Working SMART: Success in Maintenance, Asset Management, and Reliability through Technology

By Steve K. Richmond

Do you know how to make the most of your maintenance and reliability assets?

The information embedded in your assets is valuable. Take your asset management to the next level by tapping into technology. Many maintenance and reliability professionals view technology as daunting, frustrating, or merely additive. But get technology-leveraged asset management right, and you can improve reliability while saving your enterprise a significant amount of money.

​Technology changes at a fast and furious pace. But the human component of technology and the best strategies to use technology to get the most out of a business’s assets are tried and true. For over three decades, Projetech founder Steve K. Richmond has helped companies across a variety of industries put technology to work in their maintenance and reliability efforts. In Working SMART, Steve draws upon his experience as the head of the most experienced provider of Maximo as a Service (MaaS) in the world and provides insights on how your organization, regardless of size or purpose, can leverage technology to make the most of what you have today and tomorrow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639080397

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

"Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with

smart people who’ll argue with you."

—John Wooden

THE MAINTENANCE AND reliability industry can be worth hundreds of billions of dollars if we embrace the way technology gives us valuable information. One of the key concerns of any enterprise is reliability. Whether you are making automobiles or crackers, running a hospital or a customer service center, recycling scrap metal or figuring out how to occupy Mars, reliability is key. And today, technology is a critical component of any reliability solution.

For over three decades, I’ve helped companies across a variety of industries put technology to work in their maintenance and reliability efforts. There is a human factor to technology-enabled reliability, and regardless of the type of business or the company’s goal, I’ve seen what approaches work well. Even as technology changes, managing the human side of reliability stays consistent.

Even as technology changes, managing the human side of reliability stays consistent.

Technology changes at a fast and furious pace. But the best strategies for using technology to get the most out of a business’s assets are tried and true. In this book, I’ll give you some insights on how anyone in the maintenance and reliability industry, regardless of the size of your organization or the product or service you are connected to, can leverage technology to make the most of what you have today and tomorrow, whatever the future brings.

WORKING HARD AND SMART—IT’S IN MY DNA

I grew up on the west side of Cincinnati. My father was a Proctoid—Cincinnati’s affectionate term for employees of Proctor & Gamble, headquartered here in town. After he got out of the Marine Corps, my dad’s first job was to load boxes of Ivory Soap into boxcars. He went to night school, got a degree in industrial engineering, and worked his way up within the company.

I’ve always followed my dad’s example of hard work and determination. When I was a teenager in the late 1960s, he encouraged me to take my first real job at a company doing residential heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC). He believed the best problem solvers were tradespeople, and that it was best to launch into the working world with a trade skill under your belt. So I learned to thread pipe, hang sheet metal ductwork, and install complete systems by the age of sixteen.

As much as I liked working with my hands, I began to gravitate toward management. After graduating college, I took a job managing a crew for a company that owned large tracts of real estate. We kept HVAC systems and appliances operational for thousands of apartments all over the metropolitan area. By the mid-1980s, I had over forty vehicles running around the city ensuring that thousands of pieces of mechanical equipment were well maintained—all tracked on paper by hand.

Our company lived with two main concerns: scheduling preventative maintenance on all that equipment and providing speedy responses to emergency equipment failures.

I knew technology might address the uncertainty inherent in our system, so I bought an Epson PC with dual 5¼" floppy drives and some software. I put what I was doing on paper into the software system and began to make sense of some of the chaos.

INFORMATION IS THE MOST VALUABLE ASSET

Around the end of the 1980s, it occurred to me that the information around maintenance and reliability was ultimately more valuable than the actual work itself. Armed with technical knowledge and a budding interest in software solutions to these kinds of operations, I launched my company Projetech in 1990 and began managing technical projects for my clients.

Soon it became clear that my clients, always in search of better reliability and less downtime, needed better information. They needed something computerized to track all aspects of their equipment (life cycles, parts, costs, vendors, etc.). If a machine went down, by having all the information about that machine, they could determine what maintenance was required to ensure long-term reliability, what additional work would be cost-effective, and how quickly they would be able to go back online. Since no one can predict when a machine is going to break down, they needed to have all the information about all aspects of the machine on hand and constantly up-to-date. In short, they needed a computerized maintenance management system. Projetech began helping clients purchase, install, and configure these systems and training clients’ staff on how to use them.

Larger software companies saw the potential of maintenance management systems. In the mid-1990s, Project Software & Development, Inc, developed a software product called Maximo®, a system that manages the physical assets of a business throughout each asset’s lifetime. Within a few years, Maximo became the system of choice for our clients because of its ability to track and manage asset data through the life cycle; planned and unplanned work activities; service offerings, agreements, and delivery; contracts; inventory; and procurement.

THE PARALLEL EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY

The evolution of technology has run parallel in a pretty straight line with that of bandwidth or communications technology. It’s like Marshall McLuhan said: The medium is the message. When he first said that in the 1960s, he was referring to whether someone was listening to the radio or the spoken word or reading and how that choice of medium impacted what was being conveyed. I have seen the same with our ability to communicate and the technology available to us.

Consider the simple phone call. Way back in the day, we had party lines and had to wait our turn to use the telephone and then hope no one was eavesdropping on our conversation. Then we moved to each household having their own phone line, but we had to be thoughtful about when to use long distance. Remember waiting to talk to Grandma in California until after 8:00 p.m. on Friday because the rates were cheaper? Now we can join our colleagues on a multiperson video call from literally anywhere in the world anytime we want for a very reasonable flat subscription rate. We all talk to one another more today than decades before because it is easy and cheap to do so.

The internet went through the same type of evolution. The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, better known as ARPANET, was the beginning of what we call the internet today. AOL brought it to the masses by mailing you a CD, and, even before that, a floppy disk. You would load software onto your computer, buy a modem, and beat your head against the wall for a few hours trying to make your dial-up connection work before you finally got your friend to come over and help you figure out how to get online. And then once you got online, what could you do? The internet then was basically text-based, with a lot of message boards and some basic websites.

All of that evolved. Soon, we started to see computer systems that were singular machines typically built with processes designed to accomplish a specific, individual goal. Most effective early PC software programs were accounting-based—the problems the software was asked to deal with were black-and-white and didn’t require a lot of interpretation. And when companies first brought PCs to their small- to medium-sized businesses, they did so for those accounting products. The early PCs were very expensive, clunky, and isolated.

But then people began to be able to connect these devices with coaxial cable, thus creating rudimentary networks. Those very early forays into the connectivity of these machines allowed them to branch out to other uses beyond accounting. So, if the marketing team had a word processing product and they were working on copy for the next press release or advertisement, suddenly the marketing people and the finance people had the ability to share information in some ways. After that, product development and engineering and other departments would see reasons to connect. Eventually the entire company would be connected in a basic, limited but functional, local area network. Connectivity between geographies was pretty much limited to contiguous office space and didn’t take off until the late 1980s, when we started seeing a more dial-up DSL followed by the original 56K modem.

Those evolutions of being able to communicate with more people faster and for machines to exchange information all evolved around telecommunications improvement. This lit a fire under management to understand what developments were going on in the software and technology worlds and what could be done with them. These standalone systems, perhaps doing some rudimentary tracking of mechanical systems maintenance, were similar to the way I first started using software to schedule my maintenance crew instead of using a whiteboard or index cards.

Those types of systems evolved very quickly because smart people kept improving them and sharing them. Soon people realized that there was something that might be of value to somebody else and started selling early maintenance management software. The idea took off, and that type of software soon was available in the hundreds.

Anybody with a PC and a garage could write product code back then. In fact, a book I bought around 1990 was devoted to listing the ninety-three maintenance management software products available at the time, comparing capabilities, pricing, and so on. As with all young industries, so many of those products didn’t survive, but a few good ones did.

Communication capabilities continued to increase. We evolved from text-based to graphics-based software, and speed improved as latency—the interruption of packets of information moving across a computer line causing the dreaded blue screen of death—went down. This allowed the capabilities of maintenance management software to grow, and the evolution continued. Today we have wireless technology. The processing power we have with the phones in our pockets is greater than what was used to send a man to the moon sixty years ago.

And that’s the space I lived in that interested me—watching that evolution, that constant change, and the leaps in capability that came with it. Not just for the sake of fancier technology, but also because it meant learning more from everything we were doing with maintenance and reliability so we could keep saving time and money.

Now we have artificial intelligence (AI), in which a machine can take the information provided and react to it with a command almost instantaneously. It’s an extremely powerful concept, but it’s enabled by the communication evolution to almost limitless bandwidth and ultrafast connectivity.

Several new cars today have features that enable your automobile to see something on the road ahead and react to it much quicker than you can. That’s because the processing speed and the communication capabilities are there. This will be extrapolated into a wider band of information when fully automated driving comes to be as cars talk to one another and to their main systems at even greater speeds of information exchange. Then the car will react not only to what the individual driver or car may see or know but also to what the cars ahead of it are seeing and reacting to, and what the central system says is happening on this particular tract of road on a daily basis at 5:00 p.m. All that information is instantaneously available, and it’s all communications-driven. Now we’re starting to make decisions from an artificial perspective, faster and better than we humans can. And while in maintenance, you still need a guy with a wrench to make certain repairs and judgments about what needs to be done, the machines themselves are going to be making more and more of these decisions better and faster than we could have ever imagined—all thanks to the evolution of communications.

FASTER, BETTER MAINTENANCE DECISIONS

Our capability to manage assets and improve maintenance and reliability continues forward with expansion of communications and technology. We’re seeing new and better ways to react fast or make decisions that take maintenance and reliability to a new level. But as we build better systems, it’s critical to not only have the right information at the start but also then study very carefully how this information interacts and make sure that the right information is being exchanged at the right time in an efficient process so that we get the results we’re after.

The old adage of garbage in, garbage out remains applicable today. We need to be careful that we’re entering the correct information in the right format. We must look at where this information needs to go and who it needs to be shared with, what systems need to be able to touch it, what systems might benefit from it, and what systems can add value to it. Going forward, most network technology going forward will be software-defined. The flow charts we’ve made for years will soon be created by artificial intelligence (AI), based on the inputs our systems provide. Artificial intelligence, especially as the software starts to become corrective in nature, will correct even some of our subtle mistakes and make what we started with better by offering us suggestions for improvement. But those recommendations only have value if they’re based on good data in the system that reflect what we wanted to accomplish when we started down this path of

Reviews for Working SMART

[Jim Bader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed reading this book. It is an easy read for what can be a complex and difficult to follow subject. It not only simplifies a lot of technology with easy-to-understand examples, but also gives valuable insight into business situations and decision making. I am sending a copy for my son who recently left military service for the private sector managing a calibration & repair business. I think there are many tidbits and examples that will serve him and his new company in his new future endeavors.

[John R · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author shares his industry knowledge with over 30 years experience in using technology to maintain equipment and assets. Proper maintenance increases equipment longevity and reliability providing for increased profitability. As a retiree with over 45 years experience in the mechanical contracting business I highly recommend reading for anyone in charge of equipment and asset management for their company.