The 6 Things I Learned in 23 Years as a Manufacturing Reliability Consultant

In 1999 I left a 19-year career at Eastman Kodak to start my own Manufacturing Reliability Consulting Company. Looking back 23 years I really had no idea what I was getting into, but I was confident that I had something to offer companies that other consultants didn’t.

Experience

In my last 4 years at Kodak, I had worked with a handful of consultants who came in to teach our people different tools and methods and I was kind of shocked to find out none of them had any experience actually doing hands on work in a manufacturing facility.

Over the next few years, I took what I learned from some of the consultants and two of my Professors from RIT and developed an RCM Methodology that was aimed at identifying failure modes and developing tasks to eliminate the failure or mitigate the effects of each failure. The pilots for this methodology were successful and as a result, I submitted a paper to present at an upcoming SMRP event. That presentation changed my life and gave me the confidence to walk into my boss’s office a few months later and give him two weeks’ notice.

Twenty-Three years later as I retire to enjoy a life surrounded by family, free of hotels, airports and eating alone in restaurants, I can share the things I learned working as a consultant.

1)????Success and the attention that comes with it is not always a good thing.

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I was lucky to have a major success with the first company I worked with. On top of this, they were willing to share our success in public agreeing to having a cover article in one of the larger trade magazines and present at two major conferences. The result was a line of new customers and invites from several other conferences to present my RCM Methodology. This was a great thing! I got to meet hundreds of new contacts and rub elbows with the most respected consultants in the business. I’ll forever be grateful for that first group I worked with, if it weren’t for them I would have been a flash in the pan and a year later I would have had to get a real job once again.

So, what was the bad thing?

I was so excited to be recognized I took for granted that everyone was looking out for my best interests. I got talked into spending some serious cash on half and full-page advertising that never amounted to a single job. I threw money at conference sponsorships and booth space that while it kept my company name front and center it did little to bring in customers.

If you want to stay front and center with the community you work in, publish something on LinkedIn every other week, comment on something every day and speak at events where the folks running the show are interested in what you have to present, not what you have to spend.

2)????If you want to stay in business, results are what count.

I learned early on that my real work experience is what opened doors for me. As I said in the opening, I was kind of shocked early on to learn that very few people working as “experts” or consultants had worked on the shop floor as a maintenance technician, machine operator or first line supervisor. Having that real life experience made it easy for me to talk to potential customers. I had lived the problems they were experiencing and by offering some free advice on how to deal with some of the issues they were having at their site, I was able to begin building relationships with folks I met at conferences. I would make notes on their business cards and call them a few months later to ask how things were going and if my suggestions had helped. This more than anything else, this is what resulted in someone calling and asking for help.

Now while that is grand, making money in this business as a one man show requires results so do all you can to ensure the recommendations that come from your work get implemented. The first thing I taught my managers and facilitators in training was how to measure success. What did we recommend? Did it get implemented and did it did it improve your overall equipment effectiveness? Companies who see results will always want more!

3)????Don’t expect miracles from the corporate suite.

I was always excited to get contacted by a high-level executive who wanted to implement a corporate wide improvement program. The high that comes with having the opportunity to help a company with brand recognition around the world gets your blood pumping like no other. I was lucky starting out to be advised by someone who had years of experience in dealing with high level executives who informed me when you’re dealing with folks from the C-Suite your pricing is a distant fourth (unless of course it’s a government contract) to your execution plan, your timeline, and your reputation. In your first face to face meeting, ask them what their goals are, how many need to be trained, to what level, and at how many locations. Find out when they were hoping to start, when they would like the effort to be completed. Be honest about your concerns; for example, I had a client who needed courses in 7 different languages, and I speak only one. How can we work together to overcome this obstacle? Get it all out on the table in the first meeting so they know from day 1 you’re honest, and willing to work to satisfy their goals.

When you submit your quote make sure to pay yourself well. Recognize that efforts like this will prevent you from working with all the smaller clients you have been doing smaller, steady work with. When the event comes to an end, be prepared to go several months without work.

So why shouldn’t you expect miracles?

Corporate folks have multiple efforts going on all the time and they simply don’t have the time focus even a small part of each day on your effort. They hired you to fulfil what they see as a key need. In their minds, you are going to train and certify a couple of hundred people at their plants around the world and when you finish, those newly trained assets will deliver results. What they clearly forgot about in most cases, the shop floor and site managers who control what gets implemented were never part of the plan. Expect to hear questions like, why is this working so well in Springfield yet our newly trained facilitators in Buffalo just left the company without notice?

The mentor I relied the most upon in my career once told me that when he first got into the business he expected to meet the brightest and most ambitious people when he began working with CEO’s. The truth is CEO’s are like any other profession, 10% of them don’t belong there, 80% are ok and 10% are amazing. That 80% in the middle, they’re going to look around, see what tools other CEO’s are using and do the same. The great ones, they don’t share too much until their ready to retire and someone offers them a book deal!

The key learning here, when you land a big one, pay yourself well and save that money!

4)????Protect your intellectual property like you would your own family.

I came into this business as an energetic yet na?ve business owner who was going to help the manufacturing world eliminate defects by training their shop floor workers in a common sense-based methodology I had developed and thoroughly tested. In my training materials I credited the work of Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap and as I worked with customers over the first few years, I updated the course materials in areas where I now had data to support my claims that Nowlan and Heap’s conditional probability of failure distributions were applicable to manufacturing components as well.

I continued improvements of the material through the years because they helped my customers learn and made my brand stand out from my competitors. What I didn’t do is Trademark some of these improvements and over the last half of my career as a consultant, I would see my intellectual property, copied, reproduced, and presented without credit in magazines, conferences, and all over the worldwide web. Only once did someone credit me as the source of the material they were presenting as their own.

Worse yet as I sought legal advice with the simple hope of forcing those who used my information to teach others to credit the source, I discovered I had given that right away each time I presented the information at a conference and each time I had published articles about it in trade publications.

Sadly, I found out the hard way, honest folks will always credit your work. Dishonest folks will simply use it without credit or add a different letter and call it their own. So, when you see any version of the D-I-P-F Failure Curve that doesn’t credit Doug Plucknette or Reliability Solutions Inc. as the source, remember this article. Protect what it yours, you worked hard to make your brand stand out from the others.

I have met some great people in this business, Jack Nicholas, Ron Moore, Mac Smith, Mark Galley, the Latino Brothers and the entire Ledet family just to name a few. Like many others, when I started in this business I was in awe when I first met these folks. They were easy to talk to, shared their ideas openly and many even shared their clients. I grew up in a day when a handshake was all two honest people needed to work out a deal. In most cases over my two decades that worked great. I would however warn my friends to keep their eyes and ears open. Like any business there are some who are only out for themselves and upon initial observation that might not be clear so before you make any deals, take this advice.

·???????Look closely at resumes, whose bouncing from business to business. This world we work in at first glance appears large but attend three conferences a year for 10 years and you realize it’s in truth very small. Someone that’s wearing a new shirt and standing in a different booth for three or four years in a row either has big problems or little knowledge. Take note to avoid!

·???????Look for companies who are no more than a revolving door of talent. Good companies hire good people and find a way to keep them. Companies who can’t be trusted, hire folks, use them for their intellectual property and show them the door. Vet them by calling?some of those former employees and asking them pointed questions about honesty and integrity.

·???????If you’re ever thinking of making a business deal with another company, make a solid verbal agreement first. When the written agreement is presented, if it’s any different than the verbal one, run like hell!

Remember, your work is your property, it’s what gave you the right to speak as and expert in front of this entire community. Protect it like you would your family!

5)????The words will change, but everything else will stay the same

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If there is one thing that drove me crazy early on in this business it was the changing of words and acronyms. PdM, CBM, CM can we decide on one? Oh, and please, don’t try to explain that each one is something different. Are you using some tool or device to detect the presence of a defect or potential failure?

Equipment Reliability became Asset Management and we continued to all talk about the same things, but some folks wanted to convince the world that they were entirely different and in fact let’s change the name of a conference or two because while the presentations and the things we talk about are the same, there must be a difference.

In 1999 we talked about how sound maintenance practices could improve reliability. In 2023 God forbid you utter those words because the inherent reliability of an asset is determined in the design phase and no form of maintenance will ever improve that.

Really?

Try this on for size, don’t do any maintenance at all and tell me how you make out?

The truth is Reliability will always be dependent on humans, how we design, install, operate, and maintain our assets. So, when some smart guy tells you that the industrial internet of things will make us so reliable that we will no longer need to technicians to perform condition based inspections, tell them Doug Plucknette said they were wrong.

We’re humans, we make mistakes so until someone writes a program that can predict when Joe Blow is about to screw up, we will still have failures that will occur undetected.

My friend Ron Moore has always said he never got too hung up in the lingo. Companies send people to conferences and training because they want things to get better. The way we help them get better is by showing them how to identify and eliminate defects. It’s that simple.

Now look at all the words we use complicate that. Look at all the different processes and tools training and methods.

Keep it simple. Simple tools and simple methods work! ?

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6)????It’s all about relationships

Customers will come and go in this business. I worked my tail off to try and make them all happy working a schedule that would have me flying out Sunday afternoon and getting home late Friday night. Mind you, I wasn’t crazy enough to do this four weeks a month but there were many years where it was three weeks. I must admit for many years I enjoyed the travel, people watching in airports, hotels, and restaurants. The perks of travel that I was able to share with my family that allowed us to vacation like royalty. I loved the conferences where after more than a decade in the business you’re recognized by many and have a difficult time walking from point A to B without being stopped to answer a quick question. For years I looked forward to presenting at as many conferences as I could, but what I’ll miss the most is seeing the customers and consultants I became friends with over the years.

I started out saying I was lucky with my first customer and while part of that is true, I learned over the next few years that maybe it wasn’t all luck that the folks at Whirlpool Findlay were willing to go the extra mile to help spread the word. I the few months I worked with Kirk, Tom and Richard, we ate lunch together, went out for wings and a beer once a week and shared stories about our lives and our families. We laughed at each other, picked on each other and over the years, Kirk and I would work together several more times.

In twenty-three years, what I really learned is if you work hard the money and the work will always be there. But if you take the time to make a friend, those relationships last a lifetime.

So today I end this final chapter with a dedication to the friends I have made along the way. Thanks for taking time to get to know the kid who grew up working on a farm, the guy who enjoys hunting but didn’t ever care if he got anything. The golfer who has hard and fast rules about who can throw the grass and the family guy who never missed making a phone call home every night over 23 years. To the rare handful who invited me into their homes and out to special events, it was you who made this time away from home worthwhile. Thank you once again for your hospitality and friendship.

Peace!