What Makes a Good Consultant with Fred Schenkelberg
In this episode, the guest Fred Schenkelberg explains what is a good consultant? Whenever comes the question of performance in an organization—performance of assets—there is always a consultant involved who is helping you make your organization better at what you do. So what is a consultant? The consultants are mainly categorized into three major types. There are contractors who help you set things in motion or strategists who make strategic decisions for you. Then there are facilitators or internal ones who you hire for specific projects so that they can assist you just like an extra set of hands. The last ones are trusted advisors who help you every step of the way and if they are truly capable—which they usually are—with experience and expertise, they can really make a difference with the knowledge and insights that they have.
So how to decide what kind of consultants do you need? Well, there are a lot of consulting organizations who can provide you from single to multiple sets of services but you are the one who has to be the ultimate judge of your needs for the organization. There might be a number of reasons for you to hire a consultant and usually when there is a change in technology, the organizations hire trainers to educate the stuff and bring them up to the speed so that they can do their jobs more effectively.
There are other occasions when your organization may have performance issues. This leads to other issues such as lack of the organizational effectiveness and failures in different projects from smaller to critical levels. Then you have to evaluate your business processes, operational framework, and reliability solutions if you want to get what you want in your consultant. You can then hire a teacher, coach, or facilitator depending on your own evaluation of your current progress and future needs.
Once you know the reasons behind not getting the results you want from your assets, you can go ahead and look for a consultant. But what to look for in a consultant? Sure, their reputation in the industry will speak for themselves but they might not be able to tailor their reliability consulting services specifically to your organizational needs if you don’t completely understand them and vice versa.
A good consultant will always provide your client-specific solutions instead of just trying to impose the stuff they already have in store. When the high-quality organizations are hired for consultation, they always assess before prescribe or implement anything. They have to start asking the right questions if they are ever going to help you achieve the optimal asset performance. Most of the times, the organization are not sure of what they actually want to improve their asset reliability. So, running a quick diagnostic is always the best practice for the consultants. After that, they can start to help you improve your built-in reliability programs by reducing the unnecessary maintenance costs, quantifying, and then eliminating the repetitive problems.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio, LLC
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance – Free eBook
- Maintenance Planning & Scheduling: Planning for Profitability Video Course
Fred Schenkelberg Links:
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