Why Attention to Detail Drives Maintenance & Reliability Success

During a recent industry conference, a senior executive highlighted Cargill employees’ meticulous focus on maintenance and reliability. I was intrigued, because this level of detail has become a hallmark of my own experience at Cargill.

From the outset of my career, I was taught to ask “why” and to dig deep into every situation. A formative moment came in my second year on the shop floor. I was informed of a “small incident” involving a front‑end loader at a loading bay, but I didn’t investigate. The next morning, I reported it as a minor issue, only to discover that it had escalated into a serious safety event that demanded immediate action. The embarrassment and criticism that followed taught me a hard lesson: always go to the source and seek the details.

Jeffrey Liker, in The Toyota Way, describes Toyota’s “genchi genbutsu” philosophy—literally “go and see”—as a cornerstone of leadership. Toyota leaders are expected to understand shop‑floor realities in depth; advancement hinges on demonstrating this skill.

I have also recently revisited Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, a framework developed in 1956 by educational psychologists. The taxonomy helps educators design, assess, and evaluate training programs so that mastery—not mere fact recall—is achieved. The six levels are:

1. Knowledge: Recall basic information.
2. Comprehension: Understand concepts and their meanings.
3. Application: Use information to solve new problems.
4. Analysis: Identify patterns, organize parts, and uncover underlying relationships.
5. Synthesis: Combine knowledge from different domains to generate new ideas.
6. Evaluation: Judge the value of ideas, assess evidence, and make reasoned decisions.

In the context of maintenance and reliability, leading a successful improvement program—whether at a single plant, a cluster of facilities, or a global organization—requires a deep dive into the details. Practitioners must reach at least the Application (level 3) and ideally the Analysis (level 4) stages for most M&R topics. Yet many managers remain unaware of these foundational theories and may not even have reached the first level.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a proven tool that can elevate your training from rote memorization to meaningful competency, ultimately enhancing reliability performance.

Tim Goshert is the worldwide reliability and maintenance manager for Cargill, one of the world’s largest food and agricultural processing companies (more than 1,000 facilities worldwide). He is responsible for the company’s global reliability and maintenance initiatives and serves as chairman of the Worldwide Reliability and Maintenance Steering Committee. Tim is an active member of the Society of Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) and sits on its board of directors.