Send us Fan Mail Vibration analysis can be the difference between planned work and an expensive surprise, but only if you collect the right data in the right way. After a week packed with fresh ideas from Fluke’s Accelerate event in Austin, we sit down and get practical about what vibration monitoring can detect, what it struggles with, and why so many programmes fail on strategy rather than technology. We unpack the fundamentals that quietly shape every result: how long you capture the time...

Send us Fan Mail The engineering skills gap is already shaping what factories can deliver, how reliable our assets can be, and how quickly new infrastructure can scale. We’re joined by Parker, president of Fluke, and we dig into what we’re hearing from the next generation of technicians and engineers and what leaders can do right now to make these careers easier to discover and harder to ignore. A highlight comes from our time with students at Texas State Technical College. The talent pipeli...

Send us Fan Mail You can have all the data in the world coming out of your condition monitoring programme… vibration data, OGI surveys, thermography images, air leak reports… and still not improve reliability. And it usually comes down to one simple thing. No one can actually see what’s going on end to end. In this episode, we talk properly about that. The gap between finding issues and actually fixing them. Because too often the insight is there, but it’s sat in emails, reports, or spreadshe...

Send us Fan Mail Mentorship beats tools. Full stop. I’ve been on the road with Maintain Reliability across food factories, metal plants and logistics sites, and the pattern is the same everywhere. Companies invest in systems before they invest in judgement. They gather more data before they build the confidence to act on what they already know. Then they wonder why the breakdowns keep coming. The issue is rarely a lack of information. It’s a lack of guided decision making. Training gives know...

Send us Fan Mail What if the problem isn’t your data at all but the way you’re trying to use it? Too many plants are stacked with sensors dashboards and alerts yet they are still fighting the same fires every week. I see it constantly. Technology gets layered on top of a weak maintenance strategy and everyone is surprised when nothing really changes. In this conversation I speak openly about an uncomfortable truth. Sensors do not fix broken thinking. Structure does. Planning does. Stopping de...

Send us Fan Mail Ever wondered how a “high-efficiency” motor can start wasting energy and damaging bearings before it’s even been switched on? We did too. So we tested it. Using offline motor circuit analysis alongside online motor current signature analysis, we inspected brand-new IE4 motors still sitting in their crates. What we found changed the conversation completely. Critical impedance imbalance straight out of the box. One motor already showing early winding defects before it ever saw ...

Send us Fan Mail Reliability doesn’t fail because the maths is wrong. It fails because of people. That’s where we begin this straight-talking conversation with Steve Morris, the driving force behind Mainstream. For more than 30 years he has been building something different: a movement that puts real maintenance leaders on stage, replaces the hero firefighter with predictable performance, and keeps the community alive all year round so practitioners can share what actually works without the s...

Send us Fan Mail When most people think reliability, vibration analysis is the first thing that comes to mind. But what about the electrical side of your motors. That’s where a lot of hidden damage is happening and it’s often ignored. In this episode we get into shaft current. It’s been around since variable speed drives first hit the scene but it’s still not well understood and definitely not well managed. These stray electrical currents eat away at bearings and windings, quietly cutting mot...

Send us Fan Mail The reliability landscape is rapidly transforming, but are organizations truly ready for this evolution? In this thought-provoking episode, we reunite after our individual "side quests" working with different customers to discover we've both encountered the same concerning pattern across manufacturing facilities. While technology advances at breakneck speed—from pixelated camera phones to sophisticated AI systems in just a few decades—the cultural foundations of reliability ...

Send us Fan Mail What does it really take to keep 81 manufacturing sites around the world running at world-class reliability standards? In this episode, I sat down with Pablo, the Reliability Champion at SKF, the world’s leading bearing manufacturer, to find out. And this chat was packed with gold. Pablo opened up about how SKF have built something seriously special. Their Maintenance Excellence system brings together the best of Japanese TPM and reliability-centered maintenance to create a g...