Rethinking your Maintenance Strategy

trista:
Welcome Eric. Eric Hapye is joining us today. He is owner of Road to Reliability, a company that focuses on consulting with places in the industry where, sorry, heavy industry, and where he teaches and trains clients to work within facilities management and optimize their their places of business. So first, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey and why, you know, you're where you are now?

Erik Hupje:
Sure, yeah. Well, first of all, good morning, Christa, and thanks for having me on the call.

trista:
Yeah, thanks.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, so my journey started quite a while ago. I'm originally from the Netherlands, which kind of explains the slightly different accent. I was trained as an engineer, and I started working in the upstream oil and gas industry in the late 90s, and for probably... two and a half decades, 20 plus years. I worked around the world, mostly in the area of maintenance, reliability, asset management. And I worked in... I worked in the field of financial management and I worked in the field of financial management many different countries, different locations. And one thing I noticed that almost wherever I worked, saw the same kind of issues coming back. A lot of organizations, a lot of assets were struggling with relatively low productivity, relatively poor preventive maintenance programs, which were full of tasks that weren't necessary worth doing. A lot of repeat failures and just in general, actually not the kind of performance that we wanted to see, but no matter where we were in the world, we had the same kind of issues. So it was clear it was not kind of a local issue, common issue. And yeah, basically in 2018, I started my own business on the side to kind of reflect on some of those issues. And I developed a framework, the Road to Library framework, which kind of documented what I learned over the decades. And then I started developing training courses to help. companies implement those kind of basic processes. And that's what we do now. We launched our first training course in 2020, just before the pandemic actually. So that was interesting timing.

trista:
Yes

Erik Hupje:
And

trista:
it was.

Erik Hupje:
then, yeah, it was a decision I made to go online with our training before the pandemic, because I believe it's actually a very good way to train people. It takes a bit longer typically than face-to-face, but the knowledge retention is much higher. So that's how it kind of started in 2020. We launched our first course and then later that year I quit my corporate job because doing both things at the same time was just too much and I went full time with the business and then yeah, we're doing well. I think today we've worked with over a hundred companies, trained more than a thousand people in 50 plus countries or so around the globe. So it's been an exciting journey so

trista:
Yeah.

Erik Hupje:
far.

trista:
And this is all within heavy industry, or are they varied different kinds of arenas that you have that you

Erik Hupje:
So

trista:
consult

Erik Hupje:
I think

trista:
with?

Erik Hupje:
our biggest clients tend to be indeed in heavy industry, mining, oil and gas, large scale manufacturing, but we do also have clients in less heavy industry. So we've got quite a few clients in utilities, water utilities, a few clients in power, food manufacturing, and we also have some clients. Actually, one of our biggest clients early on was a heavy logistics company, so not really heavy industry. they basically ran a large fleet, probably the largest fleet of trucks and trailers in Europe.

trista:
Awesome. What do you see over and over again in these places that you are like, we're going to fix that right away? Is it that they don't have a schedule or they're changing things out over and over again? What's your biggest thing that you do when you first come into a place to consult?

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, so to be fair, nowadays I don't do too much consulting anymore because one of the things we're trying to do is basically build capability in our client organization by training and coaching them so they can actually implement and improve themselves. Because when I worked in industry myself, it's great to bring consultants on board. You can get things done fast, but you often find that your own team is not always fully on board despite what might be said.

trista:
You have

Erik Hupje:
And

trista:
to get that

Erik Hupje:
quite

trista:
buy-in.

Erik Hupje:
often, Yes, but even getting by is difficult. And you often find that that kind of work does not get sustained as well as the work that's done by your own team, because they truly own it and they understand it. So our focus is now much more on building capability through training and coaching. But to come back to your question, the main thing I see with a lot of our clients, a lot of people that reach out to us, is that they're very entrenched in a very reactive culture. So. Yeah, they may have a weekly schedule, but it doesn't get everybody, get adhered to because every day something new breaks and operations or production are jumping up and down and say, hey, you gotta fix this, you gotta fix that. So it's a very reactive environment that most of our clients that come to us work in. A lot of repeat failures, relatively poor productivity. So they, the maintenance guys are working hard, but their days are interrupted all the time because when they go and do a job, Things are not ready. The equipment might not be isolated, might not be available for them to work on, or they start a job and then they're missing parts, or they start a job and it turns out that they need something else, or they need another trade that wasn't coordinated. So there's a lot of waste in their day-to-day. And then we see a lot of repeat failures. What typically happens in this kind of environment is that organizations tend to get very good at fixing things fast.

trista:
Mm.

Erik Hupje:
So as something... important fails, the manager goes, right, let's make sure that doesn't happen. That's usually not so easy. So then the next question is, okay, well, how do we make sure that next time we can fix it better, faster, quicker, cheaper kind of thing. So the organization start focusing on getting really good at fixing rather than getting really good at fixing forever. So they're forever fixing. Um, so yeah, that's, those are the kind of common themes we see.

trista:
forever fixing instead of just maintaining. So is that

Erik Hupje:
Yes.

trista:
kind of the, the, the gist is, you know, have a plan of how, of to go through all your, your machinery to make sure it's maintained and updated. So there isn't a fix all the time and it's not breaking down.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, so the framework that I work with our clients is quite simple, actually. It consists of three elements. One of them is planning and scheduling to kind of improve that productivity problem that a lot of them have. The second one is to make sure that they have an effective preventive maintenance program. So they're doing work that is actually adding value. We see a lot of people doing preventive maintenance that actually is not worth doing. And often, they're missing important tasks. And then the first piece is around root cause analysis and defective donation, which is about getting rid of those repeat problems. And it's about getting a mindset of fixing forever that rather than forever fixing. So those three things, if you get those three processes working in your organization, you'll make a massive step change in reliability.

trista:
Right, that's awesome. So what are some things do you think a facility manager, or somebody in facilities management, can take away from your framework and your principles?

Erik Hupje:
I think it depends a little bit, obviously, on what kind of facility you're managing. But most organizations I see, whether they're in facility management or like the logistics company we worked with or have an industry, they very often have two kind of key things coming back. One is that the productivity of their team is not where it... should be or could be in the sense that, as I described earlier, what you see a lot is the technicians out in the field find that their days is full of delays because, you know, they're being asked to do a job but the job is actually not ready to do, the parts are not there or the tools are not there or they'll have to wait for somebody. And that concept of eliminating the waste in the execution process applies to... any kind of industry. Of course, it'll be slightly different in facilities management than say an oil and gas platform offshore or a mine deep in Africa, but the concept of eliminating waste and making sure that people are not waiting unnecessarily stays the same. And with basic planning steps and basic scheduling steps, you can make a big impact there. And one thing that people often get wrong in that space is that they confuse the difference between planning and scheduling. In our day-to-day language, when we talk about plans, we're really talking about schedules. And that kind of concept of that there are more synonyms has also slipped in industry. But really, the idea of planning is that you prepare the work that it can be executed efficiently without delays or with minimal delays. And scheduling is about coordination of the work and making sure you have the right people, that the workers group together, that you have minimum delays between the jobs, whereas planning is about eliminating delays during the job because you're lacking tools or parts or resources. So that focus on productivity is I think definitely also applicable in facilities management. And then probably another one that is viable is getting people to understand what actually impacts the reliability of your equipment. A lot of preventive maintenance tasks out there, a lot of preventive maintenance programs out there are not very effective. They're full of tasks that make organizations feel good that they're doing something, but they don't really add value or they don't really improve reliability. And I think a lot of that is because there's still, there's a lack of knowledge out there. Maintenance as a concept in reliability is not really taught in college, in university or anywhere else, right? So a lot of people come into the... workforce without really understanding some of the principles behind it. And, you know, in the last few decades, quite a bit of research and has been done and things have moved on that people don't know. So, for example, the biggest thing that people don't really understand is that most of our failures that we experience are not age related. So there's still this concept out there that, you know, as equipment gets older, it gets more unreliable. That is to some degree to But actually what studies from the airline industry and later from the military showed was that for most failure modes, most types of failures we experience, that doesn't hold true. Those failures tend to happen randomly anyway during the life of a piece of equipment.

trista:
Hmm.

Erik Hupje:
Now those studies were done in the airline industry and later repeated in the military. And sometimes people say, oh, that's different industry, different equipment. But if you speak to people in industry who kind of have been around for a while, they say, yeah, it's a little bit different. but the concept still apply to pretty much any type of industry, slightly different and different percentages. But the concept that most of your equipment does not fail more frequently because it gets older, but it fails because of random failure moments is not very well understood. And what it basically means is that... If you're dealing with a failure mode that's not age related, going to change that piece of equipment, or going to replace a part or a component or service it, is not going to make it more reliable. In fact, you've run the risk that you introduce a defect or a problem through maintenance. So that is one thing. So getting people to build preventive maintenance programs that are based on kind of reliability principles is a big thing, and it would certainly apply also in the facilities management space, for sure.

trista:
Right, one of the things we talk a lot about at OpenWorks is facility managers can help companies avoid risk and make their warehouses more into a profit center. And I think you touch on that a little bit when you talk about this wasted resource of folks kind of walking around changing things or cleaning things and it doesn't really need to be. you know, replaced or touched, it just needs to be maintained. So I think that that really makes sense. And also, I wanted to ask you to as far as this idea of not replacing things and throwing it away, does that touch a little bit on sustainability? Do you think?

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, um... If you eliminate waste from your preventive maintenance program and you're not basically replacing things that do not need to be replaced, if you're looking better after your equipment so it lasts longer and it doesn't fail as early, or it runs better and therefore it doesn't actually consume as much energy, they all have a big impact. And you can see some of the more kind of advanced technology providers nowadays that provide service around condition-based maintenance and monitoring of the equipment. Big focus of theirs is to basically demonstrate to the clients that apart from the benefit to equipment reliability and everything else, there is a big benefit if you run your rotating equipment, your pumps or your HVAC, etc. more efficiently, there's a huge energy benefit. So that's definitely an impact on sustainability in that way too.

trista:
All right, right. That's fantastic. So can you talk a little bit about, again, if you want to give your company a little bit of love and talk about it a little bit and what you do, that'd be great.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, sure. So we basically do kind of two things anyway. We help our clients by providing them a very simple framework to increase reliability. Because what I noticed when I was in industry, when you go out into the market and you look for help on how to improve reliability performance in your company, it's very easy to get out there and talk to consultants and different advisors. But they tend to be what's offered are very complex solutions. You see models with 10, 20, 30 different elements that you need to implement. And if you're stuck in a reactive mode, that's really difficult to absorb and to implement and to

trista:
overwhelming,

Erik Hupje:
get after.

trista:
I would

Erik Hupje:
So

trista:
say.

Erik Hupje:
it's overwhelming, absolutely.

trista:
Yeah.

Erik Hupje:
And it's disheartening too, because you go like, how am I ever going to implement all that? So what we do is we say, look, there's three things, three core processes that you need to implement to begin with. That's planning and scheduling. preventive maintenance, defect elimination. And then you need to sustain that with the right kind of leadership and culture. Leadership drives a change, and the culture then sustains it. So that's the framework that we basically work with in our clients. And then what we do is we basically train and coach their teams to implement or improve those processes in their organization. So that our whole premise is that we help our clients improve the business. themselves using their own team because then that's the most sustainable, at least leads to the best result. I'll be honest, it's not always the fastest. It sometimes seems faster to go and hire a bunch of consultants. But ROA is cost effective and it's definitely the most sustainable.

trista:
Right, and you're also touching a bit on change management there. So any kind of behavior within any kind of company is a challenge. And once you do that and you follow this new concept that you give them, there's more of a chance of success, I would think.

Erik Hupje:
Absolutely. Yeah. So change management is a big part of that. And so for example, in one of our training courses, as an example, so we in the training course around planning and changing, we have one version of the course where The last module of the course is we basically say, right, okay, in the previous nine modules, we've talked to you about, this is what planning and scheduling is, and here's how it's supposed to work in an environment and everything else. But then the last module is say, right, here's how you can implement this in our organization. And we actually teach a framework that I learned over the years when I was implementing planning and scheduling in different parts of the world. how to roll it out in an organization. And that framework basically combines the basics of project management, change management, and of course, planning and scheduling. Because a lot of organizations, they get this wrong. They try to roll out without structured implementation, without too much change management. They send out a few emails. They might have a few meetings. They might even train some people. But they usually don't engage people structurally. They don't look at the stakeholders. They don't look at. Okay, how am I convinced the different stakeholders about why this is a good change for them? And you've got to bear in mind that for the technicians on the factory floor, they will care about very different things than your executive sponsor. But you need to have a message for all the different stakeholders about why this is good for them too. Otherwise they're not going to get on board. And a big part of also at the end is what I'm big on is basically getting people in the organizations. to work as a coach. So what you would try and do is you basically have a few people in your own organization who become really good at the topic of, say, planning and scheduling. And then they work with the team to make sure that they stick to the new process. Because it's one thing to say, right, here's our new process, our new way of working. It's something different to then actually do that consistently. And it takes a bit of time. So if you have a coach who can do that, that helps a lot. Now the classic way that is done is you bring in coaches from outside. The downside with that is those coaches learn a lot from your implementation and after six or nine months they leave and they go to the next organization. My view is much better if you can get some of your supervisors or your subject matter experts trained up and get them to act as a coach in your own organization because they stick around and they'll make sure that what they have been implementing is sustained and keeps working.

trista:
Yeah, there's that ownership, that perceived ownership of the change and the new idea. I think this is really great because it combines. people and processes and I think a lot of times people forget or places forget about the people component when especially when we're dealing

Erik Hupje:
Mm-hmm.

trista:
with heavy machinery and warehouses and equipment things like this it's the people who are actually making things happen so if you can explain

Erik Hupje:
For

trista:
the

Erik Hupje:
sure.

trista:
why behind it I think a lot of things can can change so I love that your framework includes that. I think that's

Erik Hupje:
Yeah,

trista:
really interesting.

Erik Hupje:
no, and I really like what you just said there when you explained the why. I'm a big, big fan of that. When you get your team to understand why things need to be changed and why it needs to happen in a certain way, 99% of the time, they will get on board. Most people come to work with the intention of doing a good job. When... the job is not being done well, it's usually because the process is not working or the tools are not working or we have wrong expectations or people don't understand why they're being asked to do something in a certain way. So I'm a really strong believer in that, if you get people to understand what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and why it needs to be done in a certain way, then half the battle is won.

trista:
Right. Fantastic. I think that's great. Do you have anything that you would like to add? We covered a lot.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, we covered a lot. All I'd say is if anybody is interested in finding out more, they can find us on rote2liability.com. They can also find me on LinkedIn. And anybody can reach out at any time. I'm always happy to jump on a call and explore how we might be able to help or give some advice. So it's always good to speak to people in industry.

trista:
Absolutely, and I'll include your information in the show notes and also social media to make sure folks out there can know how to get in touch with you.

Erik Hupje:
Great, thank you.

trista:
Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna stop recording now. It's still recording, but I marked it. Thank you, I think that went really well.

Erik Hupje:
No worries, thank you. There was a bit of a delay on the connection. I don't know if you've heard the same, but...

trista:
So with this, this platform is really interesting because it is continually uploading over and over and over again. Like I have a little thing on my screen, it's like 99% uploading. So when that

Erik Hupje:
Yeah,

trista:
happens,

Erik Hupje:
I can see the same, yeah.

trista:
it's just, we're just seeing it and hearing it, but you have to trust the process that it's getting up to the cloud and

Erik Hupje:
Bye.

trista:
to the robots too.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah. Yeah.

trista:
So that's one of the reasons I went with this. this platform because it is really slick when it does that. Kyle, did you have something to add? This is the marketing manager, Kyle. Kyle, this is Eric.

Erik Hupje:
Hi, Kyle.

trista:
I think so. Eric, did you want to do that again really quick just to say who you are and where you work and what you do?

Erik Hupje:
Yeah,

trista:
Just

Erik Hupje:
we

trista:
to

Erik Hupje:
can

trista:
make

Erik Hupje:
do.

trista:
sure we got it.

Erik Hupje:
I think we covered it, but yeah, I'm happy to do it again.

trista:
I think we did

Erik Hupje:
Yeah.

trista:
too, but just do it again just in case.

Erik Hupje:
Right, okay. So with my name or...

trista:
Yeah, I'll say welcome Eric and then you can welcome Eric to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Erik Hupje:
Thanks Trista, great to be here. So you just want me to continue with an intro?

trista:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,

Erik Hupje:
Because

trista:
so

Erik Hupje:
it's a bit weird, no?

trista:
it is a bit weird, but you'll just say what you do, where you work, and what your best, what you do for organizations, I think.

Erik Hupje:
Right, okay, I'll just start then. Yeah, okay.

trista:
Okay, all right.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah.

trista:
Welcome, Eric.

Erik Hupje:
Thanks, Rista. Great to be here. So just as an introduction, my name is Eric Appier. I'm the founder of Road to Reliability. And we're an online training company. We basically help our clients improve reliability. We offer them a framework whereby they can improve reliability of the industrial plants, a simple, proven framework of four elements. And then we train their teams and their organization in implementing those four elements. so they can really improve reliability in an easy and practical proven approach. And we now have, we have now trained over 50 clients across I think 50 plus countries and a thousand students. So the movement is slowly growing.

trista:
Um, question on that. So do people continually come back to you for more training and help, or is it kind of like you finished the training and then that's it.

Erik Hupje:
Yeah, so we have a couple of things. So we have different organizations who progressively enroll more of their team. So we have a client in Canada, for example, who is steadily rolling this out to different assets in their portfolio. They have maybe 15 sites, and they're progressively rolling this out. So as of when one site is ready, they enroll that team there, and they participate. They also basically train new people. So we have a steady stream of clients with them or students with them. Some other clients basically will roll a whole team through say planning and scheduling and then 6 12 18 months later They might come back and say ok. We've done now that we've got that working We're now going to train our team on how to build and improve their preventive maintenance program. So It varies a bit. Sometimes it's it's you know, new people coming on board or different assets, but also existing assets They go through the different Focus areas so planning a scheduling preventive maintenance defect elimination

trista:
Perfect. Thank you. That was good. Alright.

Erik Hupje:
No worries.

trista:
Okay, well, we will get this together and what I'll do is when it's done and we edit it, I'll send it to you and I'll also send you a social shareable package so you can use it on your social media as well.

Erik Hupje:
Okay,

trista:
And

Erik Hupje:
that's

trista:
as

Erik Hupje:
great.

trista:
soon as it's edited and up, I'll definitely let you know. I think there were some really good key takeaways there that our audience can use.

Erik Hupje:
All right, well, that's very good. It was

trista:
Yeah,

Erik Hupje:
good to be on the call, Tristan.

trista:
yeah, thank you.

Erik Hupje:
Alright,

trista:
Take

Erik Hupje:
and thanks

trista:
care.

Erik Hupje:
for your help, Carl. Okay, take care, bye.

trista:
Right, bye.

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