Joe Caetano with Elevotec

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, mobile product, EAM Hexagon, offline apps, digital work, single sign-on, technician tools, barcode reading, preventative maintenance, follow-up work orders, historical data, AI integration, future technology, asset performance, maintenance efficiency

00:00

Scott. 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,

00:21

well, well, well, welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining and thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates industry professionals. We truly, truly appreciate what you do and how you're just impacting lives, impacting communities, making the world a better place. That's why Industrial Talk is here, and it's here for you. Joe Caetano, oh, Elevotec is a company. He's in the hot seat. We're going to be talking about a mobile product, an EAM Hexagon, EAM mobile product. And you know what he does right there, right he shows his, he shows us about cell phone right there. Matthew, it's a it's one that you should look at on the video too, as well. But he's in the hot seat. Let's get cracking. He never disappoints. Absolutely never. I'm updating my my iPhone to the latest, which is going to probably take forever to download. So I have no cell phone right now. That's okay. I'm watching it progress. Yeah, it's a good conversation mad technology. And I just keep on talking about Mad technology out there in industry. It is just any it's just getting better and better and better all the time. And I still think, I still think maybe just, I could be completely wrong. What? No, I'm not. I think we're still at the tip of the iceberg on this one. I think there's so much at the just going to happen. It's, it's an exciting time and, and here's my plug for into the anybody, anybody that's interested in getting into industry, yeah, it is time. It is time to be engaged and be a part of what is taking this renaissance that's taking place within industry. It's exciting. All right, onto some business. We're going to make this intro a little shorter, just because, well, we've got a lengthy conversation, because we're doing a to do conversation with Joe. All right, you have a podcast. You have technology. You want to be on the podcast. You need to go out to Industrial Talk. We want you, you right there, pointing to you in the video. We want you to succeed. We want you to have an opportunity a platform such as Industrial Talk, to amplify your voice. It's important. It's important for your success. It's important, given all the stuff that's happening out there, it is a must. You've got to figure it out. If you're not doing podcasts, you are being left behind. It's a it's a content creating machine. You know, you can take a conversation, slice it and dice it and make multiple pieces of content that that features you, your business, your solution, whatever it might be. I mean, it's it's a must thing, and you could create a blog if, if you still want to create blogs, you can create a blog from the conversation. It's that powerful. You need to be doing it. You need to figure out how to do it, whatever. Bottom line, come talk to me. Go out to Industrial Talk. I'm easy to talk to, as you can tell. I mean, I'm just, this is how I talk. Okay, all right, let's get on with conversation. Joe, he's a fun guy. Lobo tech is the company. We're going to be talking about a mobile product. He's going to be showing his screen. So if you have a video, if you you're saying, I can get it out there on YouTube, right? Go to Industrial Talk on YouTube, and if you can find it and see how he navigates the journey around this mobile app. Caetano is the last name. Let's get a correction. Joe, welcome to Industrial Talk. How are you doing today?

04:07

I'm doing fantastic. Scott, thank you for having me here this morning. Excellent.

04:11

I'm looking forward to this conversation. Listeners. We're going to be talking a little bit about Hexagons, Digital Works, EAM Digital Works, which is going to be a great conversation. We're going to do a little it's a paper and pencil, but also a watch and see how the master navigates this solution on a mobile, which is pretty doggone cool. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, hand it to you to be able to pull that up and look at your mobile and be able to see it in action, which is always good. So if you're listening to this on a podcast, go out to Industrial Talk the YouTube channel so you can see it in action, if not paper and pencil, just know and reach out to Joe and team Elevotec to be able to have a more of a conversation. All right, Joe, before we get going. Before we head head into that topic. Give us a little background on who you are, just real quick level set.

05:07

Yeah, absolutely. Joe Caetano, practice director for level tech. I've been around this maintenance engineering, asset management space since coming out of school, and you can tell by my gray hair and gray beard that's been a, you know, a whole heck of a long, long time, and have seen the evolution of where we were, to where we are and to where we're headed. And, you know, one of the pieces that are amazing to me here lately, and certainly with the Hexagon piece on digital work and their offline apps, is, you know, yester year, we used to use a lot of lot of paper, lot of paper, and that's different today. So I

05:46

got to push back on that. I think people are still sort of Holding, holding firm, that kung fu grip on paper. They're not letting go, yeah,

05:56

maybe a bit of a false sense of safety that that a piece of paper, piece of paper is always going to get them what they need. Well, I don't know how much they're going to get when that paper gets stuffed in a box, that box gets thrown under a desk or in a cold store and and nobody ever knows what to do with it. And when they go looking for it, they can't they can't remember where they put it. What

06:20

are you kidding me, that that that's happening today?

06:24

Oh, more than, more than what we know. And let's face it, I don't know. I don't know about you, but you know the listeners out there specifically maintenance people. Hey, they already carry a lot of stuff. They got to carry the weight of what they need to do. And then they've got to carry a tool chest with them, and then they've got to carry a whole script of papers and try to write it and then try to transpose it correctly, like it's just a it's just a big nightmare for those folks. Yeah, and there's

06:55

a lot of steps in there that are quite honestly unnecessary and inefficiencies. There's just it's it's all there. But I have to ask the question you mentioned or stated a word that was offline, offline apps. Did you say absolutely? What does that mean? So,

07:13

So reality is, most of our apps, you know, we're usually connected via, via internet, through, through a data connection, or on Wi Fi the Hexagon product is is really taking it a step forward, where, you know we're not always going to have the opportunity to have a live Wi Fi connection. And you know most thing, most people think, you know, the world comes to an end because it can't connect. Well, that's not true. What they've done is they've created the digital work app, which has a connection to an offline and what offline means is I can stow and go, I can sink down all my stuff. I can leave a network connection and be fully productive in an offline manner, and then when I have to come when I'm done, I can just come back into a Wi Fi connection or a data connection and just sync it all back up. Real easy,

08:15

Yeah, but you're going to be showing us a mobile tool on your absolute on your your cell phone isn't that connected. Can it just be connected to at the same time it does? It doesn't have to be offline in that sense, it could be connected to, right? That's absolutely

08:33

correct. And the way it works is it communicates back and forth with the main application, and it syncs back and forth when it has a Wi Fi connection or it has a data connection, and when and when it doesn't. You can go out into the field and you can go and do all of the work that you need to do. It saves it locally. And then when I do hit a data spot or a Wi Fi spot or network spot, they just sync it all back in.

09:00

Yeah. Let's get going. Let's share your screen, if you don't mind. Yeah, give us, give us a give us a little road trip on this particular tool. Tell me when, there we go. I see. Oh, you just cut us up now. You're not there. Didn't we just go through this whole process. We did. We went through this process. We did. We did. It's not boding well, Joe, now I gotta fill up the time and figure out. But you got it all right. Here we are.

09:36

All right, yep, I'm just gonna share up.

09:41

Got it? I see it well. What I do have is, I have an air service. I got chrome. You're you're firing it up. Boom, there it is. There's your your cell phone, like it again. Listener out there, if you're listening on a podcast, you can go out to Industrial Talk, the YouTube. Channel and and see this in action real time. So it's, it's pretty doggone cool. Take us through a step by step. Why? And again, is this, this is, this is your cell phone. But let me ask you this. It could be on a tablet too, right? It doesn't have to be cell phone. It's pretty it could be on a dog, on a computer. It doesn't matter, right? It's still

10:23

absolutely, absolutely. And the best part is it resizes itself, so you don't have to go out there and find an app for a tablet, find an app for a computer, find an app for a phone, one app fully resizable. It knows the device that it's on, and it gives it gives the user that great, you know, that great user experience of using it, whether I'm, you know, I'm using the plus size phone, I can use a regular sized phone fully, fully resizable.

10:51

So here's the deal. So I'm, I'm going out in the field. I've, I'm ready to do some work. I grab my cell phone and from there, take us through step by step.

11:01

13:20

renewable. When you say pull, you're just pulling down with your thumb.

13:23

Yep. That's all. There you go. Got it? Yep. So then I, you know, I can see I've got some color coding that brings me to, you know, the sense of urgency of what I need to do.

13:33

Red, yellow, yield, green. Okay, don't you don't even look at Green.

13:41

Go go past goal, right? Yeah,

13:43

that's right. You don't, don't look at that green. So

13:46

you know, in this one we're gonna, we're gonna fix a hydrant. I'm just gonna go into that hydrant. I can look at all of the information that's relative to me. I can, I can know a bunch of attribute information just by swiping left to right, we're going to take it a step further Day in the Life. Usually what happens is, you know, technician will get there, and then they've got to start to perform their activities. So we're going to get right on here to an activity. And my activity is the first one, which is real simple. And this is the, this is the coolest part, before we used to have to fill out these god awful timesheets. What did I do from seven to eight and all this other fancy we don't need to do that anymore. Just hit the start button that's starting. That's starting to track my time for me. Write any, any stuff down. Now the only,

14:37

the only thing that you're dependent on is that technician saying, start correct? If he doesn't, if, if it doesn't push the start button, then you're back to well, what are you doing? That type of thing, well.

14:50

And the good part here is that we have safety measures within the application that if they tried to complete the work without booking. Some time they get a hard stop. And even if they forgot to start the timer, that's okay. They can just go in there, do a manual entry. But this becomes this becomes repetitive. It becomes second nature, right at I know I got to go into my work order. I get into my activity. Start the button. I can put my device to the side, and I can just start to get a hold of the repair on what I'm doing, and you know that time is just going to keep on going there. And then I finally realized, well, I've got to do some stuff. I've got to go get some I've got

15:32

slow down. You just, you just pushed a button, and then something popped up. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Continues.

15:39

So now, you know, I need some parts out of inventory because I need to go and fix something. And here's another cool feature, and this is, this is across the board. EAM specifically is geared for barcode reading. Now we know that precision accuracy, the better we are with that, the less work we do, the less confusion we have. Yeah, and if, if we can see here, just up at the top, I'm going to hit the button. You'll see my computer by just hitting that barcode symbol, I can actually leverage the camera of the device and just scan a barcode. So my precision just got better, my accuracy just got better, and life gets a lot better, right?

16:29

That just sweet Absolutely.

16:31

Now here I've got some plan parts that I'm going to need to to do that work with, and I can just go in and, you know, there's 10 of them that are reserved that I need to use, and I'm just going to go in and I'm going to put 10 in here. I'm going to take those out of inventory, and I'm going to start using them. Very simple, very easy. Now, whoops, now I'm going to take my parts, and I'm going to go out there, and I'm going to do the work, I'm going to do all of that fancy stuff that I'm doing, and I'm just going to go back into my activity now that I got it up and running, and my timer has been going the whole time, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to keep that going, because the other great feature that we have, and we used to do this on pen and pen paper, you know, the checklist, check this, check this, check that, check, oh, yeah,

17:26

yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's a big safety thing too. So absolutely,

17:30

well, right here, I just got more intelligent, because my checklist is sitting right here on my screen, so I don't have to write any pieces of paper anymore. So, you know, it's going to ask me a series of questions. Did I do? Does it require MOC, no. Does it require a pssr, no. Did I complete this? Yes, I did. You know What date did I do it on? I did it on this date, right? You know another date that it wants to know in time, and then it wants to know some other pieces, like meter reading. And for those out there that are doing what we call usage based preventative maintenance, what that means is that, you know, we've we've traveled the distance in either time or in pieces, and we need to know that information, because a lot of our preventative maintenance programs are now getting geared and driven that way. So we're not just following a traditional calendar and either doing PMS when we don't need to or when we should. We can now do it when we have to right? So here again, you can come in here and, you know, select the different pieces that are available here, put in some text. And this is the I hate typing. So yeah, if you see down the bottom right, I did the repair the way I was supposed to do the repair. I checked it with George, and George told me everything's running perfectly, so we're just going to check this off and put it back in service.

19:07

Oh, isn't that nice? I like that. Yeah, that's that should sell itself. You don't get pencil whipping on that one, that's

19:21

correct. And if you can see, I'm going through all of those pieces, you know, whether I did some adjustments, all of the fancy things that we need to do, you know, if I'm doing some, some, you know, here's a, here's a qualitative, quality of check that we're trying to do. And I find that it needs some attention. And this is another big important part, because we used to have to, okay, take my notebook. I got to create this follow up work order because I found this problem. Well, guess what? I just hit that button right there, and we are going to just generate a follow up work order. Don't worry about the piece of paper. Anymore, and we're just get down to the end. You know, do I need some more work? Yes or No, I can just save that. And that whole pencil whip that we used to take half an hour on took us less than three minutes, and I just became more intelligent, more data, more information. And right now we're just going to go in there and we're going to create that follow up work order. And there is my follow up work order that's going to head over to the planner scheduler, and he's going to get it on the plan and on the schedule, and we're good to go. I have not lifted a pen, a pencil. I haven't put a piece of paper in a box, and this has all taken us two, three minutes. How,

20:47

how is it being received in the field? I mean, I can imagine a technician just what I've seen so far. Yeah, seems to be pretty user friendly. How? What's the feedback from your technicians? Well,

21:00

22:27

only imagined the work order backlog, if they're doing 30 separate work orders for each one of these, holy moly, that's compounding.

22:37

It's it's unmanageable. It's unmanageable. Yeah, you can, you can't, and,

22:41

and, and eventually people don't. People again, back to pencil whipping. The data's poor. The quality is is not there. How often did they do these? 30? Do they do it on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis? What was it? Yes,

22:58

yes, and yes. So the biggest one is the daily because they're checking these they're checking these lines every day. So they're they're making sure that the performance of that asset class, being water, both both on surface and subsurface, which we can't even see. They're doing their regular checkpoints to make sure that people are getting waters at the top. And they would do these daily, and then they have one that's a weekly, which is an enhanced one that does a couple more things monthly. Does, you know, it just compounds after that, from 30 to 45 you know, possibly 50 work orders a month, just trying to figure it out. And we've reduced that down significantly by applying this application and some other features within the am they they throw this in the truck, and way they go,

23:49

taking that use case and and reducing the the absolute work order backlog significantly, putting it under One comprehensive work order using a mobile device. What's your what's the feedback that you received from the people in the field? How long has it been in in service?

24:09

Yeah, it's been in play. So it's been in play in a couple of places for a little over a year. This place here, they've just had it in play here in last two weeks, and the only, the only feedback we're hearing is the technicians are coming back in saying, we need to do this with this round. We need to do this with this round. We need to do this with this round. So so they're finding, they're through osmosis, they're finding things that they're going to be able to do a lot better, a lot simpler. And they're coming into their administrators and saying, Look, you need to put that on around. I need to get that on mobile. I need to get that done. I I'm done with the paper.

24:51

Now, there's always an implementation. Now, let's say I'm I'm an existing business. I've been doing it the old school way. I've got a bunch of paper. It pretty much everywhere, yep. How do you, how do you deal with historical information, and how do you move forward? What's that? What does that look like? Yeah,

25:11

so the historical side, we certainly have the opportunity. Hexagon is fantastic for that, where we have the capability to import very, very robust, very, very strong, and importing historical data in so we have the information, the static, like stuff, it's easily transposable, because most people are Excel people, right? They live in Excel. And the source for importing to Hexagon em is Excel. So it's a, it's a little bit of trans, you know, transposition, and it's a little bit of polishing the data and just aligning it, throwing it in the utility and boom, we're, we're good to go. And

25:52

that example that you provided for the water company, how long did it take them to get to mobile?

26:00

Well, interesting story. They've been a, they've been a user for a while. And, you know, EAM, EAM user for a while, yeah, and there was a couple of times that they had, they had tried to have a go of it, and it wasn't as successful as they wanted it to be. Now, we spent, I'm going to say, about, you know, little over two months modernizing their configuration and changing, changing the narrative on how they worked and how they used the AM. And it wasn't, it wasn't, but more than four weeks in total to the time we showed them, we loaded it, we let them test it, we gap, we gap. Fix some stuff. There's always some gaps that you got to close up. Yeah, you're really, really serious about it. And then we got it into the system. We did some testing, which was a couple of hours, and then the training side was probably about three hours, and they were out of the chute, flying.

27:04

How do you deal with the the realities of people holding on to the paper? How did they, how did they navigate those waters? Are they still, do you still have a print button?

27:14

Oh, yes, very much. So we, we still have a print button. And we can even print from within mobile I think the one reality that folks still have is they want the safety of paper. So we've said, Okay, if you think you need a little bit of safety, I'll tell you what. Use your mobile device. Fill out your safety. Fill out your piece of paper and snap a picture of it and put it in to the record that you just completed now you got both, yeah, when I, when I said that to a couple of users, there was this, oh, yeah, that's cool. I'm safe on both ways. So I did it in the application, and I did it, what we found was, excuse me, what we found was people hovered to that safety and they felt safe for short, you know, a few short cycles, and then eventually they weren't too worried about the paper anymore, because they were getting it in the

28:09

it's a self fulfilling prophecy. I know that I would. It's an added, added step. And knowing human the human condition, I don't want that added step on, yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, I get

28:24

it. And, you know, one of the things Scott is the Hexagon, the architecture and and the time that they took to develop the app, they made it extremely user friendly, and they aligned it with what people are doing today. Let, let's face it, I mean, most people are hanging out on LinkedIn, the Facebook, the Instagrams. I mean, that's the world, that's the world today. And you know, when you think about Snapchat and all these other things where they're number one, it's an app. Number two, I can simply intuitively understand it, use it. I can flip left to right, I can go up and down. I can hit a button. Gives me a little bit more. Hex gun did a really good job in in, in taking, you know, what is, what is not a social app, and really cultivated into something that people can jump into and with, you know, a short period of training and relatively low or short learning curve, start to use it, second nature as part of their day. So

29:31

what's the next shoe to drop? What's a future look like? I this is a very comprehensive solution that exists out there and, and, but there's, it never stops evolving. What's that next shoe to drop?

29:44

Well, I think the excitement. I think there's excitement. Well, depends who you ask. I think there's some excitement on certainly AI. Oh, yeah. And you know, when you think about AI? The context of not chasing the game, meaning not having your hair on fire with maintenance and knowing some, you know some parameters, and knowing some some pieces, AI can really help. It can help with doing some projecting. It can help with doing some forecasting. It can help with doing some, some early release. It can help start to put pieces in. So I'm excited to see, I know that Hexagon has been working on it. I believe they're going to release some, some type of communication on here in the next future. But it will be exciting for us to understand what the AI component looks like, and how will it interact with us every day, and how does that translate into the mobile application, so that, hey, maybe I'm maybe I'm going to one last page, maybe I'm clicking one last button, maybe I'm just scanning some more, right? You

30:58

know, that's the, that's the objective, right? That increase efficiency, eventually there's just going to be something plugged to your head and and it just knows, yeah.

31:08

I mean, let's, let's even talk about that Google, Google, some years ago, had the Google glasses.

31:14

Oh, yeah, yeah. Before it's time, let's put it that way. Now, right,

31:18

right. And I do see, I do see that being possibly, and I'll say it as a device. I see that being a future state device where, yeah, maybe it's not a phone, maybe it's not a tablet, maybe it's, it's a set of glasses. I pull down and I can have a look, and I can bark out a command, and it's going to do what I need it to do and record it, and I can move on to the next.

31:44

It exists today, and I was very fortunate to be able to experience those glasses. And it's, it's pretty wild.

31:53

It is, it is it absolutely is, yeah,

31:58

well, you were absolutely wonderful. Love the demonstration. Love the mobile device. Love the fact that, you know, I lived through the paper world and and creating work orders and the backlogs and all of that stuff, all I can see is just positive from that particular mobile app. That's That's fantastic,

32:17

absolutely. And, you know, just sharing a bit more of my experience when, when I came into this world, we actually used to have cue cards that were that were like three by five. You'd have the equipment nameplate information on the back of it. You'd have the the maintenance schedule. And boss used to come into the lunchroom. Paychecks would go out first, and then he would divvy up these cards. And we walk around with these cards in our back pocket until next week. And then, you know, the evolution of of getting paper, and, you know, Microsoft and all this other stuff came into play. And then finally, some maintenance programs like the little brother of of Hexagon AM, which is Hexagon, MP, two. You know it was, it was a, it was a game changer when I was when I was out there, very early on, many am itself, big game changer. And I think for me, this is, this is probably the biggest game changer. And what I could tell you is, when I was in the field, I wish every day I had this, because there's nothing worse than taking a stack at like, 20 pieces of paper put in my pocket and I can't find it, and oh, it's just a complete nightmare today, today, if, if organizations are not resonating with a digital device, whether that be a phone, a tablet, you know, future state glasses. If they can't resonate that this is actually a tool that sits in the technicians toolbox, then I they're going to be forever just chasing the game and in pain. This, this, this is no different than a fluke meter to an electrician. Yeah, it's no different to a socket set for for a mechanical guy. This is part of life.

34:11

Yeah, no, you're absolutely I love that, and it's just going to get better and better and better, and, and, and there's other topics that can be addressed. But this, this deals with, among other things, the accuracy, but also that the resource challenges. It's, it's, it's a co it's, it's that knowledge base that you can train people in doing you still have to train them in being able to affect the the repair, yeah, or the maintenance, but it may, it goes a long way to make it, be able to help facilitate that too, as well. So absolutely,

34:48

and let's, and let's, let's understand and build on what you just what you just raised, yeah, some others, some other stuff. Let's, let's face it, whether we're privately held. Publicly traded, or even, you know, public sector asset performance is still a big requirement. How are they performing? Are they performing within spec? Are they going to live their full life? Well, I don't know that you can get all that information too sweet, out of a box on a piece of paper. Yeah, yeah. But we can here. Now I'm starting to understand performance. Well, guess what? As I start to understand the performance of the of the asset or the asset portfolio, now I get to understand how well we're performing to respond. So now I can have mean time to respond, right? Mean time to repair meantime between failures. So now I just became more intelligent, knowing how fast I get to it, how long it takes me to do it. And when people are asking me, you know, I've got a production schedule. Are we are we stable? Do we have enough time between, you know, your estimate of failures that we're going to get good runs out of this equipment, because at the end of the day, if we can't ship it, we're not sending an invoice. There's no check coming in. And the rest is self explanatory, yeah, yeah. And with this now I know a bunch of that other information, and so on and so on and so on. It just builds and perpetuates on itself. And when you have that and you're starting to glean the intelligence, the feeling is just much better. You're not chasing the game anymore. Yeah, playing? You're playing the game. Yeah,

36:33

very good. How do people get a hold of you?

36:38

Absolutely, they can follow us on social hashtag, level tech and our website, www, dot alevo tech.com, and certainly, from there, they can give us a call any way that, are

36:56

you out on LinkedIn? Wait,

36:58

we are out. We are on LinkedIn, absolutely follow us. There's going to be a lot of there's going to be a lot of video and a lot of different things we're going to start to do to educate the community.

37:12

Here's here's my mantra, H and every time you need to educate, you need to collaborate, and you always have to pursue that innovation to stay relevant to Absolutely. Don't, don't, you know, just keep, keep at it. You have to. So that's good stuff. Joe, thank you very much. Thank

37:29

you for having me. It was a, it was a fantastic session. And Scott, yeah, we always have fun at doing this stuff, and it's talking about the real deal. We're right. So

37:38

yeah, all right. Listeners, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. We're going to have all the contact in all the contact information, Joe and Elevotec out on Industrial Talks. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

37:50

All right, you're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

38:00

Joe Caetano, Ella vote, tech, is the company talking a little bit about mobile solutions within the room of asset management and maintenance, which is cool. I keep on saying it's cool. That's my word of the day. Technology is fun. A lot of innovation happening out there. Again, I think we're at the tip of the iceberg. We still have a lot of long way to go, lot of big thinkers out there, like Joe and elevate team, Big time, big time, big time. All right. Again, you've got a podcast, you've got technology, you've got your desire to get on the podcast, which you should be thinking about as a marketing you gotta, gotta tell your story. Go out to industrial, talk find out more. Come to me. Talk to me. I'll make it. I'll make the journey easy. No no friction whatsoever. But you need to tell your story. You need to, you need to step out and do that. All right, as always, be bold. Be brave. Dare greatly. Change the World. Hang out with Joe, you will and others go out to Industrial Talk. Find more. We'll be back.