Avoiding Profit Killers in Maintenance (Ep. 126)

Josh Peach  
Welcome to the Operate Intelligently Podcast, the podcast for all things operations.

Hello, Operate Intelligently listeners. This is your host, Joshua Peach and we've got the beginning of what could be a series, the profit killers podcast series. And today I have manufacturing expert extraordinaire Paul Lachance. And Paul has been in the manufacturing software space for a very long time, 20 plus years, I'll let him give you a little bit more information about him. But today what we're going to focus on is really what manufacturing facilities, what people sometimes don't see or overlook is the profit killers based on the facility maintenance and management of the buildings and the equipment that's inside of them that are building all of the amazing products around the world for us. So, without further ado, Mr. Lachance. Great to have you on again, welcome back.

Paul Lachance  
Thanks, Josh. It's always fun to be here on the Operate Intelligently Podcast, it's always great talking to you. Thank you!

Josh Peach  
You, as well, my friend. I'll tell you we've had a lot of new listeners and you know, what's interesting in this world is, as you and I relate to, my expertise is in primarily education and local government, your expertise is in manufacturing, they're all fixing things. We can say they're all in buildings or they all have pavement or anything, but there is some uniqueness to each vertical market in maintenance. Tell us a little bit about what maintenance people in manufacturing do, what they're responsible for, kind of what that group looks like how it's broken down, because there's probably a difference, maybe there's someone that's working on the building itself, but others that are working on the equipment that manufacture products, or maybe I'm off on that. So maybe a little bit of an overview on that to get us started.

Paul Lachance  
You know, you're not that far off. At the end of the day, maintenance professionals are maintaining assets, whether the asset is a building, facilities oriented maintenance, or the assets are those whirligig machines that are pumping out anything from face masks to sunglasses to automobiles. At the end of the day, you're trying to maintain those assets, so that they last longer, they produce better quality products and they ultimately can help drive profitability in your organization by just stretching life of those assets and making sure that they're that it's being done as efficiently as possible.

Josh Peach  
Yeah. You started, I mentioned, I think you've been in this business how long?

Paul Lachance  
At least 25-30 years, I think I stopped trying to keep track but I wrote my first CMMS and maintenance operation system back in 1993 or 94. It was my my first system. So I've kind of grown up in primarily the manufacturing world focused on maintenance operations. I've seen a lot of changes during that time. But at the end of the day, it all comes to the down to the men and women that are maintaining those assets. We just want to arm them with the best quality software and solutions to make their job easier.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, I was that was gonna be kind of my question to you is like, have you seen over the course of your career I didn't realize is 1993. Have you seen I'm sure you've seen over the course of your career probably back in 1993, there may not have been as much focus or awareness and the opportunity for the facilities department and the facilities team to actually drive increased profitability for their for their companies. Is that an accurate statement? Or has it always been, you know, hey, facilities can really drive profitability up for us.

Paul Lachance  
Not only is that an accurate question, it's an excellent segue into what I like to talk about, quote unquote, what do maintenance people do? Early in my career talking to a mentor of mine, I just say an old timer who had been around the maintenance world for a long time, and he was giving me some coaching. And he asked me a question. He said, What do maintenance people do? And my incident response was, well, they fix broken things. And he goes, Well, you are technically correct. That's what they do. But what they really do, and I'm focusing a little more on manufacturing, but I think this is an applicable statement across all areas where maintenance operations is being performed, but what maintenance professionals do is they increase the capacity of that organization. They are able to by allowing the assets to perform better, to last longer, to have more uptime, they increase the capacity of the organization. One of the examples that I like to use is let's just say times are good. I know we're in a pandemic right now and a lot of manufacturers are suffering right now, across the globe. But some of them are also very busy, whether they're producing PPE or whatever they're doing. Say you need to make an increase of your production by 10%. Maybe in good times, sales are good. So how are you going to increase by 10%? Well, the legacy thought was, well you're going to have to maybe run three shifts a day, or run shifts over the weekend, or maybe you're gonna have to build out a whole nother production line and get the assets and the people in the parts to do that. Or, instead you increase your uptime from 90% to 95%. That's an arbitrary number. But by increasing that uptime, you are able to stretch what your assets are doing by just having better performing assets that are running more often, running more of the time. It's way less expensive to do that. It's way more cost effective and ultimately helps drive profitability. So what maintenance people really do is they increase the productivity and the capacity and the capability of the manufacturers that they work for.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, you know, when you talk about the pandemic, and we talk about you know, uptime and equipment time, and I think that the greatest example of when equipment doesn't run for whatever the reason, we can relate the pandemic because our whole supply chain is completely upside down right now, right? And a lot of it is because many of our manufacturing facilities were closed or running skeleton crews, you know, March, April, May and part of June. And I put into perspective, I actually had a conversation with someone about this the other day. I was on a flight, I think I told you a story a couple years ago, on a flight from Madison, Wisconsin back home, and I met a gentleman that actually just happened to sit next to me that applied for a job with a manufacturing facility that manufactures lawnmower blades. It was the most fascinating conversation because I learned about not just the manufacturing, but how many they manufacture in a day. They basically that one is produced and pressed every second of every day, 24 hours a day. So when you go down for even an hour, your production is decreased significantly, right? 3600 lawnmower blades or something like that. That really puts a huge damper on what you're doing and sets you back quite a bit. And when you talk about 90 to 95% uptime, that doesn't sound like a lot, it actually sometimes is right? Because for whatever reason, keeping those pieces of equipment up and running effectively and efficiently for that added 5% takes a lot additional work that sometimes might have strain staff or strain budgets or you know, as well. So it takes some work and take some some planning to do that. And I think that, you know, like I say this pandemic, I think is probably given us 1000 examples, like you can't find paper towels, it's not because they don't want to sell them to you. They can't get them to, it's that they're not manufacturing them at the capacity that they need to to get to get out to everybody, right. Is that kind of a good example without getting into the nuts and the bolts of maintenance?

Paul Lachance  
Well, I mean, the lawnmower blade example is a perfect one because most organizations manufacturers can measure down to the minute what it costs for them to have that downtime. Downtime is one of the kings of profit killers. There's a variety of profit killers, whether it's your team and things like over time, improper balance of work, your ineffectiveness of the team because they don't have good instructions around spare parts. Like you talked about the disruption to the supply chain, there's nothing worse than having a an asset that's down, maybe you're making lawnmower blades and you're down unexpectedly, and you go to get that spare part and it's not there. That's called a stock out and those things are profit killers. And just like you said, in a pandemic, those stockouts, getting that spare part becomes more and more difficult because of the disruption to the supply chain. But there's other profit killers around parts such as poor ordering and loss and theft, and even things that crossover for profit killers around say safety and compliance. If you have an ISO compliance and you're at risk because you're for whatever reason, those things can really hurt. Hurts from fees, fines, insurance hikes, bad will. So all these different profit killers from downtime and beyond. You want to try to avoid those and that's why I always come back to the maintenance professionals are key to that, but to arm them with CMMS software, they can really help identify where those bad actors, those pains of those profitability hurting costs are so you can remedy and fix that.

Josh Peach  
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Yeah, you're picking my brain with all these great points and I want to dig into kind of what you just put in, which is, you know, what's, what's the role that maintenance and the maintenance team can play to become more profitable, maybe some examples. One of the things that you just talked about with stockouts and one of the things that a lot of people sometimes don't get. I was actually at an American made manufacturing facility recently, that the mold making machines, they're made in Germany, and it's like the only company that makes this type of machine. And I asked them, you know, what parts do you keep on on hand? And how difficult is it to get the parts if you don't have them? And it's like, even at best, if you have to order parts that are in Germany, you know, it's going to be an 8, 9, 10 hour flight, even if you know, so having that proper maintenance plan and inspection, and making sure that you're safe and compliant will give you that ability to have visibility to be properly ordering parts that you might need sooner than later and not have, you know, a long downtime or outage. What are some other examples because you've probably got 1000 of them. I mean, I've got like six. So give me a couple of your good ones.

Paul Lachance  
Well, you know, when you break it down in terms of your profitability journey, and really that comes from controlling costs, I like to break it down into three pillars. And software is probably the first of those pillars. The CMMS, the AM, whatever you want to call it, the Dude Solutions products that we do, like our Asset Essentials and say, parts for example, if it's going to be eight weeks for you get a part. And that's not an impossible number to hear. You hear those kinds of things for specialty parts that are, especially in the pandemic disruptions. It's really essential that your software can tell you hey, you're going to need extra of these parts next week or next month because they've been reserved. Or you're low on parts--what parts are you low on? And can you kick off a report or an email or a time on your mobile device say hey, you're low on these parts. So you at least know in advance that you're going to be low in those parts. But the software, I think the first pillar has a variety of types of features within it that are going to help you avoid those those profit killers. Your downtime is another example. If you look at what information, the data, the reporting and the analytics that your your CMMS software, your maintenance and operation software can show you where are your bad actors? What is the sources of your downtime? If you are able to look at all those historical work orders that you have in the system, you can spot trends, you can see our top 10 failure codes are or our top 10 bad performing assets are and you get those lists, you know where you need to focus. So really any of those profit killers, whether it be labor or asset or parts oriented, there's very typically different features and functionality and maintenance operation software, they can show you where those problems are, and help you remedy those problems before they actually happen. That ultimately will drive profitability.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, one of the things that you touched on that I think is also interesting, not just touching on profitability, but we're talking about, I guess educating the boards or the owners of the company or whoever is at the top that's in an office is is labor optimization. I was out in in western Massachusetts at another facility, and they showed me how they were they were at 90, I think they were actually at 98% PM completion month over month. Which meant that they were getting to 98% of the PM tasks that were in their system. So you know that people weren't just sitting in the break room waiting for something to break, they were proactively making sure that things were working and that's something that they were extremely proud of. I think you probably know the account, they were extremely proud of, and then they show that off, and people eat, you know, even if you're not wildly more profitable, at least you're as profitable as you can be. Because, you know, 98% completion, you don't see that everywhere. But on the flip side of that, you're able to generate those reports and do that labor optimization and make sure people are getting the most out of our team that we can possibly get.

Paul Lachance  
Yeah, that's a great example. I mean, 98% I guarantee you that organization is more profitable for that. It's a different client, but I've got data that shows you know, one client for every 1% increase in that ratio, so if they went from 50-50 to 51PM-49 corrective and then 52, for every 1% increase in that ratio, it saves them annually $26,000. So and the math is actually quite simple on that, the average PM work order costs for this client is $52. The average corrective maintenance work order cost is $400. You know, when you have good, not only the good software, but you know, there's also methodologies, best practices and services that go along with that. And you can shift those ratios from corrective to preventive maintenance, you will improve that profitability. That math is quite simple to see. And not only that, it just makes a better work environment, it's safer, the team is happier, morale is better, so they should not only be darn proud of that that percentage because it's awesome. I like to call them the enlightened ones. And conversely, you find the people on the other end of that spectrum that are in firefighting mode. They're not having happy campers. And they're definitely not nearly as profitable as a result.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, yeah. And I think one of the things, it's worth pointing out, because I've just seen so many, I'm sure you're, I think you're on social media every once in a while I see on LinkedIn, there's so many people out there that are just posting, they're just throwing numbers out of, you know, ROI and, you know, average cost per work order. But that number that you threw out, is unique to that client, when they have the data that's specific to their account, like we can talk about an average cost per work order or an average cost per PM. But having that software program or having that system in place that you can actually put your actual work in and the true cost of it, gets you those averages. So it's not just like, you know, someone can't just sit and say, Well, our average, you know, reactive work was $400 and proactive is $162. You really need to have your own set of data points, and your own work history to really start to pull that in and get that done through detail, to be able to measure that.

Paul Lachance  
There's no doubt this CMMS software, in the analogy I often use is like when you're driving down your car, you're driving down and down the road and the Model T Ford, and you hear the engine start to shake, or you start to see it smoke and you look at that dashboard, it's not going to tell you anything. You can't tell, you know that those old cars, you just you can't tell. You just smell it and you got to pull over. You drive down the road to Tesla, and you're having any sort of an issue with that vehicle, there's going to be a metric, there's going to be something on that screen that's going to tell you where your problems are. That's what CMMS software, that's well implemented, where you have good practices, but that's where it's really going to shine and identify those problems. And the same example with that data that metrics those reporting and analytics.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, and that's a great example, if you haven't been in a Tesla, I was lucky enough to get an Uber in one in San Diego. And you're absolutely right. I mean, it's constantly pinging data points. In everything well, I mean, when you have auto drive, you got to know where the red lights and green lights are coming in. But 1000 other things are happening to make sure that it's optimally performing and that the battery is running, you know the right way so that it's not draining too fast or that you're fully aware before you run out of juice because it's not as simple as bringing a gas can out to you. So I love that example. You mentioned three pillars. That's the first one is, you know, software program, CMMS, you know, some form of a software program, and then what that can do for you. Let's take on the second pillar.

Paul Lachance  
The second pillar I like to talk about is best practices, methodologies. And there's a variety of them. Some that I've recently been lecturing and featuring are five S and Six Sigma Kaizen, total productive maintenance. There's a whole bunch of these but at the end of the day, all of these best practices and methodologies are really trying to steer the world organization to operate more lean, I say in quotes, lean manufacturing, or to really focus on continuous improvements so that you can make small incremental changes to improve not only your maintenance operations, but your overall manufacturing operations. Ultimately, that's going to help control costs, create a safer work environment for the team and drive profitability. One in particular that I'm a big fan of and I think everybody listening to the podcast will probably agree is Five S. Five S is a foundational methodology or best practice stands for there's five s's. This is this originated in essentially in Japanese manufacturing is where it first became popular, the origins go back to 16th century Venice shipbuilding Venice, Italy. But it stands for sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain. The reason why I talk about this and how appropriate is for today is because I don't know I'm assuming like me, your closets, your garage, your basement, your attic is probably a lot more organized because we've all been kind of cooped up at home. And we've organized things. So Five S is a great one that it's good not only for manufacturing, it's good for all of us. So basically, it's sorting so that you only have the appropriate items you need to have are in your operating environment and essentially removing the unnecessary ones. Set in order is let's put these things in the right order. So everything essentially gets sorted and set up in a really optimal format. The third S, shine, clean it up. Make sure everything, it's really hard to tell when your asset is performing poorly if it's super dirty. If you can't see the leak, you can't smell it because it's dirty. So you got to shine things And then standardizes becomes a standard process. Finally, my favorite is sustain or self discipline. And that's where these processes become normal, it becomes a natural process. Do without being told. Now I've been trying to train my kids about Five S concepts before I knew the phrase for a long time. But in manufacturing and in maintenance operations, you picture that stockroom or you picture that tool room or a production area where it's a mess. It's hard to maintain, it's hard for people to work in that environment. A Five S methodology foundationally will improve things and that will in turn make it easier to maintain and that snowballs into reducing costs and improving profitability.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, well, as I told you, before we started I'm actually in my basement, as I'm in the process of transforming a space down here for virtual keynotes and speaking. I'm sitting here looking at a wall that a week and a half ago was just completely disheveled and a mess. And I've got eight foot wide, five tiers of shelving, fully organized with everything. I think it's in alphabetical order, it seems like so, definitely the pandemic is getting us the Five S mindset here on this side of the world. You know, one of the things that I'm playing through as I'm listening to you, you know, a lot of times people will use a combination of a number of different best practices or methodologies. Is that something you see in manufacturing? Or did they stick to like, Hey, we're Six Sigma, and that's all we're gonna focus. I know there's certifications for most or all of these. Do you see people taking a little bit of each that makes sense for them? Or do they kind of stick and say, This is the methodology we want to stick to and we're just going to be Five S all the way down.

Paul Lachance  
They're complimentary and there is no one methodology that will come cover everything a manufacturer needs. Five S is extremely generic it kind of, Five S actually sits underneath a best practice methodology think toolset called Total Productive Maintenance, which is a large methodology, which ultimately is very, very, very high level broadly says, everybody in an organization is responsible for maintenance from the CEO down to the brand new apprentice that just started working for operations. And everybody's responsible for maintenance and you have to you have to take your assets and you have to own those assets. So, for example, in that particular case, TPM, Total Productive Maintenance, one of its pillars is called autonomous maintenance. So, you picture a factory and you picture the operators of those assets, those men and women that are standing there near those assets all day. They're feeding parts, they're punching in the buttons. They're babysitting those assets and they are actively working those assets. Those people, you know, they're part of production, they're not part of maintenance, but TPM, a methodology called TPM, says those operators you know, they can start their shift every day with some basic cleaning, some basic lubrication, some basic tightening of those assets to proven things that will make those assets run more effectively, more efficiently. So, those people essentially become an arm of the maintenance team, they are not maintenance people, but everybody is responsible for maintenance. Five S sits underneath that, that operator is going to be able to do that job better if that acid is clean. If that acid is in the things they need to do the tightening lubricating are well laid out. So many ways these things are complimentary to one another. So there is no one. You have to look at your goals and objectives of what you're trying to get better at. Six Sigma as you mentioned, is a highly statistical analysis thing that's really trying to elicit a limit the variability of the manufacturing process, so it gets into high statistics. So, you know, they all depending upon what you're trying to achieve, there's going to be a methodology or best practice that's really going to help you achieve that. And they interrelate with one another.

Josh Peach  
Okay, so check out everything, find what fits, make it complimentary, and run with it. So that brings us to the three pillars. So that brings us to our third pillar unless I missed something on the second, I don't think I did?

Paul Lachance  
No, I think you've covered the second one and it just to add to your comment there, these phrases Six Sigma and Five S and Kaizen and TPM, Google them, look at them. It's really helpful if you are in the maintenance operations part of your business and you might hear of a Six Sigma initiative going on. You will be able to contribute. And it's good for you to understand these things. If you don't hear about this stuff, and you're thinking, well, I need to know more read about it. And there's all kinds of great resources to learn more, including classes, green belt, black belt in the Six Sigma world to get actually certified in it.

Josh Peach  
So the third pillar, the big number three, what is that? What does that one entail? And tell me a little bit about that?

Paul Lachance  
Services. Software is important, but people will sometimes try to implement a maintenance operation solution, a CMMS solution to try to solve problems that they're having with their maintenance operations. If you don't do a good job implementing that software, it's just going to make your bad problems go faster. So it's really important to understand that software is only as good as the quality of its implementation. It's only as good as how well your people are trained. It's only as good as the quality of the data that you're bringing into the system. So that third pillar is around services. And, you know, there's several buckets, implementation, training, data migration, interfaces and support. And you really want to make sure when you're looking at how can I improve my profitability by controlling my maintenance related expenses. Software and best practices, yes, that's part of the journey. But you can't do any if you don't have that software properly implemented. You don't have good quality data in there. It's not going to matter. So you really have to make sure that you  do focus on this to get that solidly implemented solution.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, we call it you call it garbage in, garbage out. When it comes to, you know, if you don't have the right services, the right people and the right plan to implement it, it won't get it. The software only does so much and only does as much as with the people that are using it and utilizing it. So yeah, that's great stuff. You know, we've been talking for the last number of months since March, a lot has been COVID focused for obvious reasons, you know, trying to help our clients and our prospective clients, you know, how does all of what we just talked about how does that all tie into COVID.

Paul Lachance  
You know, COVID-19 in the pandemic has been obviously an incredibly tough time for everybody involved. But I'm an eternal optimist. And I believe that what we are learning during this pandemic will make us stronger organizations. There's a number of benefits to what we've learned in the pandemic, but I think some of the most important ones are helping us understand how important it is to be lean. You know, we talked about some examples earlier. It's a more normal times. When you're super busy from in the manufacturing world, and you just kind of can't keep up with demand across the board. Well, you got to figure out how to do more with less in that situation. Likewise, those of us who are impacted where things are slow and you're either partially shut down, or you know whatever you're being slowed down by, you've got to be efficient still, you still have to try to get and manufacturing for profitable you got to figure out how to seek out a profit. How can you do that? Well, by doing more with less. So those efficiencies we learn, that can help control costs and drive profitability in a good in good times, can be done in these tough times of COVID-19 pandemic. So it you know that those things we talked about in terms of those best practices, five s and, and how you can use the software to identify those bad actors. Those things are going to help us in good times and bad times. Another one is this work from anywhere concept, maybe supported by the cloud and mobile solutions, who would have thought that manufacturers could spend a chunk of their day working from home and still get some work done, still manage your work order process, still take those meetings with zoom, still do that analysis into the data to figure out where you need to make improvements, how they software mobile solutions really help us do that. So COVID-19 has been a global tragedy on both economically and human, of course, but I you know, when you when you look at the things we've learned that will make us stronger, leading into the future, it really is how it really will help us during this pandemic and the next curveball that inevitably will hit us.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, you know, you make a great point in thinking about a podcasts we did with local government, and they're talking about how a building inspectors are going out and and setting up you know, outside the house, and the residents or the builders using Skype and going over all of the things that have been done. You know, when you talk about work from anywhere, in many cases through COVID in many different industries, I suspect manufacturing is one what's determined as an essential worker, your essential worker is undoubtedly the technician, but a supervisor crazy to think about what the supervisor might not be, and they're working from, they're working from home or working from anywhere, leveraging technology like Skype and other tools to be able to virtually be there with that technician to help and support them as well as to monitor and manage the workload, the workflow and everything else. That'sdefinitely something that I think, one of the things that's that that is is all these things that people are doing and with new best practices and the work from home work from anywhere, all a lot of these technologies in this innovation was already there, people just weren't using it, right? It's like, you know, online banking. I don't think anybody's ever gonna walk in a bank again, because you couldn't walk into a bank for two months. So you got used to that process, but that's been around forever. So I think what COVID has done, has has, has gotten people to adapt, adopt a lot of a lot of process and technology that's been out there that they just, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And nobody likes change. And I think that's something that I'm seeing, you know, across the board with with a lot of folks. And I think one of the takeaways in listening to you is like, if you're busy, if you've got lots of orders to fill, you're busy. If you don't have lots orders to fill, you're busy trying to fill the orders that you got and figure out how to get more and become more efficient. So at the end of the day, a facility staff member is never not busy. Whether it's good or it's bad, they're always trying to figure out how to do better.

Paul Lachance  
And that's why lean lean operations, lean manufacturing, lean maintenance, it's all about doing more with less. Are those people, how can they still get that done and again, in the manufacturing world, it is all about controlling those costs as a result of those lean processes to ultimately drive improved profitability, or at least keep up with things until you can truly get dizzy for good reasons again.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, I'd like to close this out with with, I guess, a question to you that I think it'll be interesting. I know roughly how many education institutions I've been in. I'm sure you know, roughly how many manufacturing facilities you've been in, but it's well over 1000 that you've walked the floor. So you've been around a long time. If someone's listening to this and just in general, like, you know, what are some things? What are their key? What are some key takeaways, that someone that is in a position where they're unsure if they're operating lean? There are unsure if they're using the three pillars? Maybe they're unsure if they have the right technology? What are some? What would you suggest? Or if you were in their shoes and being in the shoes a number of times, what what would you be doing right now like you get you get done, listen, this podcast and you go Hmm, I think I'm missing some thing and missing some key pieces that are really/ could be considered profit killers. What would you suggest to the listeners that are in that position?

Paul Lachance  
Well, first, I would start by opening up a conversation to sort of get educated on what are the possible steps you can to make those small, incremental improvements. I mean, clearly having a conversation with somebody from Dude Solutions or somebody who can help educate you on where you would even get started. I mean, ultimately, you're going to have to address probably all three of those pillars. Software is an easy conversation to have. There's we've got quality, solid software that can help do that. But you know, you got to start that conversation with learning more about that. But even before that, it starts with, I think getting with your team, and starting to make a list of those goals and objectives, those pain points, those processes, you kind of have to admit where you're having trouble, and admit that you can make improvements, you're just going to have to make the investment and the time to do that. So often, I'll hear people say, I don't have the time to think about implementing maintenance software. It's silly to say you don't have the time to make continuous improvement. You've got to take some time to make those improvements, but it's a contagious process. Continuous improvement, if you do it right, aided by good quality software, aided by the services it takes to get off that ground,  aided by improving some of those processes through the best practices and methodologies. It has a positive snow ball effect. But it starts with that sort of self reflection, that we need to make some improvements, we are going to be willing to take some time to put into it because it's going to pay off. It's going to pay off big in terms of the dollars, you will eventually save the happier team and so forth. But again, it just starts with the conversation and baby steps to kind of kick it off and then grow it from there.

Josh Peach  
Yeah, it's funny, I always, you know, I have the pretty extensive sales background. And anytime that I was confronted with someone that says they don't have the time to look at it, I always you know, kind of look at him and say, if you don't have the time to look at it, then you absolutely have to look at it because we want to find you some time. And and that's one of the things that that using those three pillars and leveraging technology, and making sure that you have the right services in place, enables that that addition of opportunity. I mean, you can't go from you can't go from 90% to 95% without finding efficiencies and more effective processes and efficient equipment to give you more time to do it. Times not manufactured, we're all given 168 hours in a week. But we were able to look at different ways of doing things that might be able to, to give us some of that time back that we're maybe not utilizing to our best capacity.

Paul Lachance  
There is no magic bullet to this. You're absolutely right. You know but the thing is, you have to get a partner, and you have the emotional investment into getting it done. And I'm telling you, I call them the enlightened ones like that example that client you mentioned in Western Mass. You know, those people are much happier campers than the firefighting maintenance teams that we so often say.

Josh Peach  
Oh, yeah, hands down. I mean, I went in there and they were calm, cool and collected. And they gave me an unbelievable tour. They were very aware of of everything going on around them, they had great visibility into the horizon. Because facilities is tough, right for 90 plus percent of facilities teams, it's tough because, you know, while it might be exciting to have be doing something different every day, you don't know how big or small that difference is going to be. And catastrophic failure when you talk about the difference between a reactive and a proactive work order, that reactive work order costing that much more money, because there's some typically some sort of catastrophic breakdown, kind of like the casserole commercials, viscosity breakdown, that's going to be expensive. And if you can, if you can bring those percentages, like you say, every 1% if you can start to sway that percentage to having that visibility, and that preparedness for preventive work. You are a much happier person. You are much more organized person to like my shelves down here. So this is great. I think we scraped off a whole bunch of things that we could dig even deeper, I'll give you any last words and we'll look forward to part two down the road.

Paul Lachance  
Thanks, Josh. It's always fun to do this and appreciate the time. And thank you very much.

Josh Peach  
Now appreciate you my friend. We'll get you on the docket here for another upcoming episode. And to our listeners, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, can't say thank you enough. You guys are giving us tons of feedback. We're taking it. Every episode we're trying to fill with your requests of what you'd like to hear more about. This is made for you. We're just we're just happy to be able to host it. If you like the podcast and you want us to keep going and get more people to listen, please do a rating and review on the Apple podcast platform. That's what gets us additional visibility and grows our podcasts to a larger market when people do searches for podcasts of what we do. And as I say in many of these episodes, closing thank you for the tireless work that all of our maintenance and operations professionals, not just Dude clients, anyone in the maintenance and operations field, you've worked tirelessly for the last six months, you probably more likely than not you've worked tirelessly your entire career, but hasn't been seen as much as it has been recently. Thank you for everything that you're doing. Stay safe. Keep at it. And, you know, we're one day closer to hopefully getting back to where we were six short months ago. That'll do it from here, and we look forward to sharing another episode with you real soon.

Thanks for listening to the Operate Intelligently Podcast produced by Dude Solutions. You can reach us by emailing dspodcast@dudesolutions.com or check us out on the web at dudesolutions.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai