#20 Jason Callis, President of the IFMA Indianapolis Chapter

20-establishing-a-preventive-maintenance-program-with-James Kovacevic

Intro:

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by stratum. I'm your host, Griffin Hamilton. This is the show where I interview industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights into modern day facilities management. From hospitality, to commercial, real estate, and everything in between. We'll learn what it really takes to succeed as a facilities manager. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton   

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management Podcast. Today, I've got James, and I'm going to put your last name. But James, how you doing today?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Very good. Thank you for having me.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And why don't you, since I would butcher it, why don't you tell people who you are and what you do.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Alright, perfect. So, my name is James Kovacevic. I'm a principal instructor with Erodicio. Erodicio we're training consulting company within maintenance and reliability space as well as asset management space. So, what I primarily do is spend a lot of time on airplanes flying around different customers and helping customers with either developing PM programs, spare parts programs, or larger asset management programs.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So how did you get into this space?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Interestingly enough, I am an electrician by trade. So, I was an electrician working at a machine builder. And early on, I went to one company had a couple of different facilities in this one area. And the one plant you went into it was spotless, everything was running well, everything was running great. And you go to the plant next door across the street, and it looks like a bomb went off. How can it be so different from the same company? It didn't make sense to me. So, when I had an opportunity to join a maintenance team and to build machinery, I did that. From there became a maintenance supervisor, maintenance planner, maintenance manager. And then I spent five or six years with a large multinational, going around and implementing maintenance and reliability programs all across the globe. Spend time in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia doing that with them. And then someone asked if I wanted to be a consultant. So, I said, sure, why not, I'll give that a try.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You're already doing the traveling why not. 

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Exactly. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So how long you've been consulting?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

I'm going to be about four or five years now. Yeah, four or five years.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And I mean, that's provide you the opportunity to really get an intimate level knowledge on various industries as you've gone in and implemented these different processes. So, what has been your biggest, you know, starting out high level, your biggest takeaway, getting that sort of exposure to different industries?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

They're not all that different. Everyone thinks they're different. But in reality, the problems they're facing are pretty much the same, regardless of industry. That and the biggest effort that goes into making these changes as we're going from a reactive to a proactive organization, it's all about people. The technical side, we can lay out, we can build plans, but the successful ones, focus on the people.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And define it still to this day that you're going in and you are establishing from scratch a new PM, policy or you going in and just revamping an existing one.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Both. So, some organizations we are going in and we're helping them build, here's your asset hierarchy. Here's how you build a PM program. Here's how you set up spare parts, we're doing that and then others are a little bit more advanced. So, then it's here's how you start refining PMs. Here's how you start optimizing when your frequencies for PMs, those types of things.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And let's take a step back and explain to the listeners out there. Just the importance of preventive maintenance schedule. What you look at as you're looking to establish it and really starting out from scratch. What the best practices are there?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yeah, for sure. So, when we start looking at PM programs, there's a couple things we want to look at. One, is it established? Are they on a regular cadence? If that's the case, then we're optimizing. There's a couple things we want to do to optimize. And what we're really trying to keep in mind when we optimize is reducing our upfront maintenance cost, but minimizing breakdowns. If they don't have a program in place, then it's trying to determine what do we actually want to do maintenance on. It's not worth doing preventative maintenance on everything. Some stuff is better off just to let fail and then repair it when it occurs. Right? Think of your refrigerator at home or your stove, you're not doing a bunch of preventative maintenance on that you're letting it go. And when it breaks, we'll fix it. So those types of things where you're helping them establish the boundaries of when do we actually want to perform PMs? What are the guidelines for that? And that really allows your organization to balance the two costs, your preventative maintenance costs and your break down costs. We're just trying to strike the balance where they kind of come together at the level lowest total cost of ownership somewhere in the middle.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And when you look at the different assets that people have, or different organizations have, is it just a gut feeling on what should be part of the PM strategy? You gave the example of a refrigerator, right? Is that just something where you look at total costs and what a Corrective maintenance costs would typically be for that asset, or is that established or standardized process that goes into that?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

There's generally a standardized process that we'll use. What we want to do is something called an asset, criticality analysis, take all of our assets, we're going to evaluate them against criteria that's important to the organization, some will look at total maintenance costs, some will look at consequences of downtime, others will look at if it's a single path failure, meaning this fails is going to shut down a whole bunch of other stuff. If it fails, is there a health and safety risk? Is there a regulatory risk, so we'll take all these different categories, and we'll rank all of our assets against these categories, then we'll generally break up those assets into a couple groups, we'll say are A assets for example, they are the top 20%, those ones, we're going to take an FMEA type approach, we're going to do a Failure Mode Effect Analysis, understand all the different ways this can fail. And then what we want to do to prevent it from failing. The next round are the B assets, which is roughly 40 to 20% of our assets, we'll do what we call a PM optimization, we'll take the manufacturer's recommendations. And we'll run that through our optimization logic. That way, we're removing non value added stuff, adding stuff where we know it's been missed, that type of thing. The bottom rest, depending on your organization, some organizations will just let that bottom 60% Run to failure, others will expand that PM optimization even further. So, it might be from your 21% down to say 60 or 70%. They'll do PM optimization on those. So, it depends kind of on the organization and what their tolerance for risk is. The only exception to that if it's regulatory, then you don't got a choice you got to do it.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that the manufacturers going in and having that as a playbook really. And what I've seen, has been difficult for a lot of people is they take that. And that is literally what they do for their PMs, but they don't take in consideration the fact that they're using it, you can't classify a piece of equipment being used the exact same way universally. Is that something where you see that as an issue, when people are just following that sort of thing and think that they're doing it correctly.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

That's the biggest reason why we take the manufacturers recommendations and run it through that PM optimization process. If I go buy an air conditioning unit, for example, and I stick it in St. Croix, it's hot, it's going to run all year round, there's saltwater all around it, there's issues like that I take that same air conditioning unit, and I shove it up here in Toronto area. It's not going to run all year round, very different environmental circumstances, we got to change our PM to adapt to those. So, manufacturers do their best to provide, regardless of where it's used, here's what we're recommending, but you have to modify that to suit the operating context. It's a very dusty environment, you may have to change filters more often. If it's running all year round versus only six months, you might have to check and change belts more often those types of things.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And is that something where you feel as if there's some resistance or do you ever find there to be resistance when you go in and make these recommendations, with people having the assumption they're already doing it properly and they don't want to, in this example, add, you know, more PM policies there that could increase the cost in their mind. Right, looking at the short term?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yeah, there is always pushback when you're trying to change some PM programs. If they're grown in house, there's generally going to be a little bit more pushback. If they're just taking from a manufacturer's recommendations, it will be usually a little less. But there's a couple quick rules of thumb people can use to evaluate, are we doing this at the right frequency? For example, if I'm doing a PM inspection, alright, I'm going in inspecting the belts inspecting the filters, whatever it may be. There's a rule of thumb that we go by that you should find an issue one out of every six times. If I'm finding one out of every 10 I'm probably inspecting too frequently. If I'm finding one out three, I'm not inspecting frequently enough. So that's a quick rule of thumb that you can use. And that just allows you to help establish, is it the right frequency? Do we got to expand, reduce that type of thing.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And sticking to the I guess a rule of thumb to follow as well. Something that I've heard is the ratio for PM [inaudible 09:45] maintenance around 80-20 should be the goal. Is that your target?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yes, what we typically recommend when we look at organizations, as you say 30% proactive maintenance. So that's your preventative maintenance and your predictive maintenance Inspections. From there, we're going to see about 60% planned corrective, meaning we did a PM we found an issue, we got to order the part and we'll perform a planned repair at a later date, that should be about 60%. Now, last 10%, is what we look for in breakdowns. Doesn't matter how good your PM program is, you're always going to have breakdowns, there's always going to be things that get through, but we want to try and limit that to about that 10%.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So, there's a big difference there that not many people think about is finding a failure during the PM process versus the actual breakdown, where I feel as if there's, that line can be blurred. In some circumstances,

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

It very much can. And the challenge is, if I'm doing a PM, and I find a V belt, for example, and it's almost completely destroyed, we know if we don't change it immediately, it's going to fail within the next couple of days. That becomes a breakdown to me, that is not a PM task, that is a break down, because it's the point where we have that react immediately. So, then we would change the belt. And ideally, if we're doing this, we're capturing that belt replacement on a breakdown work order, not on a PM work order. The reason why we want to do that is twofold, one is not going to skew RPM times. So, when we're trying to schedule in the future, we know PMS take this, this takes a repair. The other issue is that... there's another rule of thumb that we use is for every hour of traditional PM work, we want to see an hour of planned corrective work coming out of it. Now, this isn't a one for one, this is more at a macro level. So over six months, I did X amount of PMs, did I get X amount of corrective work out of it. And we want to be able to see those numbers come out which is why we don't want to capture that time on the PMs. So, there is a fine line there. Is it planned, corrective or is it a breakdown? My general rule of thumb for that one is if it's performed immediately, or within the next seven days, it's still a breakdown. If we can plan it and schedule it out more than next seven days, then it's a plan corrective.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Makes sense. And everything you're mentioning, you're looking at it, you know, six months down the line, for example of getting that data that's been gathered over that time frame, and then taking that data, and making tweaks to the overall strategy and making these constant improvements. And that's something else that I find there, in which people just kind of set it forget it, where they think that this is, okay, we've got this, check it off the list. And that's that, whereas reality, this should be something that's constantly evolving over time.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Always, these PM programs are evergreen, right? They're, always changing, they're always being updated. And those are driven by a variety of different triggers. So, if we have a major failure, we might have to do a root cause analysis. And part of that would be go back review the PM program. I know some organizations where they have triggers around maintenance cost and maintenance cost goes up by X percent, then they're reviewing that PM program to figure out what they're missing. So, they have all these triggers that they have in place to force that review, because it should always be updating based on latest data, what we're seeing, and even to some extent, the age of the asset, as it gets to a certain age, certain things are going to be more prone to failure. So, we may have to inspect more frequently.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and that is, like I said earlier, that that's something where it's difficult to really explain the importance of that to make those tweaks to improve that overall strategy. Because, as you just mentioned, it's constantly changing. And that is going to be something that as overall as an organization as a whole. You're going to feel it across the board.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yep. Absolutely.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And so, with that, diving into the evolution of PM as a whole, right, so we've gone from what was breakdown, maintenance to in, early 1900s, when the equipment got more and more complex, they had preventive maintenance plans. And now we're using data and technology for predictive as you alluded to earlier, even prescriptive maintenance, is that something that you guys are implementing on a regular basis?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yeah, we see a lot in the predictive side of things. So, to us, you know, predictive is just being much more thorough in your inspection. You know, we can catch the failure wave further up on the PF curve, if you're familiar with that. So, it gives us more time to plan a corrective action address the issue before it causes breakdowns. We're starting to see more towards prescriptive but that I think is still reserved for a select few companies that have taken the time to learn preventative, learn predictive, have good solid programs. Now that's the next evolution. In my experience, you can't go from having nothing to prescriptive overnight. You got to have the foundations in place. You got to have your asset hierarchy. You got to have your good PMs in place. You got to have an RCA process. You got to have all those things in place to be able to make that jump.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You got to walk before you run, right? 

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yep, exactly. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And with technology, what are you seeing that as, obviously being more and more common to track the data, but having different sensors, for example, to trigger PMs to occur, and that going along the lines with predictive and prescriptive maintenance?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yeah, I'm starting to see more of it. I'll be honest, I'm a little skeptical, not of the technology itself. But more so of how people utilize it, I'll give you an example. I can have a sensor that's monitoring this motor, and the sensor is going to go off saying, hey, I have high vibration. If there is not a good work management process, meaning a way to identify the defect, plan the repair, scheduled repair or the parts and get the work to the technician to execute in a timely manner, that center is just going to tell us I'm failing, I'm failing, I failed. And then we'll go do the work. So, it didn't really save us any time or effort. It actually, we lost some credibility from our team, because we invested in these things, but we're not able to react to the information they're giving us. So, I'm a huge fan of them, as long as we have a good work management process and a spares management process in place.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So how do you ensure that you have that in place?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Good question. There's a lot of work that goes in there. So how do you manage your work requests? If I get a breakdown request or a maintenance request from whoever our customer is. Do we have someone that can actually review that and say, Okay, look into CMS, it's this motor, let's make sure we order one. Okay, do we have the right tools, the right people, can we schedule it in for next week? Yes. Okay, if we have someone who can do all of that and coordinate all that, and we do it repeatedly, then I think we're good. We're looking at that point for about 90% scheduled compliance week on week. And that is loading our guys up to 100% of their available time. So, if we're doing that, then by all means, let's get some sensors and get a little bit more proactive. But if we're not able to do that consistently, I don't know if you'll see the true benefits out of the sensors.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And is that something where people and all of this takes time, right, it takes time to accumulate the data, it takes time for these process to not only be put in place, but to be executed as they should. Do you find that people are impatient as we all tend to be, but they want those results immediately. And then they just kind of give up on the PM, as a strategy as a whole.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

I don't know if they give up on the PMs on a whole, but they definitely are wanting the results immediately. When we work with clients, regardless of industry, what we say is that journey from being reactive to proactive is typically five to seven years, is what it's going to take to change the culture, I can put in all the systems in a couple months. But to get people to actually buy into those changes, use the system properly having that cultural change is about five to seven years. And the reason why I say that is I'll give you an example. And we'll relate this back to a PM. Most organizations I go to they have a PM the PM looks something like inspect pump. Okay, what am I looking for? Am I looking to see that the pumps there? Yeah, it's there good. It might be bouncing three feet off the floor. But it's still there. So, we're good. You may have another mechanic from the same company or same organization or same team that will go through it in detail and they'll look at all these different things, they'll check all these different things. But the procedure itself only says inspect pump. So, the challenge becomes is how do we standardize these PM so we know they're done efficiently and effectively. So, we should have PMs that call out you want to inspect this, you want to inspect that, if you're inspecting this, here's your acceptable window or tolerances. So outside of that you got to perform a repair, you got to get all that documented and built. Now here's the tricky part. Now you actually got to get your mechanics or technicians to actually follow it. You got a guy who's been doing it for 20 years, do you think he's going to read through those steps and say, I'm going to expect this check that measure this validate that they're going to see inspect pump. And that's it. Not why it takes that time because we need everyone doing it the same way. Or else we won't know if it's effective. But to get people to do that, that's a huge cultural change.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So, what's the best way to change the culture there because that five to seven year is a long time. And I mean, we know the statistics where five to seven years from now, there's going to be you know half the industry is going to have retired. So how do we go about establishing laying the foundation and beginning that process of changing the culture and establishing buy in, you know, starting out with the technicians doing the actual work?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yeah, there's a couple different things. So, from a larger organizational perspective, you need to employ some change management activities. If you're not familiar, ADKAR is a great model by the pro science to and Cotters model for changes and other great one. So, you got to do that to communicate benefits help the cultural change. From a frontline mechanic technician standpoint, we want to capture their knowledge, the mechanic that's going out there with a single line inspect pump, we want to know what he's doing. So, give him a red pen, let him markup that PM and list all the things that he thinks needs to be checked. Then when the next mechanic goes, he'll have that list. But he can also mark up and make updates saying, hey, we want to check this as well, this one, we should check less frequently. And then we can start having those conversations to develop these over time. Now, with that journey, being five to seven years, that doesn't mean we're not going to see benefits or returns immediately. If you're doing a couple good RCAs, you're optimizing your PM program, you're going to start to see returns pretty quickly. But it's that cultural change that takes time. But the biggest thing we find is that, generally your frontline staff, whether it's maintenance, supervisors, technicians, whatever, a lot of them know what they need to do. So, we just got documented and start that document documentation process, because like you said, five to seven years, half of them won’t be here. So, all that knowledge, walked out the door.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And do you find so that you're referring to the cultural change, start with the technicians, right? We need to document this we need to enter this data into our system, whatever process you have in place, right. On the other side of it, I've also seen where you have buy in at the technician, and the urgency is there in the facilities department are like hey, we need to document this, we need to standardize what we're doing. You know, I don't want to retire and get phone calls while I'm on the beach, asking questions on how I did this, right. So, let's document it. And there being resistance from the management side of things. So, do you find that to be even more challenging to get buy in at the top level?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

It can be, it definitely can be now those same change management frameworks I mentioned, like ADKAR, we utilize those at the management level. Ideally, this is management supported, driven from the bottom up, right. So, Management supports the whole thing, but let the guys improve it with some support. It's hard, though, because they're almost competing at times, management wants quick returns, they want results now. And depending upon your organization, I've seen this in a few. Management is used to getting what they want right away. So, if I want my walls painted, tomorrow, they're going to get painted. But if we move towards more proactive maintenance approach, okay, you want your walls painted, we'll order the materials, we'll get it all sorted out, we'll be back in like a week or two. That's a huge change for them. Because they were used to that immediate response, right? So sometimes it's those types of things that we see, it's not that they don't support it, but they still want certain things to happen immediately, regardless of where it stands and the overall priority of things.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And how do you recommend for a technician or the facilities department in general, because I mean, we all know this is not across the board, but in many cases is looked at as an organization where part of the business where the money is going out, right? You're not generating any revenue, and it's difficult to highlight the importance of establishing these processes and procedures. And that sell of it, okay, in five to seven years, we're going to get a return on it, where to your point, people want that immediate return. So how would you equip someone or recommend someone going to senior level management saying, okay, here's the importance here is the data behind, the return that you should expect, be patient with it don't give up in six months, and bear with me?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Yeah, the business case behind it is hard, because there's a lot of variables in it. Some organizations focus on if you're in manufacturing, what the uptime is, improvement in up times. If you're in facilities, then it might be the lifecycle of the asset, can I get an extra three or four years out of this before I got to replace it? Can I reduce the number of break down emergency calls? Those are the types of things you got to consider. Some organizations, it's we can stock millions of dollars worth of less parts. So, there's all these different factors you got to consider. And, you know, when we work with organizations, what we'll typically do is an assessment. So, we'll evaluate all the different aspects of their asset management program. And from there, we can figure Okay, roughly from benchmark your X amount away on spares from here, in this industry though not they won't go to benchmark, they'll actually be a couple percent higher, because of regulatory requirements, whatever. And we can tell them what those gaps are. Here's what you would expect to have as opposed to what you have now. I've seen a few calculators online, where you can just, you know, look it up punch in the numbers, it'll give you the answers. But I don't think that's industry specific. It's more of a here's a general approach. So, I know there's a few out there, but I'd be more than happy to answer questions. If anyone has a specific one or they want to build one and then send it to me. I'd be more than happy to do that.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, And I guess it's a good segue of talking about, you and what you're doing right now and looking at what you're seeing down the line as far as COVID, and how that's having impact on PMs and how people could contact you to help through that whole transition of establishing this PM as we move forward. So where can people find you and how would they best, connect with you to having come help them out?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

Alright, excellent. So, I'm active on LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn, James Kovacevic, kind of a hard name to spell. So, if you look up rooted in reliability podcast, you can do it just on Google or on LinkedIn, it'll come up. That's my podcast, talking about maintenance reliability topics each week. So, you can message me through there. Or you can email me at J K O V A C E V I C @ E R U D I T I O.com. And I'll be able to get back to you right away. Well,

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Now people know why I didn't even try to pronounce your last name. Well, James, certainly appreciate you coming on before I let you run. This is all really great content, giving a high-level view of the importance of preventative maintenance. And we can talk about this for a long time, you can get down to the details. And there's a lot of content that can be covered there. But kind of switching gears and looking at facilities management as a whole. You got into it as an electrical space and working your way up. How would you best recommend someone get into the industry of facilities management?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

So, the way I did it, is I just always said yes. Do you want to try this? Yeah, I'll try it. Do you want this? I'll try it. So, I always said yes, but I always took a lot of time to read books. So, there's all kinds of books out there on facilities maintenance, reliability and maintenance, those types of things. Huge fan of just educating yourself. And don't be afraid to reach out to people. When I was trying to learn this stuff, I'd reach out to consultants, people writing articles, writing books, they always made time to have a conversation, may have not been, you know, I got them for eight hours. But if I had a question or two, they email me back or give me a call and talk through it. So don't be afraid to learn. That's the biggest thing. The other thing I think that helps a huge amount is some certifications. Alright, so if you want to continue to move up, if you're a technician, you won't be a supervisor or manager or whatever it may be. Look at the various certifications out there, whether in facilities maintenance, or in a larger maintenance or liability realm. They may seem just like a piece of paper, but it shows you're willing to put in the work and I find those help you get that leg up.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. And that's great bit of advice there because I mean, networking, one, that you can't get through this industry without having a mentor and knowing the right people, because you said at the beginning industry to industry, you're going to come across very similar issues. And you know, you need someone that you can fall back on who's been there, done that, and you could, hear how they would attack a situation. So that is perfect advice there and something that is going to help anyone else in the industry, but any lasting bits of advice, or parting words for you, James?

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

For PMs, you know, you got to start. Big thing to me is consistency. Get the PMs done the same way by everyone. And then you can figure out what's working what's not and evolved from there.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure talking with you, and we'll talk soon.

Speaker: James Kovacevic  

All right. Excellent. Thank you.

Outro:

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