Bill Green with Fluke Reliability

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Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go.

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As always, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. And thank you very much for your continued support. We celebrate industry professionals all around the world, because because you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly. you innovate, you collaborate, you just are constantly focused on solving problems and making the world a better place. And of course, you make my life a better life. So thank you very much. That's why we celebrate you on industrial talk. Again, we are broadcasting from Accelerate 23 Orlando, Florida brought to you by those wonderful people at Fluke Reliability, go check them out at is it Fluke. reliability.com? Or how do I get to Fluke Reliability? Their

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liability? Yeah, it's emaint.com, Fluke.com. pruftechnik.com.

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There it is right there. Go there. Let's get cracking. That's silky, smooth voices, Bill. Green.

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Thanks for having me on Sky.

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Thank you for being here. It's been a great conference. Have you been having a good time?

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It's been a great conference. So here's the deal.

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It's not too big. It's not too small. It's just right. I don't know. Because I can have conversations I can meet with people giggle a little bit, talk about a problem solve the problem. It's been good. So is that your feedback?

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Yeah. See? I don't know. We've all been to big ones, that we've all been to small ones. Yes. And we've and I, and I'm just I don't know, maybe I said I might be drinking the Kool Aid. But quite frankly, it's like, all right. It's great to connect. But before we get into any conversations about the user community, I think the listeners would like to know a little bit about Bill, can you give us a little background on who you are?

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Yeah, don't don't even go down that road. I mean, you know, as well as I do, eventually, like one additional click, I'm jettison I'm gone. I'm out of here.

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That whole user experience being an old system implementer dot longtime PeopleSoft I now know The saying is oh my gosh, yeah. But it was a beast. And we always had the conversation is like, well, we can't do that, oh, no, we can't modify that field. Oh, you're gonna have to do it that way. And we weren't very focused on the user experience. One question, define customer success, what does that look like

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to you? That is great. So I think a lot of times people see the title. And, you know, yes, I have a team. And yes, we have, you know, we work from support, implementation, training, and education, our professional services teams, you know, they all fall into the customer success umbrella. But ultimately, customer success isn't just a fancy title for a department, or a buzzword title. I think ultimately, what we try to do, and what I do is customer success starts is throughout the organization, right? If our product is not easy to use, the customers aren't successful. So we have to work with the product team have to have to get that feedback, that customer feedback back to them. If our sales team is selling to customers that really shouldn't be using the software, then they're not going to renew with us. Right. So our job ultimately, at its core, isn't the title is our job is to ensure our customers are successful with our product. Yeah, let's get that adoption is to get the results. And that's ultimately what all of us, all of our jobs are.

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Now with that said, what makes this event so unique, from my perspective, is that it is steeped in the user community. Of course, I'm looking out I'm looking into the conference hall and I see a lot of the Fluke products and the solutions. And then there's of course, the third-party providers. And then there's this user community at events like this, do you? Do you just sort of gauge the temperature these individuals want to learn? What have you been hearing from the use user community about? Email and all of the products?

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Yeah, so we have you know, we've we've been working on and we have launched our next generation product, the next 5x 5x, five, a more

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robust scheduling tool to I did a little sprint. There it is like, yeah, that's more robust.

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Me the highlights. Yeah, the highlights. Yeah, so like, one of our customers are tenured with us for a long time. So we have customers are like, you know, and I'm introducing the different people, and we talk about x five and x four, before that there was x three. And so a lot of you know, x four was the system when we got acquired by Fluke. So a lot of people here, especially the Fluke people were

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like, Oh, so that's

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that was the system, that was the system.

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But if that was 13 years ago, right.

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13 466 years ago, we got acquired 13 years ago when I started.

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Oh, yes. So six years. Got it. Nevermind,

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we iterate a little bit quicker. I was just gonna say a little bit a

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little bit trying to do the math here.

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So yeah, they like and so our customers will, they want to get it. I mean, every every customer that I've talked to write, they are seeing what's coming up with x five, and like, I think sometimes change can be scary, right? So they get your they having a very successful product. They rolled it out to the guys, it's adopted. So like, Okay, another, you know, upgrade, like, that could be scared. But they're seeing the benefits that could potentially come for it. But they're saying, hey, look out, look what else I can do. So they're they're making, they're making plans, right? They're talking about, okay, we need to take this back and figure out, what's our game plan to move over to this next this next generation platform?

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But is it not a cloud-based system? It's correct, like, so they're given the fact that it's in the cloud, given? That's where the platform resides? Then you're able to sort of also make, shall I say, tweaks on the fly? Absolutely. Because it resides in the cloud. So this this next x by, you know, launch is a significant modification to the core system.

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exports in the cloud to so yeah, they're both everything's in the cloud. It's all it's all cloud based on the main site, now, x five really, the way I've been telling customers is that he means steeped in history, right? So the founder, started this company 30 years ago, and with your multi iteration, multiple iterations of what that looks like, and when you the core of where x four is built off of and you know, it's built off of x three, but the functionality there, and you're talking about 15 years of iterations, 15 years of consistently building up on that tower. And so, some things might not be architected in the best way. So you're climbing up that because the industry changes, reliability changes, people want to go deeper into asset criticality, and hey, what does that look like? So let's, let's, let's, let's make sure that functionality is there. People want to, you know, be able to better track failure codes, and everything's okay. Let's make sure that functionality is there. So it's all built continuously built on for extreme X for system x five instead of like, Hey, if you could start over again, what would you do differently? How would you make it sorts that much better? So not gonna say like that everyone started fresh, but it's like, hey, we will take a fresh outlook on this and say, Hey, all these learnings, all these things that our customers love? How can we make them that much better and more intuitive and more built to this base core functionality that's there. And that's really where x five was born out of

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it, and the x five I guess, launch and platform is reflecting the user community. There's that feedback, there's that dialogue being a customer success. Individual, you having those conversations and saying, Okay, we like this scheduling tool, but it would be better if it did this. And do you have sort of multiple conversations saying, Oh, I see, I see a common theme in that side of the, of the solution. And then we're gonna do, how do you how do you guys make that decision?

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So ultimately, the customers drive all that. Right. So like, we, you know, I think a lot of the times, like we taught people talk about like innovation sometimes, you know, you see people that are just leaders in organizations making change, like, Hey, this is what the people want. But ultimately, the changes that we have here, you know, we have a product management team, we have, if there's seven or eight individuals here, strictly on our product management team, they're driving the roadmap, they are executing on on on those pieces throughout throughout Fluke Reliabilities. toolset, right? And they are talking with customers almost as much as anybody else at this organization. So like, they work with developers, they drive the roadmap, but they're on the phone with customers multiple times a day, to help influence and drive that peak. So we develop something and we come up with something that we think is cool. And no one else enjoys it. And it's not battable that just sits there and it's a pretty paperweight on the shelf. Yeah,

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it's it's a common tale. Let's put it that way. That's that's happened before. Yes, it has in in this Accelerate 23? Are you getting a sense of other things that are what's that future look like? What is what are people really talking about? Because you've got an incredible user, community, industry, whatever, just what do you hear in going forward?

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I think at its core, I mean, like removing any silos. I mean, that's that's been, like a common theme across the board, removing any siloed barriers, whether it be to processes, whether it be to people, whether it be the UN, most most importantly, the data. Right, the amount of times, I'm still surprised that our customers are capturing data, condition based data that they can never access, like, literally, the data is being collected, and they can't get to that data, whether it's on you know, because they don't have the code to

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give them another system, or it's like, Okay, I've got my CMMS right here. It's in that system. And then of course, I can't, I'm collecting all the data on that asset. But I, the two are not talking right.

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Or, or three systems, and I'm doing double entry, triple entry, quadruple entry. And yeah, there's that was there was a time, that might have been acceptable. There was a time where that was so difficult. Like, that's a that's a dream state. This is yeah, this is table stakes now, right? And our customers are expecting, expecting that, you know, why is that? Because the worldwide web? That Funky that that little little finicky thing. Yeah, tried.

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And they're out there saying, Hey, I see the world wide web telling me I need to be more digitally enabled business, and I better do that. And and that's,

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that's, you know, and speaking of the digital piece, too, right. I think I think I'm seeing more and more you hear the buzzword and I I call the buzzwords out when I try to see them. And I try to avoid using the fancy buzzwords because people get caught up on that. But one thing that's common, I think it's it's being more and more adopted. People process and technology, right. So people feel use those three terms and a great we have a suite of solutions. We have the technology piece that's here. I think there are certainly for a long time. I feel like people thought technology by itself would be a magic one, solve the problems, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna go get a CMMS, we're gonna go get a flu camera, we're gonna get something and boom, problem solved. No issues.

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See it? Let me tell you a story when I was working to start up a sugar refinery, okay, and the big buzz with and realize we need to be a reliability organization. So what does that mean? Well, I need that IR I need that vibration. I need that those tools to be able to perform my, you know, analysis of these assets. And you know what happened? It's, you know, they were just in the cube nobody you use them. They just stayed there. Right there. So I hear what you're saying. Don't do that. Don't do it. Figure it out people process and technology. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I do I, you know, it's always a people equation, right?

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People's a big part of that equation. That's a big part of that equation. Again, and you know, and we end up and we, we try to influence more like we, I talked about, you know, getting back to what customer success is, my guys, you know, a lot of people my team's job is to make sure the customer is successful. And so they'll come and say, No, I can't, you know, they're not, you know, they're, they're having trouble getting the users to adopt, you know, because they're the processes there to get them to leverage this or, Hey, their processes all over the place, right? They're doing this, they're just like, okay, so yes, we have the technology, and that's our piece of it, but how we have to be able to influence, right, because if the technology by itself, and other things aren't there, the technology is gonna fail. And then ultimately, we fail. So we have, so we're working on different ways of how we can influence this, whether it's, you know, conferences like this where they can, and we have individuals up on stage talking about where they want specific actions where they took away to, hey, we had a people problem. And these are the three things that we did to start that journey, where we had all over the place. So

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I think, I think the holy grail to a certain extent, and I put my, let's say, I'm a manufacturer, things are spinning, moving, and all that good stuff. When I start to think about me to be more reliability, centered not on reliability sentiments, just Reliability centered a culture that is, is pursuing reliability, asset management, really, truly doing that. I'm looking for something that is that enables it, but from a simplistic permanent point of view, I want I want, please, I've got complexity over here, give it to me in a simple way. And if that's the pursuit, I'm all in,

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it's great. It's gotta be simple. It's gotta be it's got to be people. It's got to be simple.

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When you were talking about that, one additional click. That's why I when I go to websites, and they have a little pop up, hey, do you want to talk to me? I'm just looking at your website. And now I've got to click on that little x over to the top. And now you're asking me to do that? How dare you? How do people get ahold of

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you? Just email me? bill.green@Fluke.com. Very easy. And yeah, great, Scott.

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