Mastering Failure Analysis: The Collision of Human Skill and Machine Technology with Jim Dettore

And working there, I started as a machinist in a hydraulic shop and then moved on to the component shop, building transmissions and things like that. And into the main shop where I did a lot of major repairs and like Caterpillar certified rebuilds on large machines,992s, D10s, things like that. And then into a service truck. I was in a service truck for several years for a couple of different dealers. So I worked for five different dealers across the U.S. over the 37 years that I've been in the heavy equipment industry. And one of them was Johnson Tractor, which is in Riverside, or was in Riverside, California. I think they're owned by Quinn Company now. But when I went to work for Johnson, I spent the first 30 days working in their service shop. And then the next three years working on the East Side Reservoir Project, which was that big reservoir that doubled Southern California's drinking water storage capacity.

So that was quite the learning experience all the way around. Very high profile project as well. Then I was recruited from there by Michigan Cat to be a technical training instructor, kind of where I got into training. And it just continued on from there. So working for different dealers. always presented the opportunity to learn more and more and more. When I finally got into service management, I had an opportunity to go through some really great Caterpillar schools, such as their flagship management training program, which was excellent. And then business tools for service managers, business tools for parts managers. And then last but not least, their Caterpillar production system or CPS, Lean Six Sigma DMAIC black belt training. That really helped a lot, especially with our business now. But what we do is we travel the U.S.

teaching failure analysis to customers in multiple industries, different market segments, such as construction equipment market, construction equipment dealerships. We train for construction equipment manufacturers, several different manufacturers. We also train in the mining sector. We do mobile equipment as well as process, training for mines for root cause analysis. Then we get into the remanufacturing element as well. There are quite a few remanufacturers out there and we train their folks. And then recently, I guess most recently, the last couple of years, we've gotten into the marine industry. And I got to tell you, you know, historically, you would think that the miners could tear equipment up. Right. And they can't hold a candle to what happens in those big ships when they have a large engine failure. So the marine industry has really been taken off for us. So that's that's helped as well.

But what we do is we teach people to actually help them improve their inspection skills for starters, being able to recognize when there is a problem and then act on that problem. And we teach them to to work with facts. Instead of things like opinions or feelings, when those things get involved, they lead us astray. And we refer to that as the preconceived idea. So we help them avoid the preconceived idea as well and, uh, and get them to employ critical thinking skills, which, uh, I think, uh, I think I did a blog post on your website on, on critical thinking skills. If anybody would like to check that out, but it, uh, It tends to make people better at their jobs. And they seem, after the training, they seem fired up and more interested about their jobs and applying what they've learned. Sometimes, Ron, we'll get folks that'll be in class that have turned wrenches for 15,20,25 years. And by the end of the week, it's a...

fairly common comment that they'll, they'll come up to me and be like, wow, this is a great training. One of the best trainings I've had. And I just got to say, I wish I'd had it 20 years ago, you know, so I really knew what I was looking at, but we, uh, we teach them to get to the most probable root cause of component failures or equipment failures. Um, we cover engines, hydraulic systems, power trains, air conditioning. weld failures and weld fabricated structure failures as well in heavy equipment. So that's kind of the gist of it, if you will.

That's an accurate statement.

Well, so that's a great question. Obviously, with the amount of training classes and the people that I get exposed to throughout the year, I've always kind of got my ear open to the guy that, that may have some interest in doing what we do, but also has to possess certain skills. He can't just have technical skills. He has to possess strong interpersonal skills. He has to be relational to the problems that the customer is experiencing and be that problem solver, be able to discover what are the hot buttons, what are the points that... The customer is really feeling the pain and being able to expose those and then act on it. So I've run across a few. I got to say they're few and far between because it is a very specialized skill set when it comes to just the analysis portion on its own. You know, you have to know some things about the process, the failure management. You have to know some things about metallurgy.

You have to know some things about wear types or tribology. You have to know some things about fracture types. But then there's the whole other aspect of loading the machine. And when I say loading the machine, how we load that machine down. You know, is the operator running into the pile of the wheel loader with a bucket four inches off the ground, wide open in third gear? Or is he doing it like he should in first or second gear, you know, bucket level with the ground? and getting a full scoop. So being able to identify and recognize those things is, it's a skill set that I haven't seen replicated in just five or 10 years. It seems to be the person that's got 20 to 30 years experience to have the whole set. And like I said, they're few and far between. But I have run across some folks that I have been interested in. And they've also shared their interest in doing something similar.

The other aspect of it is, Ron, is that we're a mobile training service. So rather than the brick and mortar and folks coming to us, we go to them. And that's one thing that's attractive to a lot of our customers because they don't have to buy airline tickets and hotels and meals and expense accounts and all that for all their people. So that means that if you're going to get on the road for 30 weeks a year. hauling a bunch of training gear all over the country and setting up one place from week to week, different places. And to be able to do that, well, I think that would be difficult to do if you were, you know,30-something with a wife and a few kids at home, right? So there's challenges there as well. And I have faith in believing that I will find the right person or people to be able to kind of continue to carry the torch. a little bit about our history. I'm not sure if you knew Daryl Davis.

Daryl Davis was, uh, was the gentleman that originally authored the failure analysis training program for Caterpillar. And, uh, and Daryl was my first failure analysis training instructor and, uh, back in the early nineties. And he continued to do that until 2002 for Caterpillar 2002. That was when Caterpillar, um, let a lot of the, the industry term was oak trees go. The guys with all the knowledge and experience didn't make a lot of sense to me, but so be it. So, so Darrell wasn't done. So he started this business. He wanted to continue to work and he put this training program together. We simply purchased the business after Darrell's passing. And what's kind of interesting is Darrell was the type of individual. Just world-class. They broke the mold when God made Daryl Davis. But he kept everything in his head. There was no instruction manual. There were some presentations. There were some books. There were cases of iron.

But being able to have the skill set to transform that into the business that we have today. And we've made a lot of changes. The crux of the business being the presentations, what you see has changed a lot as far as the verbiage has not changed tremendously. But Daryl did the same thing, but this was after he retired. So finding that guy to carry the torch, if you will, I feel like that's kind of what we've done with Daryl's business. Yeah, I agree with you.

Well, to a certain extent, yeah, I would agree wholeheartedly. Except for the other issues that happen. Like machines get worked on, oil gets changed, air filters get changed, something gets missed, a rag gets left in an air inlet, you know, or contaminated oil gets put in a component. If you put contaminated oil in a component, it's fairly rare that you will see some sort of indicator other than maybe a low oil pressure event happening. via the electronic control system that's going to warn you that you have impending doom or a failure happening so they definitely the telematics the electronics the sophistication of technology and machines it's come so far it still doesn't seem to be able to head off the failure when something an anomaly has occurred such as the contaminated oil rag you know

That's interesting.

Absolutely. And boy, oil analysis is a whole nother thing. So we teach that as well as a diagnostic component for helping us determine root cause of failures. But from the atomic absorption that you mentioned to nowadays, you know, it used to be historically. That's old stuff, baby. Historically, we couldn't article count diesel engine oil. because it was too dark but with the lnf technology or the laser net finds technology nowadays they can and also we have the uh the pq index which is uh which is a particle quantifier which if used properly is huge especially in mining when we're talking mining truck um your rear final drives and things like that and wheel motors It's just, it's a tremendous tool, especially for us for failure analysis purposes, because the failures already happen. Show me the history and don't send me the report that only has the last four oil samples.

I want the last several years of history because something could have happened a year and a half ago that triggered, you know, the initial root cause of this failure progressing or the premature wearout progressing over time. So yeah, technology.

So machine inspection, Ron, is a critical element, which encompasses everything. So if you pull up to a machine and you do an initial walk around and you've got your eyes wide open and you're recognizing problems, and that machine has physical damage on every single corner and every single panel, Well, some applications, that's unavoidable, but most applications, it's completely avoidable, and it tells us something about the operator, right? So when we do that inspection and, you know, we see leaks, we see lots of grease on a couple of pin and bearing joints, and one of them that doesn't appear to have much grease. Those are things that are red flags.

So I may, and that'll take a little bit of digging.

So there was a gentleman.

Sure. So I spent five years working for a gentleman named Owen Cowling. And Owen was the founder of Red Mountain Machinery Company. The business is no longer, you know, Owen has passed, rest his soul. But working for that company and getting exposure to the heavy rents side of the industry was just tremendous for the knowledge base. And we inspected machines thoroughly before they left and upon their return. And customers got billed for rental damage. And a lot of times, root cause analysis was involved to help determine that. the customer was at fault. So with that being said, I think, I think things have changed a lot, Ron, when it comes to the operator. So I come from a lot of the old school where I worked with a, with a gentleman. He was an operator at Cass Construction in San Diego in the late eighties. And his name was, I don't know if he's still around, but his name was Sam Snow.

And when you would walk up and talk to Sam, he was just this grumpy old cuss, but he could run a 245 excavator that it would just blow your mind what the guy was capable of doing. And then he could jump on the wheel loader and then jump on a backhoe and then jump on a trencher with, with the same amount of expertise. And those guys were fairly rare back then, but even more so now. Yeah. And one thing that I've seen change drastically and, uh, I just talked about this last month. We were teaching a weld fabricated structures course for one of our customers. And one thing that we see nowadays is an operator will run an excavator until the boom breaks in two. And through inspection, he could see the rust line running down the side of the excavator boom because something's broken up top, bare metal's exposed, the rain, the moisture causes it to rust.

But let me tell you, The first contractor that I ever worked for, Terry Cameron at TC Construction in San Diego. They're a very large underground utilities contractor, sewer water or storm drain contractor. And Terry, if he was out on a job site, which he was often, he cruises all of his job sites, he always knows what's going on. And he were to see something like that and the operator was still running the machine, that operator loses his job. You know, nowadays that doesn't seem as big of a deal because there's somebody down the street just dying to have that guy. Right. But nowadays they'll run it to the point that it breaks. And I just don't understand that because of not, not just the cost of the replacement part, but the downtime and the inconveniences that it creates when it's as simple as, as soon as you see it. You do a good inspection as soon as you see a crack. You call the maintenance department. They send a welder out after shift.

That welder gouges it out, welds it all up, just like they would do, similar as a factory repair. And the machine was good to go. You didn't have that downtime and all that inconvenience and unnecessary costs. But nowadays, it's let's run it until it breaks and then just get worn to your goodwill on it.

Sure.

It is. My

tends to be the case One other thing that we're seeing with operators nowadays, and it's really not the operator as much as it is the machine manufacturers, with several of the major manufacturers in North America and Japan, we see the auto machine function, meaning that they get in the machine, they bring up the monitor, it may look like a large iPad, and they go into a particular digging mode. And all they have to do is release the safety lever and touch a lever one time and the excavator digs the ditch for them. And a lot of times it's flatter and more precise with less wasted movement and less fuel burn than the operator could do without it. And we see that. Traditionally, that stuff started in mining products. The large high-dollar mining products where it started and we see it start to trickle down. It's trickled down to the point where we see medium-sized machines. with those capabilities now.

And that, that tends, I believe that that tends to, uh, to invite the operator that is maybe just looking for the job and looking for the paycheck rather than looking for the skillset, because what skills does he really have to have? He or she really have to have.

It's how you turn on the video game and the buttons that you push to get it to start. Yeah. let it go through its paces so yeah

was well yeah

Been there, done that.

Sure.

Sure. Yeah, a lot of truth in that.

I believe that ASM, American Society of Metals, offers their classes virtually. But I do want to say this, Ron, is our business is much more of a niche simply because of the iron and the component experience that we have. I agree. Yeah, so they're going to show you, you know, broken pieces of this gear or this frame assembly or this crane boom or this particular bearing that failed. And the reality is, is that the road signs are still similar. If it's a fatigue fracture, it's going to have some kind of stress concentrator and ratchet marks and beach marks and be smooth and things like that. But sometimes guys have a difficult time putting the pieces together. from seeing that on one piece of metal versus seeing it on a wheel loader lift cylinder pin that's broken, per se. So again, with the web training, web-based training as well, there's definitely a place for it. And I am a proponent of it.

However, for the skills that we teach, the hands-on portion is what people really get excited about. I just, you know, I can't lie about that.

Well, it's an interesting comment. I always like to remain humble. But thinking about that, I've never really looked at it that way, Ron, but I would say that that's fairly accurate.

So I'm going to say that with our customers, we see quite a few of them that still do apprenticeship programs with mentors. There are other places where... The tribal knowledge runs rampant and tribal knowledge can be a double-edged sword. Yep. So if you've got a guy that's worked in the shop the longest, immediately he has the most experience. Well, the reality is he has the most time in service, not necessarily the most experience and the most training. Would you agree with that?

Well, I agree wholeheartedly. That was something that, well, when Hawthorne first hired me in the job interview, They made a couple of statements. One of the first statements was, you know, you work for a cat dealer for five years, you can go to work at any cat dealer. Right. So that was interesting to me. But the fact that they said, we'll train you. Caterpillar has some of the most sophisticated service technician training programs, you know, in the world. So I held their feet to the fire on that. I was the squeaky wheel. Hey, you know, I haven't had any classes this year. Can I get some training? Can I get some training? And sure enough, you know, I was the guy that got it. Kind of funny, other guys in the shop would complain, well, why is he getting all the training? Well, I was asking for it. Those guys that were in their job for 15 or 20 years, they knew their job well.

A lot of them didn't want to leave home for a week to go somewhere to train. So, you know, there's that whole element of it as well.

That's going to depend on the dealer and who my supervisor was. Of course. But some of them, it was annual. One of them, it was quarterly. And some of them, it was, you know, every once in a while, whenever they kind of felt like it.

In this day and age, I would say quarterly, but the supervisors aren't going to want to hear that.

Sure.

Capitalizing on strengths. Absolutely. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So you know who does a good job of that and is very helpful? My guess is, do you probably know Lynn Daniel? Yeah. At the Daniel Group Surveys? Yeah. So Lynn was, uh, Lynn is a good friend and, and, uh, and a bit of a mentor as well. When he brought his program to the dealer in Mississippi, I was service manager there at the corporate headquarter store at Puckett machinery company in Jackson. Yeah. And, uh, and Lynn brought in, you know, the, the surveys with the NPS score and. and educated us all on that. And, you know, that was all well and fine and great. And, you know, we did really well at it. We were number one in the country several years running. But what really helped the most is when Lynn came to the table with the rest of the questions that were on the survey, because, you know, then the net promoter score was based on one question.

How likely would you be to recommend this company to someone else? But all the rest of the questions were answered by the customers as well throughout the survey. So he would bring us those numbers and he would put them in a spreadsheet and graph them out for us. So we could see where the areas were that, yeah, we were weak, but also the areas that we were strong, what we were doing right. So what I did with my crew, and I say my crew, this is my team, my service planners and my service foreman, probably about six or seven people altogether. is when we would do morning walk-arounds. Occasionally, we would talk about the surveys, but one day, we would make it specific that we would talk about the surveys. Okay, this customer is in the shop. How did their survey look last? What were we doing right for that customer? They gave us a 10 across the board. So they were a promoter.

So what are we doing right for that customer that we're not doing right for the customer in the next bay that is a detractor? How can we change that? How can we capitalize on the things that we're doing right instead of just holding the stick? Hey, you're doing this wrong. You need to get better at it. That is ineffective. And I hate to say, you know, I've done that too, you know, in the past.

So they're few and far between, but we do have some that attend our training classes. The service planner is actually the person that does the follow-up. But again, as you said, it's going to depend on head count. You know, if there's one service planner and you've got a 17-bay shop and, you know,15,20 technicians out there, that service planner is just buried.

Oh, that's interesting. I don't have any inclination on that one. Pick a guess.

So, one question. Are we talking during the warranty period or outside the warranty period?

The whole time. I'm going to say 20 years ago, it was probably less than 50%. And nowadays it's probably more than 50%.

That the dealer sees, yes.

Oh.

I would say yes. Yeah.

Oh, this is going to be brutal. Go ahead.

Wow.

No, I'm going to say that that's going to be less. We see dealers that are very strong in that area, and then we see dealers that have no interest in it.

Understandable.

Well, I think a lot of that initially boils down to relationship and communication.

Okay.

Understandable.

Well, I guess that there's a couple different ways to look at that. What type of maintenance are we talking? Because I've worked for dealers that are, well, we'll just say they're a non-union dealer. And the extent of the preventive maintenance is oil and filters.

Yeah. So I've also worked for dealers that are a dealer that was union. And if you were in a truck in field service, you were a journeyman technician, which meant that if you were in a PM service truck, You did the valve adjustments. You changed belts. You did minor repairs. Yep. Outside of just changing oil and filters because you did that too. But you also, being a journeyman mechanic, you probably cut the filter and squeezed it and inspected it for particles and smelled the oil and got a visual representation of the oil sample that you took instead of just taking it, filling out the label, sending it on. You know, going a little bit further. So that's where I believe it comes down to communication. What value is the customer receiving and do they really understand the value? Or are they focused solely on price point? And then the relationship, people, reality is people buy from people they like, right? There's a lot of truth in that.

And your question is?

I think for some customers, it's a good idea. For some customers, it's a bad idea. But, you know, you're going to hopefully. know that customer's history and maintenance practices before you make them an offer like that. Because I've seen some customers, when they get a long warranty like that, they'll run the machine into the ground.

So that's interesting you say that, Ron. I bought a new truck this year for our business. And usually we roll them out every couple of years. They get 100,000 miles on them and we need to be in something new and reliable with powertrain warranty, preferably. So we roll those trucks out every couple of years. And this year we bought a new one. And unbeknownst to me, until I signed the paperwork, the dealer manager said, oh, by the way, this truck comes with a lifetime powertrain warranty. And it's got a Cummins diesel engine and an Eisen heavy-duty transmission in it. So how likely do you think I am to keep that truck over the ones that I would roll out?

And I'm a maintenance guy, so I make sure I oil sample. I do my maintenance on time. The thing is, to maintain that warranty, the stipulation is that I have to change my engine oil every 10,000 miles. And I have to call the company who the warranty or insurance is through to let them know where I'm having it done and what the date and the miles are on the truck. So I stay within the warranty statement guidelines, right? But that's an interesting topic, Ron.

Wow, that's interesting. That's really interesting.

That's accurate. Or they do some of it like they used to. It's just a very small amount.

Sure, sure. Yeah.

Ron, as I always enjoy our conversations, and, yeah, this was a great one. So I hope that the folks listening get a lot out of it. And if they'd like to learn more about our business, our website. www. fas-training. com. So www. fas-training. com. You can follow us on Facebook under Failure Analysis Services or on Instagram under Failure Analysis Training.

I am. Twitter? Not Twitter. Okay. I just, well, so recently I deleted my Twitter account from my phone. I was just getting a bunch of garbage and it was eating a bunch of time and I need to use that time elsewhere. Yeah.

correct? Yes, sir.

There you go. I will say one more thing as far as our training classes. I mentioned that we deliver our training at customer sites. But on our calendar, on our website, you can also find our open enrollment classes. So if you just want to send one person to check it out, to validate it, or you want to send a small group of people instead of having a large class, you know, we can accommodate you there. We do them in, currently we're doing them in Fort Worth, Texas, in Pittsburgh, PA, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.