explain it to me is I almost need a a specialized degree just on how to use this particular system.

So being able to pull out your own data and your own insights really with the click of a few clicks of a button is it can be really helpful.

Yeah. That was my certainly my experience as well with some of these other systems. It seems like you needed a a dedicated, you know, IT manager Mhmm. Technician to kinda help you with all this. And with Lemville, we didn't really feel like that was the case at all.

Yeah. For sure. And then so you did you and you said too that this took about it took about nine months overall, but would you say it was nine months before you could start using Limble, or how quickly were you able to at least start using some of the functionality and start seeing some some benefits after implementing?

Yeah.

It it took us about three months to to bring all the data and set up all of our PMs. We added a lot of logic into our PMs too, so that took a a lot of, I guess, a big proportion of the the Sure. Time and implementation time for for Limble. But, yeah, we've been in it for about a year now, fully, but we saw the impact immediately when we were able to start tracking, different metrics and things just even after the first month and seeing how many work requests were coming in compared to our old system.

The impact was felt pretty pretty quickly, pretty immediately after we really were up and running here.

Yeah.

One of the, bullet points there too is about implementing tablets with Limble for all your maintenance technicians.

How did that process go for them of kind of being fully on paper to now working with tablet? Because this can be one of the biggest things I hear too. Oh, I'm not gonna get my guys to be able to use a phone or a tablet to do this. How did that process work for you?

Right. Yeah. That played exactly into the the same situation before with just adopting the system itself was I wanted to create a way for them to really do their maintenance and their their tasks on the go and not have to kinda go back and forth between printing out their next task and going and accomplishing it, going and then going in the system and doing it. So I thought I thought tablets would work really well for that. So we purchased tablets. I loaded Limble onto all of them. I I gave all the technicians training on how to use it, and it's been really great so far.

I know that our weekend maintenance guy, he really has adopted it, and that's been really great to see. But, yeah, it's it's just so nice to see our maintenance personnel just on the floor with their tablets, looking at their tasks. They're able to do things on the go. Communication is is seamless that way too.

So just having that that portability and the the on the go kind of attitude with this, it really elevated our our operations here quite a bit.

Yeah.

It sounds like it. And, was that was your weekend maintenance guy the one that you were kind of like, if anybody's gonna be my holdout, he's gonna be my holdout?

Yeah. Surprisingly, he was one of them, but, yeah, he he certainly picked it up quite a bit once he once he knew how easy it was to use.

That's awesome. Last thing before we before we move on, though, is I wanted to hear about this digital signage. What how did what exactly does that look like in your context?

Yeah. So one thing that I kinda noticed here was, especially with our old system, communication was almost nonexistent. A lot of people especially like we said with the with the black hole for our data, it seemed like that, for the outside customers as well. So people not knowing, you know, what we were working on as a maintenance team, if their if their work requests were being addressed or not.

There was really no visibility with that. So, I thought it it was a good idea to, implement digital or implement the custom dashboards with our digital signage here. And having the ability to rotate the dashboards was a really great feature with Limble, because it just gives us an opportunity to cycle through a different metrics and different things that all of our customers can see, and it just gives them an opportunity to to look and see what we're working on. So I think that's great.

Yeah. It sounds great. I mean, to go from a place where even your executives and your administrators and management are having a hard time seeing any data to now everybody on your team can see all the data at really just at at a bird's eye view and knows exactly how they're performing and where they need to improve and, areas that they have improved and things like that. It's, it seems it even seems good just good for morale.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's great for morale. It gives, you know, everybody here an idea of what we're working on, and it it makes makes our workers feel appreciated for sure.

Yeah. Absolutely. I love that.

Why don't we do this then? Let's let's take a look now at just really what matters most. Let's get down to the brass tacks.

What outcomes did you see from implementing Limble as your new CMMS after clearly doing such an amazing job of rolling it out, to the team?

Yeah. Absolutely.

We we saw a significant impact both in performance and job satisfaction, when we initially rolled out Limble.

There's our weekend guy with his with his tablet, by the way I love it. On the screen.

But, yeah, going back to it, our our entire team lives and breathes in Limble now. You know, we are it increased our morale. A lot of our workers have less stress because they're able to do a lot of their work faster and quicker, and it gives them more time in their day to address different things, whether it's, you know, personal things, emails, or whatever that they need to accomplish or, just, you know, addressing other, tasks in our backlog.

And a lot of this has impacted our metrics as well. We're seeing a lot of positive metrics with this. You know, downtime is going down, less incidence of major downtime period.

We're seeing asset performance, moving up as well due to our ability to to track our PMs and our our planned maintenance.

And like I said with our old system, how our data went into a black hole, limbo is the complete opposite. I mean, the visibility that we have now is is fantastic.

We can now track things like all the open tasks we're working on, any all the completed hours that our users are are doing each week.

We can look at upcoming PMs. So being able to see, hey. What's coming up next week? What's coming up next month?

You know, just just a few of those things that that we're tracking now and and have visibility, not just for our maintenance team, but even our leadership here and executives as well, to give them, you know, insight to all of that as well.

Yeah.

The dashboard, like I had mentioned, that that's a big thing for us as well.

Not only do we use some of these dashboards to drive our meetings now, which I think is really cool, but we share dashboards across our team.

So, usually, that's me. I'll come up. I'll make a dashboard and share it with the team, and, that's really helpful for us because it gives, you know, one centralized dashboard, one centralized location for our data that we're all looking at, that we all have visibility to. And, it really just generates more understanding, more trust in what we're doing, because of all that.

Big time.

And, I mean, that data piece is so important, especially for so many people who hear that may be decision makers for your particular team, and you you're you depend on that kind of data. But I think one of the things that you mentioned at the beginning, though, is I and I that I think is so underestimated is that the importance of the job satisfaction of your employees. Like, your employee satisfaction went up, which means your turnover is going down because people like their job. Because of that, that's actually improving other data metrics as well, though.

It may have an easy to use system that allows your asset performance to go up. I just love how it's all tied in there. Like, you make your employees' jobs easier. Make it easy to do their job, and it's gonna be good for the entire organization.

So love that. Thank you for sharing all those insights there.

Yeah. Absolutely.

The next one, I'll I'll kind of let you take it from here. The next one that you you mentioned.

Yes. Absolutely.

So, yeah, like it says, we're able are able to easily track our asset performance, and it really enables us to make, data driven decisions now.

So our maintenance team, we can analyze each incident of downtime. That's one of the metrics that we're tracking is is, any task that had downtime of more than an hour.

And that's great because it really allows us to kinda to, do a deep dive and really understand the root cause of why some of these things are happening. So it gives us a chance to really address that right at the root rather than maybe some Band Aid, you know, in a way. Yep.

It just helps us, in general, just make more informed decisions here.

But it all it also has improved our our talent management. It it helps make a case for saying, hey. You know, we have this much work coming up in the next few months. We have this many workers working this amount of time. So it kinda justifies us if we wanted to hire another person, wanted to bring somebody else on, to help the team.

All that we're able to do. And it's it's it's it's hard to to really emphasize how much having that visibility and data with Limble has just significantly improved, our maintenance and facilities operations here.

Right. Because I I'd imagine there's very few maintenance teams who wouldn't say that they could use an extra hand or two. Right? But it's one thing to go to it's one thing to go to the boss or it's one thing to go to the executive of your board and say, I need I need a new employee.

I need two new employees. And they're like, yeah. But you don't, and we don't have the budget for it. But if you can go and say, actually, we will make more money.

This is better for the bottom line. You have the data to back that up to show your increases in production. That's a that's a different conversation.

It really is. It's it's a fantastic tool to really just validate what we want, you know, what we're asking for in terms of that.

Yeah. Big time.

Great. Let let's hear about the how how you guys were able to slash the admin work here.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Like I'd mentioned before, there was so much time spent trying to generate and print reports, especially the weekly paper reports.

So implementing the tablet or or and on top of that too, I should say, printing the work orders as well. You know? Before a technician would go to a job, they'd print out the whole work order and instructions for that. So that's more admin work when now at night, they can just grab their tablet and go.

You know? They grab their tablet. They have access to all their tasks. They don't need to spend time printing out everything.

They don't need to spend time going into the system and trying to close it out.

All that is accomplished on the go with our tablets now.

It's increasing our productivity because of that too. Just because they have less time that they're spending doing all that admin work, it gives them time to address more of their work and, more of the things that are gonna make them better at their job.

And, yeah, just just that instant access, I I really can't emphasize that as much that it's it's just a a game changer for us.

Yeah. I mean, this is totally putting you on the spot, so you may not have an answer to this. But, like, would you have even an estimate or a ballpark of, like, how many hours in a week you think might be saved, for a general employee, on your maintenance team from moving from what they were doing to what Limble was able to do and slashing that administrative work?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, if I had to guess, based on how many members of our team and how much maybe admin work they were doing a day, across our team, I would probably I'd probably estimate maybe forty hours just because, you know, time generating reports, time printing out their work orders, all those little things add up to to quite a bit, especially with the size of our team.

Yeah. I mean, that's an entire employee right there. Right? Having a whole another employee for your team. Yeah. And it's not gonna cost you as much to have a system like this as it would to hire somebody, onboard them, pay for the benefits, and all that kind of stuff. It's it's it's pretty amazing the the the savings that that can that can offer still.

Absolutely. Yeah. One hundred percent.

And, and then how about the this ability to get ahead, plan ahead, talk to us about that a little bit?

Yeah. One thing I can say is our technicians love the calendar view. They love the ability to to go into Nimble, look at their calendar, and and really see what what they're doing or what's coming up for them.

Another thing that we kind of implemented too was we use our priorities a little different where, we do color codes for for the length of time or the estimated time for a work order as opposed to, you know, the priority, I guess.

And that that's a nice visual cue for them on their on their calendars to kinda plan their days. So, you know, if they see a a a task that's bright pink, it's like, oh, we know that's a a heavy hitter task that may have to be the only one they work on that day where if they see, you know, a couple, you know, yellow tasks that tells them, oh, those are those will take a couple hours. So adding that within with, in the addition to the the calendar view, They know what they have on their plate. Right?

They get to see, you know, what's coming up, what they can prep for. It helps with planning, any kind of allocation of resources that they would need to do in the future. I know that comes up quite a bit with our operations. She's trying to figure out, hey.

This this is planned this day, but it's also a holiday weekend or, you know, something's going on. So, just having that that ability to to look ahead and and really understand what's what's coming up, what we've got on our plate.

It just helps us out in so many different ways, especially in planning in a daily operation.

Oh, yeah. I can imagine. I mean, I just think being able to plan for your day too and what's coming up tomorrow or what's coming up next week. There's so many intangibles associated with that.

Like, I talked to a lot of maintenance professionals that are plagued with just the anxiety. Like, I can't take a day off work. I can't be sick. I can't go to my kid's ballgame.

Like, those kinds of things because it's constant well, what do I have to do? And I can't really remember it because I can't keep track of it all because there's no good way to do that right now. We're just doing it in pen and paper or it's all getting lost in a black hole or something like that. And so, and I I love that idea of, of color coding it not based on what you would typically think of as a priority, but on how much time they have to spend.

I'll I'll use that when I when I demonstrate our product more now. That's, that's super helpful.

Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, yeah, you are are spot on with all of that. All the intangibles, I mean, you know, I I I feel like with maintenance work, a lot of it is reactionary in a way. So being able to to plan, you know, and have all that planned out rather than trying to react everything that's happening, I would just imagine that that makes our our technicians, Ethan, mind, just so much better and and able to focus on the things that that they wanna focus on and and the important things.

Absolutely.

Big time.

So, man, it's it it sounds like there was a I mean, just a ton of impact across the team from all the changes that you implemented, including, you know, boosting operational performance.

You've got less downtime. You've got increased job satisfaction.

You've got more informed decision making. You've got less administrative work and the ability to plan ahead for for projects. I'd love to maybe hear did you have any other results that you maybe didn't expect? Like, these are some pretty standard results that you expect when you when you implement a system, at least a good system. It really does make the lives of your team easier.

But did you have any, other results you didn't expect outside of all these solid improvements that you saw?

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I I guess my unexpected result is more of a personal one.

Sergeant, we've been doing really well here. We're we're, planning on expanding, and, and I was plucked from the software and automation team. I I as you can see, my my title is now maintenance engineer. So the maintenance and facilities guys, they plucked me from the the software and automation team to to join them and really enhance Limble, bring you know, help bring those operations, kinda keep them going and and and move forward with what we're doing here with the new TMMS.

But, also and part of that, the plan is for me to to serve as the facilities manager at the new building. So, it's great for me. Limble was a big part of that, and I know that a big consideration for for me, being the facilities manager was how successful we were with implementing Limble. So, yeah, that's been just really, really great, to do, and that's just it's a great result from all this personally.

I really appreciate it.

It correctly. You implemented Limble. It goes great. You get a promotion.

Pretty much. That's it. Love that.

So, folks, you heard it here first. You implement Limble. You'll get it from I can't promise you that, so please don't take my but it's not unheard of. It has happened, and Ross is not the first person I've talked to, where that's been the case. And so congratulations on the new role. That's that's very exciting. Thank you so much.

Well, honestly, that that's mainly the end. We're gonna do some q and a here in a second. So, here's gonna be a couple of shameless plugs, though, really quickly. Honestly, if you are if if after seeing this, after hearing Ross's story, Sergeant Aerospace's story, if this is inspiring to you, if you are thinking, like, maybe Limble could be a good fit in our organization, and you wanna you you don't you wanna put Sargent and Ross's words of wisdom into action with a game changing CMMS in your own in your own company, please feel free to reach out to our team. You can actually request a demo, of our product by scanning that QR code, and then you're gonna meet with a product specialist like myself, and we'll get back to you right away, probably the same day.

And so feel free to I'm gonna leave that up there for just another second or two, but feel free to scan that, if, if there's any interest at all and maybe just exploring, what we're gonna do in a meeting like that. We're gonna dive into, man, what are the challenges that you're facing? What is the impact of those challenges on your bottom line? And what would it look like if we could turn that around for you, and and and and really streamline your maintenance processes. So feel free to scan that, or, of course, you can always go to our website, limbal CMMS dot com. And, there's lots of spots there. We'll we'll make sure that that button is nice and big for you to request a demo, as well to meet with us.

In addition to that, I have another QR code for you to download, and this is where you can download our big book of modern maintenance. And so to dive deeper into how maintenance experts like Sergeant Aerospace and others have transformed challenges into success stories at their organizations with really specific quantifiable results that they achieved, you can download this resource, the big book of modern maintenance. And so feel free to to do that as well.

And last but not least, we've kind of come to, toward the end of our time, and now we, now we have the opportunity to ask some questions. We did get one on our, in the q and a here, and so we'd love to go ahead and post that one first.

Can you share some examples of, effective goal setting techniques in the in the maintenance field?

Any thoughts there, Ross?

Yeah. Absolutely.

For me, especially in the maintenance field, goal setting techniques, you know, using data, that's been a great one for us. But, I would just say maybe, you know, maybe taking if it's especially a big goal, maybe trying to take little chunks of it and and and focus on those in the in the meantime. You know, all those will add up to the big picture. And sometimes that big picture can seem really daunting too if it's a bigger goal that you're looking at. So, in terms of of strategies for that, I would just try to to just reduce it and shrink it as much as you can and just focus on what needs to be accomplished, initially and just what you need to do to kinda keep keep moving forward to accomplish that goal.

Yeah. That's that's certainly something that I that I use when I'm looking at things like that for myself.

Okay. That's great. I appreciate that insight. And then, one of the ones that we also got in the q and a chat here was, are you able to show the digital signage, and how did you get it to your displays? I'm I don't know if we'll be able one of the pictures is from your digital signage, right, that we had in there?

I don't think so. Yeah. It it would be tough. I I can explain what we did.

Yeah. So why don't we do that?

Yeah. So, we just had a a TV.

We worked with our IT team here to, set up little mini computers behind it that we can cast to the the TV, and then we just pull up Limble, on there. And we have a a a special account that we log in to. It's a view only account, and we just use that to, display all the dashboards that that we wanna show all of our users. So we have, we have a TV in our our maintenance or near our maintenance team, so we have it, showing there, and then we're working to expand that and show it to more areas of the facility.

Yep. Absolutely. That's great. And, and and by the way, if you did wanna reach out to me, connor dot smith at limble CMMS dot com, if you wanna have more of a conversation or, ask any more additional questions about kinda how you could do do some of that, feel free to reach out.

So my another question I had, does does Limp will have the ability to geo track and locate tools and assets in real time?

So we do have a mapping feature, that's available on our enterprise account.

However, with the it's not like a GPS locator, so it's not going to to track it in in that way.

Hopefully, that answers that question, and I appreciate people chiming in here.

This one is be gonna be specifically for you, Ross. This one comes from Joseph. What was the process that you guys went through to get the operations team, to submit work tickets?

What was the process we went?

I guess the way that I'm understanding that is is the work request portal.

So one thing that I did was I created a PowerPoint, showing how to submit a work request. We print that out, and we hand it out during our safety onboarding classes or our safety orientations here when new hires start. So that gives them, an opportunity to learn how to do that. And then I also added a quick link to our home page that we use here, that just takes them straight to the request portal. So, just a a communication on on how to do that. Thankfully, the work request portal is so easy to use, especially compared to our old system.

So it's just a matter of, putting up a link, communicating how to how to submit work requests. And, thankfully, like I said, Zimble makes it so easy that, not a lot needs to be explained. You just go to the link and and submit.

And and a lot of our external users, have found that much more helpful, especially considering how we had to do it with our old system, just being able to to click the link and let us know what's going on.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think maybe what might be helpful there too is because how did the old process work? So before you implemented Limble and you have this old CMMS, what did the general process look like when maybe somebody from the operations team needed to communicate a problem to the maintenance team?

Yeah. Absolutely.

I'll try to speak on that as much as I can just because I didn't personally experience it Okay.

Prior to starting here, but I know it was cumbersome. It was essentially the same where we had a link or or some way to do it. But, just from what I know, it it was slow. It was hard hard to use.

And, so yeah. I I just remember that they highlighted just how difficult it was to use. And because of that, the, you know, people on the shop floor and and everything else, they wouldn't utilize it to submit work requests. It just increased the more shoulder taps that we were getting.

The shoulder taps. Yeah. Absolutely.

Right. And and and then, you know, with those shoulder taps, you're losing all that data. So, you know, if you had an asset that went down, that's not getting tracked because it's not getting put into the CMMS.

Yep. So there there's so many things that that come from that. But but, yeah, just just communication and and implementing it.

Yeah. And I don't know, Joseph, your your particular, situation, but I I know that, Ross, when I meet with a lot of folks, this tends to be a recurring theme where they're like, well, we've done this kind of shoulder tap thing for so long, or we do we do a combination of text messaging, WhatsApp, email, shoulder taps. I don't know. I yell down the hall at the guy and say, this is broken.

Come fix it. And when he gets to it, he gets to it. And the idea can seem a little bit overwhelming at times to move away from that. Even though it's in theory, it's easier to actually get people in practice to stop doing the shoulder taps and just scan the QR code or click the link and submit the ticket, can be the idea of that can seem cumbersome.

And so did you have any of that pushback when you when you made that transition from shoulder tapping to to to limble?

Yeah. Absolutely. Especially with how, you know, hard it was to do with the old system, you know, trying to explain that, you know, again, you know, they were already they already kinda had it made up in their mind. It was set in stone.

Like, yeah. This this doesn't work. Right? So, trying to, you know, show them how easy it is to use and, you know, the communication and all that.

Once they were once they saw how easy it was to use kinda with our our technicians here in in using the system, that really eliminated a lot of the pushback that we had to where they could just click on a link. It took less than a minute for them to submit, you know, something that was wrong, a work request, or anything like that. So Yep. Yeah.

Initially, there was pushback just because of all the the trauma, I guess, from the last system that we had. But once once it was adopted initially and and and people were starting to understand, hey. This is much easier to do, It it became something that was really easy. And something that I like to tell people is, if it's not in limbo, it didn't happen, just because that that tracking aspect is it's so important.

So Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. If it's not there, it didn't happen.

It's really nice to just hear a satisfied customer saying that because, of course, I can of course, I'm gonna tell people. Right? Like, no. It's easy.

I promise people are gonna adopt it. But it's nice to talk to somebody who comes from a one hundred year old company. You've got a lot of folks who are set in their ways doing things, and the adoption has been so successful. So really appreciate that insight.

Sure. The next question, I can definitely answer, but, Ross, I'd love for you to speak to this. So the question is, do you offer assistance to train the technicians on how to use the CMMS? What did the training look like for you, with with Limble?

Yeah. So, I piggybacked off what Limble offered.

When I was, initially looking at Limble and and researching them, I was on their YouTube page every day looking at all the how to tutorials, all the success stories.

But part of that, Limble does have a technician training video, and it's great. It it allows for them to pause and bring things up. It it's really comprehensive and informative.

So I kinda took that. I made it my own, and, I just kinda went through and and came up with an agenda on what what things to to highlight and to show them. And then, the thing that I like with Limble that another or the Limble video, I should say, that I piggyback was was having that test work order. You know?

It's it's one thing to to sit them down and show them how to do it, but, you know, give them a give them a quick test. Say, hey. Look. Here's a a test work order.

Just show me how you would go in, accomplish it, complete it.

And that was a kind of a good, you know, verification or, saying, hey. This, you know, this training went well.

Yeah. I love that. That's that's really helpful.

And we do have so I can speak a little bit more as well. So when you, come on board with Limble, you really have an entire team, that's available to you. So you have a dedicated customer success manager or CSMs is what they're called, and they're your primary point of contact. They're dedicated to you for the lifetime of your partnership with Limble, which is something a little bit unique, in the industry.

You don't just have access to them for, you know, a few weeks or months during the implementation phase, although that's when you'll meet with them the most. They're they continue to be a point of contact and a resource that you can lean on. However, of course, we always want to empower somebody specifically like Ross, who can be like the primary, as we call them internally, a Limble champion, of limbo at the organization that can ultimately kind of spearhead some of that because it's always better when you're hearing from somebody on your own team rather than somebody at an external organization.

In addition to that, yes, we have tons of really well produced, training content on our website and on YouTube.

In addition to that, we can we can offer, you know, group trainings.

And then beyond that, we have twenty four hour a day, and we've recently just went from twenty four five, has just gone to twenty four seven customer support.

And another unique thing in the industry is that all of our support is in house support their employees of Limble. They're North American based. We do not outsource that. And their response times are typically sixty seconds, or less. And so even though this is a very intuitive system that you can typically run on your own, if you ever run into a snag or an issue or just an additional question or a functionality question on how to dig deeper, they're they're usually available within a matter of seconds to to help you out.

So Yeah.

And and I can speak on that too if that's okay.

Just just say, I've used that chat plenty of times to the point where I could guess which, you know, which technician I was gonna get, you know, during the time of day I was asking something.

But, Yeah. They're they're so helpful, and there hasn't been a single incident where they haven't been able to answer a question that I've had, you know, depending into whether how complicated it is. I've always gotten an answer.

So they're they're very good. They're very quick too. I've never had to wait more than sixty seconds at all ever. It's usually pretty immediate. So Yep. Yeah. That's it's it's been a huge huge help for us to have that.

Absolutely.

The last question that I had here that I wanted to address, that was kinda given offline was, are there any and I know this wasn't exactly your context, but I'd be curious to know if you have any insight into this. Any tips for how maintenance teams can effectively communicate their needs and challenges to upper management.

This is such a relevant question, I think, because it is a very, very common experience for me to be doing a demo, of Limble with someone, and they're like, I see the value. This is a one out of ten. This is a twelve priority for me. Like, we need this, but I don't know how to get the people that can ultimately sign the dotted line. I don't know how to get them on board. Do you have any tips for how maintenance teams can effectively communicate their needs and challenges to upper management?

Yeah.

You know, we we certainly do that with with our within our operations. We certainly do that, and I think that the the data visibility, really relies on that a lot.

Just being able to show, hey. This is these are the things that are contributing to the issues that we have and just making that so clear, with, you know, with all the different types of, widgets and and, ways you can display that data. It made it so helpful. But, yeah, just in terms of of, you know, the value that you get from switching a CMMS, that yeah.

That's a tough one. I I got lucky. I didn't really have a lot of pushback or anything like that when I was trying to communicate that to my upper leadership. But, Mhmm.

Yeah. I think that any way you can, you know, put numbers or statistics behind that, you know, and especially with something with Limble, it's very easy to do in that sense.

Mhmm. To me, that seems like, you know, the best way to communicate with upper management. That's kind of their language. So, that's been my personal experience with that.

Okay. No. I I appreciate that.

And then are you guys, using Limble for PM? This is a question, from Mike. Are you guys using Limble for PMs based on calendar or run time?

Oh, yes. So right now, we are doing, calendar, but we are in the process of setting up, our metered our metered, condition based PMs as well.

Kind of speaking to that that big goal, you know, we we're constantly evolving our our maintenance here. So that's certainly the next thing we're tackling is the meter based, conditional maintenance as well as adding sensors and and using that to to build our maintenance program.

Okay.

Yeah. That's great. Thank you.

From a safety perspective, did your limbo rollout help with OSHA reporting and overall workers' comp claims? Don't know if you'd be able to speak to that or not.

Yeah.

We certainly have OSHA, you know, OSHA, regulations and things, included in our PN, you know, references to different OSHA statutes and whatnot.

But in terms of workman's comp and things like that, that's not something we've explored quite yet. It's really interesting. I'd I'd love to to hear more about that. But, at the moment, unfortunately, not.

Okay. Yeah. That's great.

Awesome. Well, we are pretty much at the end of our time today. We've got a couple minutes left.

I do want to for those that are present today, go over here really quickly. I once the webinar ends, here in a minute or so, there's gonna be a short one minute survey that's gonna pop up in the event lobby. And I know that not everybody wants to wants to fill those out, but they really help us a ton. We'd appreciate your your feedback there and encourage you to submit any topics that you'd like to see us discuss.

Ultimately, these are for for you. These are for our inside heroes. These are for our maintenance professionals. And so if you could let us know what topics you'd like to see us discuss for future webinars, whether they're Limble specific or more broadly maintenance related that would help you in your everyday job, that would help you maybe bring this to upper level management, which the one thing I was gonna say about that is the more metrics you can provide, the better.

If you can show, you know, how much time you're you're not you you know, that you're wasting right now or how much money is going out or specific downtime metrics or those kinds of things. And if we could, you know, improve that by this percentage, it would save us this number of dollars, And Limble can save, you know, on average saves customers, you know, thirty seven percent downtime reduction. You know, those kinds of things. Those metrics are are usually key in, in getting upper management to be to be on board with that.

But if you could fill out that one minute survey, that would be great.

Ross, I did wanna give you an opportunity after one second here.

How is Limble oh, how this this would be a good one. We do have, like, two minutes left. So, how has Limble helped improve your asset uptime?

Yes.

So like, like I mentioned earlier, it seems like a lot of our data and and some of these PMs were becoming overdue in our, our like, the data was going into a black hole. We were losing sight, in tracking of our our PMs. So, being able to have more, more knowledge and more, awareness of that has certainly allowed us to, increase our our, preventive maintenance, and we think that that increase in preventive maintenance is correlating to a better uptime.

The more that we're out there with our planned maintenance, getting out there and maintaining our equipment, is usually leading to less, you know, work request, less downtime for equipment.

So, yeah, that's that's what I would say is is just, more insight, more visibility to what PMs we're doing, how we're scheduling them. It's really kind of been a great way to elevate, our equipment uptime.

Awesome.

Appreciate that, Ross.

You're welcome.

Ross, thank you so much, and thank you to sergeant for, you know, being so generous with allowing us to use up the an hour of your time today. I wanna thank everyone for joining us today, and, obviously, getting to Ross for for your time. We look forward to seeing you all in our next webinar. Have a great rest of your day, guys.

Thank you so much. Bye. Bye.

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