Dave Buttner

Emerson’s Dave Buttner joins us in this FIRSTHAND Operational Certainty in a Pod podcast as a follow up to our earlier 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert podcast with Dave.

In this podcast, he shares some of the drivers, challenges, and methods of sustaining reliability improvements for better business performance.

We hope you’ll enjoy this episode and will consider subscribing to the whole FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod series on your iOS or Android mobile device.

Transcript

Jim: Hi, this is Jim Cahill and welcome to another edition of FIRSTHAND Operational Certainty in a Pod. Today I’m joined by Dave Buttner who’s a Business Development Director for Emerson’s Operational Certainty Consulting practice. And Dave has a project management professional and certified maintenance and reliability professional certifications. So Dave, what are common concerns you hear that drive manufacturers to pursue help with reliability improvement initiatives?

Dave: Jim, typically, in the economic state that we’re in right now, where, you know, we’ve seen a pretty extensive growth for many months, if not many quarters, a lot of our customers are kind of tapped out in terms of their capacity. So, they’re pretty much…they can pretty much sell anything they can make and so that it creates a situation where it’s pretty simple for them to see that if they can make more with the same capacity, a level of capital equipment, then they can make more money. I mean, I don’t think that’s rocket science there. That is something that really helps drive a great deal of demand for Emerson’s products and services. And also, we think, you know, it helps drive demand towards our services because we can help our clients make good decisions about criticality, where they should be deploying their technology investments or condition monitoring and their production optimization technology investments.

So, really, the hot economy I think helps drive it and it doesn’t always have to be in other different cycles, obviously to the economy. And sometimes in a slower economy, you know, a lot of manufacturers are trying to produce on fewer shifts. So, they’re trying to kind of control their variable costs, which means that reliability is, once again, very important because instead of running 7 by 24, every day of the week, every hour of the day, they may be running maybe just 2 shifts a day, 5 days a week. And that means that they need to get a certain production level of it. So, reliability is always important, I think that the taste for reliability products and services, you know, does have an epic flow to it.

Jim: Yeah, that’s interesting that in the economic conditions we’re in now there’s lots of levers that people can pull to improve performance and just given the current state, reliability sounds like it’s one of those biggest levers.

Dave: Once again, related to the tight economy, I think we all know that the labor market is, fortunately, you know, I think for all of us very, very hot. But that also means that a lot of companies aren’t staff to get better, they can’t go out and hire the staff to go from a certain production level to a better performance result. And so, they’re more willing to look at outsiders to help them get there. And I think that’s also been something that we’ve been seeing, driving a lot of our business. We’re the helping hands that…they have that capability internally, but those people are tired of running the business.

Jim: Well, that makes a lot of sense. So, how does reliability enhancement help businesses reach their business objectives?

Dave: The math is pretty simple. If you have a fixed capital investment and you can produce more oil, tablets, whatever it is you make, with the same capital investment, it’s gonna increase your return on assets and that helps drive shareholder value for our customers. So, the math is pretty simple and it makes it kind of an easy sale at the conceptual level, but what I think a lot of times our customers don’t always appreciate is the complexity that it takes to simply get another 1% or 2% of equipment availability, you know, out of their plants. That’s…logically, it’s easy. Tactically, it’s…can be challenging. And that’s one of the things that we help our clients sort out is what should be the sequence of events that help drive them towards a higher level of performance.

Jim: There’s a lot of things that it sounds like it’s an easy thing, but when you really try to get in and do it, then that’s where the challenge opens up. So, if a manufacturer or a producer decides to move forward and work with the Emerson reliability consulting team, what are common preparation steps they would take to prepare for the engagement?

Dave: Generally speaking, they have to have good performance measurements. So, if they’re hiring us to help them improve their line efficiencies, if it’s consumer-packaged goods, operation, or just their overall throughput, if we’re talking about a larger, you know, perhaps an oil refinery or petrochem facility, they need another…their measurables, they need to know how they perform now. Ideally, they have some sense of what the root cause issues are in terms of what’s affecting their performance, their reliability performance. So, if they don’t have…chances are they’re not gonna be talking to us unless they have those measures. But if they’re gonna engage us, they need to have more detailed measurements in place so that we can establish a baseline and agree upon what the targets are. Because it’s not just about deploying the tools and the technology.

It’s about driving towards a better performance level, which means that we have to have a baseline measurement and we have to have a committed to target improvement. And then it’s our job to help the customer get there. It’s not our job to get there, they’re hiring us to help them. So, besides measurement, there’s also—they have to figure out what they’re willing to commit in terms of the resources internally to help drive the results. Because once again, they’re not hiring us to run their plant better, we’re there to help them, provide them with the tools and the techniques to do it.

Jim: You really need the measurements to start with baseline to know and then that’s all part of the business case where you’re at, where you’re trying to get to. How does engagement typically kickoff?

Dave: It’s very common for us to open up with establishing what we might call strategies, or customer might call policies. We sometimes will call them project rules, that is… Okay, so we’re going to improve the maintenance strategies or the predictive and the preventive maintenance procedures that a client deploys to maintain their equipment. We have to agree with them, like, in what should be their standards for what makes a good preventive maintenance procedure. What does a good job plan look like? So, it’s really establishing standards at the outset so that we all agree, and we help kind of facilitate that. We don’t come in and we tell them what to do, we help facilitate them towards kind of a best practices-oriented outcome. So, that establishes the foundation for what it is we’re gonna do next. And beyond standard project management, procedures and tools that we might put in place for a project, that’s really kind of at the heart of how we kick off a project with a client.

Jim: Yeah, and that sounds like important, especially if they have cross-functional team working at that to gain alignment there on the front en