A Reliability Engineer's Tale: 7,500 Motors and a Clipboard

As a reliability manager for a major paperboard manufacturer, Ken Latino spent years working with large, complex machines. His days were defined by a never-ending cycle of manual tasks. There were the pressure vessels and electric motors he and his team checked regularly, the gearboxes that needed to be changed—sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of a rainstorm—and, not least of all, the multitude of paper forms and spreadsheets that needed to be filled out just about anytime anything happened inside the facility.  

It might not have been so bad had the routine yielded better outcomes. But as Latino tells it, it felt a bit like a game of industrial whack-a-mole, with his clipboard as the mallet. 

Latino was focused on finding a better way for the mill to manage the performance of its valuable assets. This required a digital solution practical enough to work in a large facility. It arrived in the form of Asset Performance Management (APM) from GE Digital.  

APM enables plants to adopt more proactive models. Today, rather than waiting for assets to fail, workers are able to monitor thousands of assets in near real time and address issues well before they lead to equipment failure and costly downtime.

Latino likens it to maintaining a car. 

Today, Latino works as a Senior APM Consultant at GrayMatter, lending his decades of insight to help build better and faster APM solutions for industrial operators.

The plant’s shift to preventative maintenance also created a safer work environment for technicians. When every task is an emergency, Latino noted, it’s hard to plan safety into the job. APM helps ensure that when assets are in need of attention, the right tools and personnel are available on site and that safety is built into the planning.

Since APM was deployed at the mill where Latino used to work, employees have traded clipboards and binders for tablets and auto-generated reports. Logging information now takes a fraction of the time previously needed, and data is instantly uploaded to a central database where stakeholders can easily analyze it. Technicians and operators no longer need to hope somebody does their due diligence—the system, coupled with defined work processes, automatically flags critical asset information and ensures timely follow-up on issues. 

Reporting has been similarly streamlined. 

“It was great to be able to go into one tool and have everything related to our equipment. If my boss needed a budget report, he could go into APM and get it with just a couple of clicks,” Latino said. “I think if you talk to any technician, engineer, or manager, they would love to have that because even today, a lot of plants are still using multiple point solutions. They have a spreadsheet for this, a homemade Access database for that.”

Though his work now impacts countless technicians and assets in an array of different industries, he still checks in on the mill. He is happy to report it continues to make great strides in its APM journey.