Colin Morris with MaintainX

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

MaintainX, asset management, maintenance reliability, AI mobility, digital work execution, integration, data strategy, overall equipment efficiency, mobile application, voice summaries, tribal knowledge, SMRP conference, industrial innovation, supply chain insights.

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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 all

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right once again. Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you for your continued support of this platform, this platform that celebrates you industrial professionals all around the world. We are here Fort Worth Texas, SMRP on the floor. It's a great conference if you're in the world of asset management, maintenance, reliability, it's a must attend event. You get to you get to connect with great people. One of the great people that are here is Colin. He's with MaintainX. He's in the hot seat, and I just can't wait to have this conversation. Let's get corrected. Hey, how you doing? I'm

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doing well. Thanks for having me on, Scott, yeah. How long you been with MaintainX? Just over two years.

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You've seen a lot of changes, lots of changes. There's a lot of changes happening over there. Sure are. Been

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working in the s industry for eight years at this point, so it's been been a fun journey with MaintainX over the past two where'd

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you get your where did you start your career?

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I have been working in the software business for over 10 years before joining MaintainX, I was at Rockwell Automation, working on the text product. So have seen, seen it all at this point?

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Wow, you're, that's a great group of people. Yeah, Rockwell, geez, that's, that's good. Well, we don't have to go into your background. You just gave that, gave that to us. But let's, let's, let's roll right into it. Now, is this your first SMRP experience?

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yeah, but, but now you it's pretty good.

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I am very impressed with what I've seen so far. Yeah, yeah.

02:38

So take us through a little about MaintainX I've seen that you've been in the news. You've got some fusion of some money, if I remember correctly, that's right. Talk to us about what that means.

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Yeah. So we recently raised another round of funding to help enhance a lot of the features that we already have in place. So a lot of this is going to go into our feature development focused on AI mobility first, and fundamentally growing the product to be even stronger than it is already today.

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Because, because you, you're, you're going down that road. What do you see that our priorities, if I have my capital, if I have the money looking at that strategic vision of the future as it pertains to this industry, what are we? I know AI, but tell us a little bit more. What, what? What do you deploy now? A lot

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of it is focused on building out a lot of more mobility first features. So we have always been a mobile first application. So we are enhancing even more of the functionality to allow for not only the technicians to use the application, but anybody within the business. So enabling our operators, enabling our safety operations, everybody within the business should be using some form of digital work execution platform. And so we're very focused on getting more of those people into our system, presenting easy to understand work instructions for not only maintenance actions, but anything else that happens within the business,

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explain to the listener how MaintainX is. I mean, you've got to admit you come to a show like this, yep, there are a lot of solutions. They definitely overlap in functionality. It seems I'm not going to dive deep into it, but it just appears to be, I mean, the reality of I'm tracking an asset, and I'm writing a work order against and I'm looking at all it's a use case that's been used 100% so how does MaintainX recognize and differentiates itself?

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I think the big thing is, we're looking at extensibility. What does that mean? We are partnering with a whole bunch of people at this show to ingest information, not only from our system, but also from wireless sensors from SCADA, from. ERPs and fundamentally trying to build out a connected platform. The days of having a standalone EAM or CMMS are gone. In my opinion, we need to be able to pull information from everywhere to help influence better maintenance decisions and fundamentally improve the way that we are executing against our jobs and increasing asset availability.

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But that would include bidirectional type of kind of connectivity, APIs, whatever, whatever you want to call it bidirectional to the sort of the system of record, which tends to always be that. ERP, so there's no, I mean, you're just, and with that said, Are you deter? You're agnostic to that. That's it. It's just do whatever API bridge you have, and then you just sort of make sure that it's whatever map those fields, or whatever, whatever you want to call it. That's right. How does, how does MaintainX say, hey, I want data from this system, from your technology stack. You got this system, you got that system, you've got whatever, all these systems, and we determine that that piece of data, or that collection of data, is important to this particular asset. Do you work with the clients to be able to map that out? Yeah,

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absolutely. One of the biggest things that we need to do is understand the data strategy. So how are we going to get information between these two different systems? We have a team in house that builds integrations. We also have a variety of different self serve tools. So our code, no code, no code tools. You can, for example, install an ignition module directly within the platform, and it's going to start feeding us any of the measures, asset status, anything that exists within ignition directly into our system to help influence those maintenance schedules, as well as get a better understanding in terms of asset availability. It's one of those big challenges with OE, a lot of people blame me. Oe, OEE, overall equipment efficiency. Thank you very much. Yeah. So we want to get data from all these systems to have a better understanding in terms of what is actually happening within their business, and to give them real time analytics on how it's performing.

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Isn't there a point of return like you're saying, hey, I want that data. I want that data. I want that data. I want all this data. I want this data to be hammering on on this particular asset. Is there a point where there's too much data and it's just like the point of diminishing returns? If I have this, this and this, I'm 95% there, I

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would say. So I think one thing that people always need to understand is, how is it actually going to impact this business? Right? You can definitely connect into all of the data systems. Is going to add value, maybe not. And so a lot of the time we like to say, You got to crawl, walk, run, you got to set your baseline, you got to build out your asset information, you got to build out your provider maintenance schedules. And then let's talk about extensibility. On how we can pull in information from other systems. So it's not always all at once. It really depends on where the customer is coming from, and so we just want to make sure that when they are ready to upgrade their maintenance practices, we have the tools to help enable that.

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So if I'm a manufacturer, right? And I say, hey, MaintainX is for me. I need it. I I want it, or whatever. What is your typical implement implementation period? You know, don't give me 18 months. Don't do that.

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So our average time to implement is around three weeks. It is outcome based. So we like to say, we're not going to say, you have three weeks and you're done. We're going to make sure that we have a measurable outcome. We have goals, and once we've hit those goals, that's when we say, Yeah, implementation is complete. So we have a team of over 40 implementation consultants. Everybody has worked within the industry. Most of them are engineers by training, and so they are providing that expertise to help you get set up, provide best practices and fundamentally ensure that you're going to be successful.

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I got a because many of these systems start to allow third party connectivity. Does MaintainX have third party solutions connected to

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it. We definitely do so a variety of the different vibration vendors that are here at SMRP mentioned already, the ignition connector, Kepware, and then for other industrial protocols, thinking MQTT, so standardized messaging protocol for industrial controls. Outside of that, we also look at things like ERPs. So we're an SAP partner, for example. We connect into Oracle in for all of those big solutions that exist today, and have very fast implementation times for those integrations as well.

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That's pretty cool. Now, with all that said, you're strictly and I'm you must have a desktop version of your solution. Got it. I mean, you're all mobile first, and get it. I get it. But the reality is one, there's that desktop and, and, and it just, how do I say this? But you still. All from a mobile perspective, I can use my cell phone. Yeah, it's

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available for iOS, Android devices, phones, tablets, about 90, over 90% of our technicians. So anybody that's actually executing against work uses that mobile application. We do have a full web client as well, so it's feature parity between the two. The only thing that's not available on our mobile devices. Are reporting. Why? Doesn't scale, and fundamentally, anybody that's generating reports is gonna

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be sitting at a desk. Oh, so. But what if I, what if I'm using your mobile device and I wanted to report on that particular pump? Can I just sort of hit a print and then it sends it someplace? Or we

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definitely see customers doing that. We'll we'll definitely encourage them to use the mobile application. Why we find that you get better data, you get better information. You lose a lot of that information as soon as you walk away from that asset. And so getting it on the mobile device is huge.

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Yeah, you eliminate the pencil whipping, that's right. And how do you eliminate the pencil whipping? Because, because, let's put it this way, if I'm on a mobile device, I have, well, relatively speaking, limited real estate. So if I have to sit there and enter information, how? Tell me how you've simplified that. Yeah.

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So the majority of the work instructions have pictures, they have videos, they have links out to external documentation that they may already have in place. They're simple check boxes, so you can use your gloves, if you have them, and still click onto those boxes. What we've also done is, at the end of the work orders, we actually prompt our users to use voices, voice summaries, so those are AI enabled. It is building out the knowledge within our system. And rather than you having to sit there, type out all the information, you simply can talk to your device, and it provides a full summary of what you did

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see that that that when somebody comes in and you realize that somebody just pencil whipped some information, his story, history on that asset, and you have that translation capability, then it's a say, Well, you can't talk to it. I mean, it sort of puts them in the position of saying, Well, yeah, I guess I could have That's right, and then be able to, can you mine that information? So it's, you know, I'm going to mine whatever.

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Yeah, this industry, we're struggling from a labor shortage. We're having people we're having people stay at companies for less time. And so what we've actually why we built this feature was to help capture a lot of that tribal knowledge that exists today within those more experienced technicians. We take any of those voice summaries, we present it as simple check, simple bullet points, and then we actually use all of the information that was uploaded to help enhance our copilot functionality that we have within our system. So our

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AI, one last question, where do you see all of this stuff going like, like we put your future hat on. You look at it here. What talk to us about that?

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I think we're seeing a lot of change within this industry. There's a lot more willing going. It's crazy, crazy fast. Yeah, there's a lot more interest in using these tools like AI. I think the other big thing is the days of having a single solution are gone, yeah, and you need to build a best in class solution. So that's leveraging tools from other service providers, wireless sensors from skaters and fundamentally building out a data platform that allows you to do maintenance better.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good stuff, man, I gotta tell you. So if somebody says I'm interested to know more about you and MaintainX and getting some more information, all of that good stuff. What's the best way

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you can go to our website, MaintainX.com, or reach out on LinkedIn, or any of the other social media.

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Again, it's MaintainX, right? That's right, yeah, yeah.

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Just, just MaintainX. Please. Make that exceptional, my friend, exceptional. I'm so glad to be able to meet you conversation. I like it a lot. All right, we're going to have all the contact information for Colin out on Industrial Talk. So, you know, connect, that's, that's your to do list. Connect with Colin, and you'll get to see his stat card out on LinkedIn, and you'll say he's got a lot of street cred, but anyway, that's, that's what, that's what you need to do. All right, once again, we're broadcasting from SMRP, and we, it's been a great conference, and we've started out, and there's just a lot of people happening here. Put this on your calendar for next year if you're in the world of asset management, maintenance and reliability, this is the show for you. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

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