Past and Future Trends in Reliability
It is my pleasure to welcome our panelists today, Eric Elder, Maureen Gribble, Jenna Johns, and Shon Isenhour.
In this episode we covered:
- What were the things you were seeing people asking about at that conference?
- What does the future look like for the reliability industry?
- 2022 Conference Plans!
What were the things you were seeing people asking about at that conference?
One of the big things that I have heard from a lot of people you know is that they’re really looking to get more efficient with their time. They’re not just looking to implement every solution. They’re looking to implement solutions that save them time, that help them work smarter, that help them get to a place where they aren’t just going through the motions of doing routes. People were excited to share what they’ve done during the pandemic season. Others spoke about how they’re struggling.
Is it a combination of business systems or management systems and technology, or just more so technology?
It’s a big combination of both.
What have you seen change over the last six years while in the reliability industry?
Starting out with PRUFTECHNIK and then being acquired by Fluke Reliability, it’s going from not just a product. That provides a solution, it’s kind of the product plus the services aspect. A couple of us have touched on the lack of resources, part to where a lot of the requests that I’ve seen for the hardware that we sell, at least from a predictive side, a lot of customers are wanting us to do more of the data analysis aspect.
And I think that as the predictive analytics gets even better, there’s also going to be less and less of even the human interaction with the system, which I think is a very kind of fascinating aspect of what we all do is that computing power has increased. Technology is rapidly advancing and getting all these benefits from the computing faster. More organizations are focused on improving reliability. They’re realizing it’s not just improving uptime, but also really enabling improvements in environmental performance, compliance, health, and safety performance within the organization, all those other things as a strategic approach.
Why are organizations not relying specifically on vibration to validate that it’s aligned properly?
They’re spending a lot of money trying to upgrade some of this aging infrastructure that they have, but they don’t have a really good idea or a really good way to quickly verify that it’s put in properly. Right at the beginning of install is a huge point of failure. What our technology allows them to detect if everything was done properly, if the bases look right, if everything looks attached properly, because all they must do is take a quick video. And then they can use that in communication with those OEMs to make sure it gets put in right the first time.
What are the next six years going to bring for the industry?
Planning, scheduling, managing your MRO stores, applying technology will remain to be the same. Some of the methodologies and some of the ways we do these things is going to change. I hope somebody puts together all the right technology to be able to detect these defects. A never changing thing is the fact that people are going to need to operate reliable reliability, to be able to be competitive against things like price pressures and all these other outside market forces.
The companies that we service and work with are all going to have that same consistent problem of figuring out a way to balance cost savings and maintaining reliable equipment. One of the things we see happening over the next six years are a shift to things like responses to shortages of people. I think that we’re going to start seeing robotics being utilized. We’re going to see a significant shift in the way maintenance is performed. We’re going to see more and more of the technology piece with some of the planning and scheduling some of the materials management pieces. We’re going to have to leverage the full suite of technology.
How do we bridge that gaps in the six years if we want to deploy this type of technology and really leverage what we have?
Bring it back to the basics. The nature of solution selling is making sure that you meet the customer where they’re at.
What are some of the things that you really see have come and gone or stayed?
ISO 55,000 came on fairly strong and has faded at least here in north America overseas, you may see more adoption, but over here that has faded significantly. IOT was a big skeptic when it first came out, because if you don’t have the basics, it’s very hard to make the rest of that work, but I’m seeing the companies that do the basics while leveraging IOT now. I think the technology side of this is really going to accelerate over the next six years. We have people skills, knowledge, I think that’s just going to become more and more important. One more thing that’s going to lead to improvement is a more dynamic approach to maintenance.
What’s next with Leading Reliability?
We have a face-to-face conference coming up May 10-12, 2022 in Clear Water, Florida. More information can be found here!
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