Reliability Radio EP 373: Carlos Gonzalez, Remsoft

I think a lot of us practitioners in there are kind of used to the tried true story.

The only time you really talk about MRO is when they didn't have something.

Right.

So let's kind of dive into that kind of space a little bit.

MRO tends to be usually an afterthought.

Right.

It's usually something that you get to after you get your your PM set up or after you get those sensors on vibration or after you do that RCA, then you start to look at it or it's like something that you find during the RCA that we didn't have something, the after action, those incidents, the emergency logs of what didn't get fixed.

So tell us like your point of view as somebody that spent 20 plus years looking at inventory.

Why do you think that is? I mean, everybody has spare parts squirreled away somewhere, right? So why do you think that we still can't get that right? Well,

it's a combination and most of the time it's been like that for 40, 50 years.

It's no one's fault.

It was inherited and nothing was done with it.

So most of the companies that we work for have been in business for several years.

Oftentimes, we find parts that were purchased back in the 70s and are still there.

No one wants to get rid of them because what if you need them tomorrow? So it's an exercise of grabbing those minds and expertise and aligning them with data to understand, do you really need it? Or can you do without it? Or there's a better option.

But if no one asks those questions, those parts can be sitting there for hundreds of years.

And the odd part is that that knowledge that currently exists is going to go out the door as the people retire.

So generations coming behind are nowhere equipped to make those decisions whatsoever.

So

do you think that those decisions don't get made out of fear, right? Totally fear? Or is there some combination of the knowledge and understanding of a better way to run MRO just may not be widely known?

That, the latter.

There is a better way, but people are so down to the daily operation that it gets missed every single

time.

So I got to tell you from my own personal experience, and I've said this on previous podcasts.

if you got a part that's down and you just need one, you end up buying three, right? You buy one to put it on there then because you didn't fix the real problem, it breaks.