 | Watch the full interview at ProFood World to learn more about asset reliability management in food production. |
Bryan Griffen: Based on your experience, what's one thing that the OEMs are doing right? And what's one area where they can maybe do a little bit better, if you were to give just one piece of advice to them?
Shawn French: What I've started to see, and it's similar to the manual for your car, of, “This is the maintenance you do at 5,000 miles and 10,000 miles.” And it's very descriptive. It's very prescribed. You go to the dealer and they do the work that they're supposed to do. I've seen some vendors that are taking that same approach to a machine.
So if you say, you know, one shift, 52 weeks is 2,000 hours, right? One year's worth running around the clock is 6,000 hours. If there's a 3,000-hour maintenance and a 6,000-hour maintenance, where you as the vendor have a very defined series of work that has to be done, if you send a kit of parts and you send the people to do the work, and at 3,000 hours, we do that. And at 6,000 hours, we do the 3,000 plus another tranche of work and so on and so forth. I think that, yes, it's more money, but it probably translates into more uptime.
The thing that's an opportunity, and it's a hard conversation is, if I go to an OEM and I want a one-inch pillow block bearing because that's part of the machine, and I can go buy that from Dodge and it's, you know, part number XYZ, right? I don't want to go to the OEM and have them hide what that part number is because they want to sell me a 1-inch pillow block bearing.
I'd rather some transparency. Yes, there's going to be specific parts that are custom designed by the OEM. I can't go buy those from my local power transmission supplier. But there's an awful lot that I can.
