Who’s the Hero in your Factory? Is it the guy running around with his pants on fire fixing all the breakdowns on the Weekend? What if you or that guy could still be the hero AND also be able to take a day off now and then? Or get through a whole week without some production crisis showing up? Wouldn’t that be nice? In this episode, we talk to a Facility Maintenance guru and learn how to get out of the break-down mode. Think it’s not possible? Listen to this.
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Show Notes
EPISODE TITLE: The Maintenace Geek – Robert Kravontka
EPISODE SUMMARY:
This week we interview Robert Kravontka, owner of The Maintenance Geek, a full service training and support agency to help small to mid-sized manufacturers roll-out and maintain Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM) programs.
Don’t know why that’s important? No problem. I’ll get you up to speed as we talk. We’ll also touch on the Skills Gap and shifting perception about working in the industry.
About our Guest Robert Kravontka:
Robert Kravontka has over 30 years in the manufacturing world with most of that in machine maintenance and quality spheres. A 28 year continuous Chapter Chair of his local Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and an active member in both the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the American Society of Quality, Robert also worked for Connecticut’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership “ConnStep” helping small to mid-sized manufacturers improve throughput, profit, and maintenance practices. That level of access provided him insight into the operations of hundreds of shops and plant floors. Robert has a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from University of New Haven University where he also got his MBA. If there was one person whom I would say has seen it all, it would be Robert. Let’s face it, Connecticut has some amazing manufacturing legacy from the first airplane to the War Efforts of Pratt & Whitney. From the Brass City past (Waterbury) to today’s birthing grounds for the latest in submarine technology. Great things are still being made here, and the machinery still needs to be maintained!
Advice for Maintenance Professionals:
“75% of the time your equipment will tell you before it breaks down and the other 1/4 of the time you can put sensors on to predict failures.” – Robert Kravontka
About The Maintenance Geek:
Let The Maintenance Geek help you avoid downtime—and stay out of breakdown mode. Learn CMMS Computerized Maintenance Management Systems and why it can keep your equipment from breaking down. Learn how to use UPKEEP CMMS… It is a low-priced system way better than using Excel and Outlook to track your maintenance program.
A CMMS can give you better control of your assets, by knowing what repairs have been done to each and when. Also, you can set up simple Preventive Maintenance intervals that will keep them running trouble-free. There is a boatload of money being wasted in your shop every day. Find out how much money your maintenance professionals can generate.
Link to homepage: http://www.https://maintenancegeek.com
Notes from the Show:
We have some young people through no fault of their own going to college. They said, “oh yeah, let’s go big”. And it turns out they partied, they had some great times. And I think now the problem is that they got a philosophy degree and $100,000 in debt. And when they got out, they couldn’t find a job as a philosopher. So they were having some issues, but they did know that everyone without a college degree is dumber than they are (said with sarcasm).
Well, now we got Joe, who went to a tech school. He actually got involved in an apprentice program. And he came out with a four-year certificate with no debt, and an $80,000 a year job, to go and turn off the electricity of poor Jim who’s the philosophy guy who can’t pay his electricity bill. So they’re always my story about young people understanding that the factory is not the black iron place where they’re all scarred up, and they’re missing fingers. What it’s now is a place with painted floors, air-conditioning, filtered air, and an intelligent way to make the equipment run any ability to communicate with a lot of people. And will you need people with college degrees? You betcha. Will you need people without college degrees, even more!
Transcript
6 – Robert Kravontka, The Maintenance Geek
Mitch Kennedy 0:11
Today I have a very special guest, Robert Kravontka. From the Maintenance Geek, he happens to be a long time friend, and also a highly experienced and technically oriented person regarding maintenance within factories. And we’re going to talk a little bit about what you need to do, why you need to do it, and what the factory of the future looks like in terms of maintenance systems. Good morning, Robert.
How are you?
Robert Kravontka 0:38
Morning, Mitch, thank you for having me.
Mitch Kennedy 0:42
I like to just give people a little bit of background of how you got into manufacturing because I know you’ve been many years. And you have a very interesting story about it.
Robert Kravontka 0:51
Well, early on, and my formative years in high school, particularly and was under a car. And I just love being under-car working on things, fixing things, making it work. And then the Vietnam war came around. And I was trying to make a decision as to what I was going to do with my life. I like being undercard, I said what g military be pretty good. But it scared me where I was going to go visit. So I talked to some counselors and so forth. And they say we have this great two-year school. It’s a technical school, it’s a technical college. And sounds like you know, take their placement exam, you can see it might be something you want to do. So that’s where I went and went to Hartford State Technical College. And part of the community college system in Connecticut. When I started, they said to look to your left and look to your right, because you’re never going to see these guys again, there’s going to be in there were 130 of us who started in 19 in the scratch.
Wow. So it was kind of cool. You know, so after the two-year program, we were then able to at that point, I started understanding how things were made, it was an associate degree in manufacturing. So we were going watching I’m replacing these parts under the car.
Now I understand how these parts are made. So this is pretty cool. I decided that while the war is still going on, I need to continue to keep going to school because I was a chicken. And so I went to the University in New Haven got a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering. And at that point, we’ve not only learned how to make parts, we learn how to measure whether they were good or not, and be able to understand the science behind making things.
And at that point, I got the bug in school and I was really trying to learn more and more I found something I actually was interested in. And I ended up with an MBA from the University of New Haven. So I’ve developed a business degree. On a parallel to that. My brother worked at Pratt Whitney, and he was at United Technologies in East Hartford. And he became part of their apprentice program that back in the 60s 70s was still a popular option to train people coming along. And he got a world of training in keeping the wonderful equipment, they have the equipment, even then and now that are wonderfully technologically advanced and computer-driven and so forth.
But they would break and these guys were first trained to fix them. As timing would have it. Along Came this process in manufacturing called lean manufacturing. And they would look, the goal of lean was to take the waste out of manufacturing, so you could be more efficient making your parts what my brother was lucky enough to have happened at United Aircraft and Pratt Whitney was he got sent to Japan to learn lean maintenance. And they took the waste out of the maintenance operation.
So when we were talking back and forth all the time about I’m looking at the business and he’s looking at this and it was conglomeration, but long story longer. He now runs a company that he’s one of the foremost authorities in maintenance. I kind of got that idea from him. While back because I was in various consumer goods, bearings, manufacturing, all sorts of different things.
And at one time, I had a sales career in machine tools. So I became the foremost expert in each one of these specific machine tools for fabricating and machining and all sorts of different operations, but you had to become pretty well versed in it. And I started to see this common thread of every one of these pieces of equipment breaks. And when the equipment breaks, all hell breaks loose. And what happens, what happens is, everybody’s looking at productivity, and to be able to stay ahead being a world-class manufacturer, which means you can pay people a lot more here in the United States, but out produce anybody in the world, these pieces of equipment have to keep running, and they need to be productive.
So when they broke, they had to get running quickly. air freight in parts, bringing a motor, maybe it was smarter to rewind it, but there’s no time bringing a new airframe in a rush, rush, everything has to get back up and running. My brother and I kept talking about this. And it was, all of a sudden, these light bulbs kept going off, say, well, gee, if we do this, right, we can train manufacturers to never have their equipment break, it will never break down.
Mitch Kennedy 6:44
That’s a great idea.
Robert Kravontka 6:46
That’s what we thought, in that easy to convince owners of manufacturing shops and so forth. But we were able over a period of time to be able to show that $1 spent on intelligence, my maintenance gave them $10. Wow, in return $10 in increased productivity for every dollar spent. Wow. And then we looked at Well, how are we going to do this? You don’t just you know, wait, yeah, gee, it sounds good. Your equipment will never break? Well, how come? We looked at how they do it now. And typically for years and years in the shop? What would happen is that the machine was would break down or it would be very close to breaking down. And the only prediction they had was, what’s that smell? Or holy crap that is hot.
Mitch Kennedy 7:46
Oh,
Robert Kravontka 7:46
there’s fire. They figured out that it was going to break in about 10 seconds. Why can’t we look at this same piece of equipment and be able to tell it’s going to break in six days, or it’s gonna break in six weeks. And we developed and started using predictive tools. And there are some great tools out there. I was joking about the fact that all of a sudden there’s fire there’s heat or wherever. But before a motor breaks, its temperature starts to rise, and it gets hotter and hotter, hotter. Turtles fall apart Melton others. As the temperature starts to rise, we can measure that. And we know that we will have a piece of infrared cameras that we can go around, and we’ll put one of the techs on a pm. And all he does is once a month once a whenever we determine the right cycle is and we determine that by how critical equipment is equivalent that’s going to break down and everything comes apart, the whole place is in trouble. We’ll do it weekly. If it’s something that breaks down weekly in a couple of weeks, we could get it back up man check that yearly depends on the criticality of the equipment, right.
But once we know how critical that machine is, we’ll send the young, the young hot shout out the new trainee in maintenance, who really doesn’t get very much training with a piece of equipment and some training to measure what the temperatures are. And in reasonably short order, all of a sudden, they’ll get a spike and because they keep it recorded, we need data and the more data we can collect, the better off we’re going to be on understanding and then graphing and figuring out where all these motors are. The motors are one of the things but is the principle holds true for all of these issues. Steam compressed air Other things like that, what we found, oddly enough with steam and compressed there was that it wasn’t that the plant would break down. But if you could find the air leaks and, and be able to insulate the steam and make sure that the steam traps and all of the systems in Steamworks, your expenses went down, you could save so much money by finding the air leaks and checking your steam traps and replacing them on a timely basis that he had paid for all the training and all the equipment he wanted to buy for predictive things.
Mitch Kennedy 10:41
So you could
Robert Kravontka 10:41
have an infrared and ultrasound and all the great equipment. And this paid for it. So we started. That’s where my business end came in. Because my brother, thought of all of this mechanical stuff.
From the business end of it, I’m sitting down, because normally we work with nuts and bolts all day long. But I had to sit down with brains and bucks to be able to get the funding for this. Because we want to train people and how can we make your equipment never break down. And when we sat with brains and bugs, we decided that we would treat maintenance as a profit center instead of as a cost. And by looking at that mindset, the owners started looking at watching, maybe we should invest in some better tools for our maintenance people. So that was helpful. But then we sat with nuts and bolts in the maintenance people because there was some resistance from them going with cheese, we’ve always done it the other way. We have big red S’s on our chest that says we’re Superman, when something breaks, we run in and we fix it better than anybody you faster than anybody. And all of a sudden, they’re heroes. It’s a hard thing to take this hero thing away from them.
Mitch Kennedy 12:09
Good to be a hero.
Robert Kravontka 12:10
Exactly. And now they’re going to go around and fix it before it’s broke. Wait a minute, just so we had to make it a team that understood what the maintenance people were going through. And we were pleasantly able to convince the maintenance people that, you know, when this breaks, it’s five o’clock on a Friday before you got to go to your kid’s ballgame and this and that you’re out all weekend trying to get parts in and do this and you’re just up to your ears. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we can schedule it? So everything levels out and you don’t work as hard? You’re not killing yourself over this. And by teaching them some really simple things with predictive tools that would help find out if the equipment ahead of time was good to have issues. Excuse me. Um, but the real important part of this was to train all the operators with them. Because the maintenance people for predictive methods need more eyes and ears. Well, nobody knows more about that equipment than the operator runs at eight and 10 hours a day. Exactly. They know doesn’t sound right, doesn’t sound doesn’t smell right? vibrate. There’s something wrong. So we allow every operator to send in a work order saying they don’t have to know what it is just something wrong. Take a look. But we also gave those operators it’s a good idea to give them some tools so that they can not just have a feeling about it. Most equipment has various gauges and speed levers and so forth on them. So what we did was we’ll tear stop the machine for almost a day sometimes and tear it down and have maintenance and the operators and everybody works on it as a team and bring that machine back up to like-new condition. When it’s running, we know that the pressure should be at 30 pounds 32 pounds should be in there. Well we’ll take the gauge and we’ll put a green wedge on it and they can see through it and you know if the needle isn’t in the green, comic,
Mitch Kennedy 14:32
visual visual,
Robert Kravontka 14:34
we also found it. Equipment breaks for really only two or three reasons is once contamination there’s some enter no shops have a lot of good in here. So we want to be able to keep the equipment clean. We want to also make sure that it gets lubricated lack of lubrication contamination are 80% of the problems you ever run into when any piece of the worn get out?
Mitch Kennedy 15:06
It’s that simple.
Robert Kravontka 15:08
Yeah, 80%. I mean,
Mitch Kennedy 15:10
I mean, the top to the, you know, you’ve got that bell curve, right? It’s an 80/20. Yep. But how many people do you think actually know that?
Robert Kravontka 15:23
Everybody knows it, but they don’t do anything. Ah, so we offer tools to understand the simple things you can do that go a long way. So part of this training is keeping the contamination out of things. Now, almost every piece of equipment you run has a big giant motor on it. If you look at most of them, there’s a fan on them because they blow fan to blow air over the motor. Gotta have to keep it cool. Cool, right? Of course. Well, that also sucks in all the contaminants and goo from the shop air and passes to them the motor. And after you watch over a period of six months or a year, it gets thicker and thicker, and pretty soon, it doesn’t move on the air motor gets it. Right. Right. So we thought, Well, why not let the operator control how clean the motor space is. So we’ll put a piece of velcro around the fan. You know, first, make sure we clean the motor. When we bring the machine back to light new condition motors nice and clean. We put a piece of velcro around with a disc of filter material. And it just lays on there. And part of what we train the operator to do is to take a walk around the machine at the beginning of every shift. A lot of places used to take and give you a checklist. We’re gonna checklist that dimension pencil with a wood mark. Oh, yeah, no, it’s
fine. Oh, it’s not? Oh, yeah.
Robert Kravontka 16:56
We found what how do we get rid of the pencil whipping? It’s called visuals. And we make sure number one, we put a thing on a gauge is the gauge within the range. We walk around is the filter dirty, because you should peel it off, put a new filter on it is the fan or the fans operating will put maybe a little piece of streamer on it and things should be. And we give them pictures of each one. And they just walk around. Yeah. Well. And that’s all they have to do. But the cool part is, how do you check that? Anybody can check it? So now Yeah, now the superintendent walks by the and we also we always try to get some of the higher-ranking people would come by and when they walk around and they go cheap gauges and in the green. Did you call maintenance, all of a sudden, crap, I should be checking it. Well, now maintenance comes in finds out that in part of the air compressed air system. There’s an oiler I ran out of oil. He’s just not lubricating all the bells. Oh, wait about put it back together. Machines good for another six months, won’t break down because one of the valves stockings packed everything else contamination, lack of lubrication. And then getting the invite. And if we get invite operators involved. And we make it visual enough so that anybody a visitor can be walking by and going see what happens when the filter gets that dirty. Oh, I just feel I’m putting on. No more pencil women. But now it becomes a useful thing for the maintenance department because now they’re getting actual requests from the operators who know the equipment inside and out and go, it’s running a little slow. It’s running. There’s something Yeah. And by doing as in lean manufacturing, lean for maintenance, we’re doing some very simple things. That takes the waste out. In any time the machine breaks down. That’s a waste. But we can do simple things to take the waste out of the system and now the maintenance guy comes in. And he is again a hero. But he sneaks in these little things before there’s a big one.
Mitch Kennedy 19:17
He’s fixing them when he’s there. Eight to four, Monday through Friday as opposed to on July 4 weekend or Christmas or as the kids graduation. Exactly. Yeah. Makes huge sense. That’s amazing. I love that story. Let’s pivot slightly and talk a little bit about you. You talked about visual cues and visual signs of a maintenance thing. What about your opinion of the technification of the shop floor, the industry 4.0 you know, it’s called the Industrial Internet of Things. everything’s connected. All this thing’s talking to Other, what do you think of that? From your perspective of being in manufacturing, as well as your perspective, being a maintenance guru, so to speak.
Robert Kravontka 20:10
Well yes, it is the future of manufacturing. We’re talking, which is why we’re talking about the factory of the future. As we get more connected in our shops, and by connected any new piece of equipment, now you buy a new compressor, and it talks to the manufacturer. And he knows how it’s been running as the filter has been changed champion oil been changed, they have pm setup, and filter issues set up so that good routine maintenance is tried to be followed. It turns out from a business point of view, it’s good for them. And it’s good for the distributor who, excuse me, does the maintenance on equipment because now they know, gee, this thing’s time we got to go in and take care of it. And most maintenance, you’ll get from these types of things. The factory now, they sometimes, a lot of it is based on time.
Mitch Kennedy 21:17
Operational hours,
Robert Kravontka 21:18
Exactly. Oh, the hour meter says it’s time to change the oil. Well, you got a big giant piece of equipment with 500 gallons of oil in it. And now you got to pull it out, send it somewhere because you have to get rid of it, buy new oil and put it in, and try not to screw something up on the machine while you do it. And we’re got looking at that and going well, every 500 hours based on time. And that’s maintenance based on time. We don’t ever want the equipment to break down. But we also want to be lean about it, we don’t want to do PMS needlessly. So what we find is that now let’s do condition-based maintenance and preventive and predictive maintenance. And condition base means what we’re going to go in and we’ll pull an oil sample, and we send it to the lab in the lab tells us this stuff is wonderful, except it’s missing two additives that kind of evaporated out. Here’s a two-ounce bottle, put it up, it’s as good as new. Check it again in 500 hours. Well, guess what, you didn’t have to send it off-site, you didn’t have to shut the machine down, pump all the oil out of it and pump it back in, you didn’t have a hose break and leak all over the floor, you didn’t have a lot of things you didn’t have to do. And you can now take this maintenance person who was gonna do that and have them find something else. That’s brilliant. So what we look at is this is going into the factory, the future, we want to be able to predict these things. And we can have an oil analysis done on the fine, he can send reports back and he can measure it can check the oil inside the machine. That’s way down the line. Because pulling oil samples is fairly simple, right? Or I’m pulling oil samples, send them out. And it saves you a whole boatload of time. But where it does come into view, we have a lot of manufacturers who have two stamping houses and then you walk in the press room and boom bow. And every boom is $1. When I take the brains in bucks, dirty shop, I go bum bum bum bum, you’re making money, all of a sudden stops, you’re not making any money, you’re either changing a coil, you’re changing a tool. What happens with the brains and bucks people is they’re getting their customers are putting pressure on them to give them shorter runs. So they are constantly changing tooling. Well, what we want to be able to do, and you can now put it simple enough to put a sensor on the die with a little magnet on it. And every time it goes by a Hall Effect sensor, it counts a pulse. Well, typically what’s happened is, you know, when you’re toolmakers know that over a period of time every 100,000 strokes, you’re starting to get a little edge you need to sharpen the tool. Well, with the shorter runtimes they pull out the job, put it in the next one and this one goes and sits and waits for the next run. It may go back to the toolmaker, but it’s only had 10,000 parts, right. He’s not gonna do anything to it. But he comes back in and now goes back and forth and after a while, they don’t really know how many strokes were done in a store, what works well is now we have a sensor that just goes back and gets and it goes back could go to any box that you want it to do any spot that collects the data. And when it reaches that 100,000 threshold, it sends a text message to the filmmaker, or it is made to the manager to makers, if it’s a bigger show, I deal with small shops, so they have a couple of toolmakers and they get a thing on their phone go, Oh, 100,000 strokes before they think blows up. He goes talks to the supervisor, supervisor says Yes, yeah, it’s a short run, he says I got another 500 to run, you can have it work orders in, they pull the tool comes back up sharp. And they do not have any problems with quality. That’s great. Because what happens is not only does your machine break but your quality, the bell curve or your quality. As you approach the life of the tool was decently sharp. So that’s where I see the Internet of Things, the industrial internet of things happening.
Because in the old days, it was the same thing where, oh, it’s making an awful noise, right? Oh, right. It’s catching fire, oh, well, we have predictive tools and how to go around and check things.
Robert Kravontka 26:32
But the next step in that the next level in the Internet of Things is to have sensors send you back at a point that says you either set it upon you, it’s very important to set up your
Unknown Speaker 26:53
PLM
Robert Kravontka 26:55
the system, not just for tools, but for the quality everybody’s going to be involved with. And as the data starts coming in, we’re going to have better software that big data is going to be very helpful in manufacturing. There’s a lot of fancy stuff out there that I’m just kind of checking my notes here. So
Mitch Kennedy 27:23
I think there’s there are different approaches for each situation. So I know, the shops that you and I have worked together on the smaller side. And so they consequently have smaller capital budgets. So when they hear Oh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do this new program, they’re always thinking, How much is it going to cost me on on the front end. And I think one of the brilliance of the maintenance geek is that the maintenance geek has figured out how to do this without having to spend, let’s just throw out a number of $100,000 on a big e RP system for a shop that maybe only has 20 employees, even less than 100 employees. You know, that’s a big, big bill to bite into. In order to go to the Internet of Things. I think the thing that you’ve you’ve really polished and made special here is that with training and some simple technology you can get that world-class uptime
Robert Kravontka 28:34
if you will, okay, we’re aware of what’s actually going on with this to kind of draw this future factory of the future together. Excuse me. You really have four things. You have the internet, the Industrial Internet of Things big data, the thing called blockchain in the blockchain is a way to track data. And here’s an example of it. You’re going to go buy a tuna you’re and you want to make sure it’s fresh. Well, there’s a blockchain developed for this tuna industry. And what they’re able to do, they can tell you and give you a report that shows every place that first off who caught what boat caught the tuna, they can show you what temperature was kept on the boat. It can tell you what date it gives you geolocation, it can tell you where it was quiet and the temperature of the water so that you can if you have a very high-end restaurant, you want a very specific piece of toner for your customers. But with that data, you can number one market the fact that you have this to this never been above a certain degree in a thing and it gives you wonderful abilities to understand the product. You’re selling wares that go with manufacturers. The point is, with a manufacturer, you’re not an island, you’re part of a supply chain.
Mitch Kennedy 30:09
sure everybody’s in a supply chain
Robert Kravontka 30:11
as you develop more sensors and so forth. Your distributors, your so your suppliers can now start to tell, okay, you’ve used this amount of equipment, you’re now part of a big team. And they know when they have to have material for you. They also know that we can now track quality levels. And we can check the band’s quality to find out are staying within the right levels,
Mitch Kennedy 30:47
but that whole Six Sigma thing?
Robert Kravontka 30:51
Exactly. But now with the right sensors online, and again, we’re looking factory in the future. We’re not looking tomorrow, but we were surprisingly fast. blockchain has come a long way in five years, 10 years. blockchain is tied to cryptocurrency, you probably heard about all the different
Mitch Kennedy 31:13
all coin offering at all.
Robert Kravontka 31:16
But the big thing you have to understand about blockchain and Bitcoin is what it develops for trust. Now, here’s an example with Bitcoin, there are no banks because it is so well regulated. And it is so hard to get account and get into the account. And it keeps, it’s what’s called distributed data, where if you buy a Bitcoin, in that one location, it shows every other location where Bitcoin is that that was purchased, then you are the owner. And it makes it so that with that thought process in place, you develop a trust with your suppliers and the people, your customers and you, you are able to eliminate a lot of spot checks and cue quality things because it’s now built into the system. And as you get more sensors, your tools stay in better shape, your operators are becoming a more important part of the team. And your equipment never breaks down. And because of this, you can now predict better, you can also get more business because you can now go to the next customer and say, “Look, we control our process like this, we’re the best there is you need to come and buy our product.”
Mitch Kennedy 32:45
I think that’s a beautiful vision of how you can use blockchain. I personally have never heard anybody talk about blockchain for manufacturing. Because everybody’s talking about how they’re going to make money off of Bitcoin. Sure, or whatever the new one that Facebook just came out with, you know that everybody wants the IPO money. So the practical application, I think is really important to understand in terms of the tracking and verification, which a lot of companies have to do in aero, military work, scientific work, pharmaceutical work, all that has to be very carefully checked. And every I dotted and t crossed and all that. Now play sort of the “devil’s advocate”, if we go to this whole system, where we’re industrial Internet of Things, Are there going to be any jobs? Who’s going to who’s going away? And what kind of jobs? Will there be if there’s going to be any jobs? What do you think?
Robert Kravontka 33:46
I think they’re going to be more jobs are going to be Oh, by far, they’re going to be higher-level jobs. There are here’s an example. You started in the 40s. And the 50s, in the maintenance guy had a pipe wrench and a hammer. And he was a strong son of a gun because he added it because whenever we broke up all tear apart, big unbelievable. Now we started to come along and we started to give them newer tools. They now had an infrared camera and an ultrasound that they could put on a bearing and they could tell six to eight weeks before the bearing expires. They can tell just by putting this probe against the bearing that the inner or the outer race was going to be the problem. Well, they knew next weekend, they ordered a new bearing it came in for the supplier they split it up to put her on nice and but they weren’t giant Big Muscle guys. They were starting to use their noodle a little more. I start to First See, where are we, we always need maintenance people, but they’re going to be a smarter bunch. They are going to have tools that will tell them way in advance what’s going on, so that they can then communicate with production and with purchasing and with everybody else to have everything they need to be kitted up and pre-built so that they can then just put a union in something, pull it out, put it in, problem solve. So they don’t need to be these big black iron guys, the one thing Stretton pipe into him. We’ll have a few of those guys, but not very many. Once the factory is built, it will be able to be maintained at a point and cleanliness that you’re going to have people that let me talk about a pet peeve.
Mitch Kennedy 35:56
Please do. pet peeve. Robert.
Robert Kravontka 36:01
There are apprentice programs going on, at least in the state of Connecticut, there are some hiccups with them. Because there you can’t get enough of them. And you have to tie them to if it’s an electrical one, he has to be with an E to electrician all the time. And so anyway, but that being said, they are at least looking at that. And the ability to have apprenticeship programs, wherein the factories of the future it’s going to be like working in a lab of the future. And so the misconception of manufacturing, at least presently is that it’s a rough and tumble place.
If we look at the factory, the future that’s a thing that I would love to have the factory future talk about. My pet peeve is, what a great place it’s going to be to work. You have to use your head and it’s gonna be a place to work that you’re proud to work. It’s not that I couldn’t do anything else so they send them to the shop.
Mitch Kennedy 39:05
Right, right. Brilliant. I like it.
Tune in again next week for another episode and thanks for listening!
