Alliance Industries’ Maintenance Supervisor, Shane Verkuylen, is working to build a maintenance program from the ground up. Verkuylen shared how the Maintenance and Reliability Management (MRM) Certificate has prepared him for the job ahead.
“The benefits I achieved from receiving that certificate would probably be my newest job. I think without this certificate, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in right now. With my combined background and the certificate, it opened up so many doors.”
– Shane Verkuylen
Verkuylen has been with Alliance Industries for only a few weeks and is working to build their maintenance program into the future. To supplement his work, Verkuylen has received the MRM Certificate and has taken five courses so far with UW–Madison.
UW: What are the biggest challenges you face in your position and how have the courses that you’ve taken so far benefited you in addressing these challenges?
SV: I guess the biggest challenge I faced would be organizing a maintenance department. I mean, what I’m dealing with right now is a system with no paperwork orders, no history of what happened. I’m starting from the ground up. So, these courses really prepared me to implement a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) to start logging data to learn about meantime between repair and meantime between failures.
All the courses have been just amazing to prepare me to start this kind of an adventure. It’s kind of jumping all in, you know? It’s not just getting your feet wet a little bit, you’re just thrown right in the pool. And I feel like I have the tools to be able to do that.
UW: All of our MRM instructors come with multiple years of practical experience. Could you please describe the impact that this may have had on the quality of the courses that you were taking?
SV: The teachers I dealt with… these guys are legends. Just visiting their websites, their personal Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, you can see how much experience they have. When they talk, you can see that it’s not just a façade. It’s the real deal. They know what they’re talking about. Being in the course with them, they can relate it to you a lot easier because of their experience. Maybe they have seen ten different situations of the same thing you’re trying to understand, so they can explain it ten different ways and give you a better idea of what you’re trying to understand.
UW: What advice would you provide to other potential MRM students?
SV: I would say take as many classes as you can because there’s just so much information in there. There’s so much in our industry that we might not experience firsthand, but we might in the future. If we can get a knowledge base of that before it happens, we’re better prepared for ourselves for the future.