Lee Morgan with Fluke

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Fluke, Xcelerate event, predictive maintenance, AI diagnostic, reliability strategies, Voice of Customer, shaft alignment, ROI calculator, energy savings, vibration monitoring, condition monitoring, video replay, product portfolio, customer success.

00:00

Industrial Talk is brought to you by Fluke. We were on site at Flukes Xcelerate event where reliability reimagined came to life from high energy keynotes to hands on predictive maintenance tools to break through AI diagnostic the event delivered real world strategies teams can use today. Xcelerate once again, proved why it is the launch pad for smarter, faster, reliable operations go out to Fluke.com to find out more.

00:35

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

00:53

go all right once again. Welcome to Industrial Talk.

00:55

Thank you very much for joining the number

00:57

one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you industrial professionals all around the world. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you're solving problems each and every day. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk, you are the heroes in this conversation is and I'm at a conference right now. It is called Xcelerate. It is brought to you by those wonderful people at Fluke, at eMaint. And it's all here talk about solving problems. It's here put this on the count. You're not on it. You need, you need to reach out to these guys. And we have one of them in the hot seat, Lee Morgan, he's with Fluke. And we're going to be talking about some of the new products that like geek out on. Let's get cracking.

01:45

Yeah, I had

01:47

a little frog in my throat.

01:50

It's not as if I'm not

01:50

talking a lot around here

01:53

trying to keep it clean.

01:56

How's it? How's how's the conference been there? Lee, it's been

01:59

fantastic to be honest with Scott. We've had some really good engagement some of the breakout sessions have been treated really, really well. We've heard from customers. We've heard from some of our peers. It's going really well so far.

02:12

When we start talking about breakouts, it just just, are they interactive? Like you come into this breakout session, you you better be ready to have conversations which is good, which is a bonus 100%

02:25

and we believe, actually, there's a lot of learning going on as well. And we always believe people know learn best by doing themselves. And so all the all the breakouts are meant to be interactive. We want to hear from customers. We love what we call voc, Voice of Customer that actually forms a major part in how we bring our products to market. We don't want to just design something for us. We want to design something that solves customers problems. And so, you know, quite often the places like Xcelerate, that's where we learn exactly what problems our customers have and how we can help them and solve them. Yeah, I got to ask the

02:58

question, because customers, there are a lot of customers, and a lot of customers have a lot of ideas, and all these

03:07

customers might not align with

03:09

the ideas. How does and I of course, we need to go into your background. But how do you prioritize?

03:15

What is that? That's a really good question. And I think I mean, if you take some of the latest solutions that we've launched, actually, as of today. Yeah, you know, we, we, we've been known as the leaders in shaft alignment solutions for for many years now. And, you know, how do we, how do you innovate when you're you're already at the top sort of thing? And what we've, what we've done, is we've gone to customers and we've looked at how they use no tools at the moment, what they'd love to see, you know, in those sort of tools, you know, I have whenever I'm carrying out voc, I always have a sort of a three wishes type question. So I always ask customers, if you had three wishes, what would you love to see in our solutions? And then what we tend to do then is synthesize, you know, we don't just go to one or two customers. We go to as many as we possibly can. We synthesize the results that we get back, you know, the wishes, yeah, and then we look to see if that's physically and technically possible in our solutions. And I'll give you one great example. So we, as of today, we launched the new alignment portfolio, namely the Rotaline core and Rotaline Elite. And one of the big problems that customers kept telling us was we we struggle to get the justification from our management to buy these solutions and to also to implement the processes. And so what we've done is we've actually put a built in ROI calculator inside the actual application that sits within the controller that enables customers all they need to do is put in the pre alignment, the post alignment the cost of energy. And we all know the cost of energy is Sky not fun, and that'll automatically calculate to them how much they've saved by correctly aligning the shaft of that actual device. And in some cases, something like an 11 to. Kilowatt motor could be, if it's if it's misaligned, could cost up to $500 per year in energy costs alone, and that's per single motor. Now we all know there's not just one motor in most industrial plants, and so you know, and that's energy savings. We're not even talking about reliability or catastrophic failures, which we know that shaft alignment, the correct shaft alignment. Can, can help avoid, yeah, I was good.

05:25

I was already down that road. I'm going, Yeah, I can save power. That's all good. But that misaligned motor that the likelihood of the failure on that particular and then that, you know, goes out the door, you there's,

05:39

there's a ton of other, you

05:40

know, costs associated with just that failure

05:43

exactly when, typically a motor is connected to something else, right? It could be a water pump, a cooling pump. Could be blowing air on something. I mean, take a modern sort of data center. Yeah. So the HVAC systems and data centers they, you know, they are critical. Those data centers have to be kept cool. And also the data centers cooling costs a fortune, right? Oh, yeah, and you don't want to be wasting energy there. So it's a hugely prevalent topic at the moment.

06:12

I bet it is. I bet it is.

06:15

Can you

06:17

in that solution, that ROI solution? Can you sort of go back in time and say that Acme motor, see how I use just generic name, that Acme motor, it failed and it failed because it was out of alignment. So and then, and then, just sort of

06:39

if we did this,

06:41

there would have been, not to mention of the ability to be able to say, hey, it's starting to vibrate, do whatever it needs

06:47

to do. Yeah, there's a potential for that. And I think it's a pretty high percentage of most rotating machine failures is either vibration or alignment or misalignment. And so, you know, if a company has a very good sort of preventative maintenance or predictive maintenance process in place, then the idea is to stop it before it fails. And that's where a lot of our vibration sort of expertise comes into play. We can actually predict several months in advance, sometimes before it fails. And so companies that might have outages, they might say, right, okay, we've been given a red flag Fluke condition monitoring portal is telling us that this particular asset, particular asset is in red. It's trending, you know, increasing vibration levels the next outage. We need to switch it off, and we need to do remedial work. And more often than not, they'll, they'll when they when the outage happens, and they disconnect the machine and they switch it off, they may take a look at a bearing, because the fluid condition monitoring portal can actually tell you if it's a typical bearing for if it's a typical bearing fault or something else. Then they'll then they'll then use that as proof. They'll use that as ROI, and say, Look, this is the benefits of the PDM,

07:50

yeah, it's a no brainer. Yeah, come on. It really is. If, if you're an organization that values a resilient, reliable operation. You can't, you can't have that or achieve that without a commitment to, you know, these tools, these, the profession of, you know, mounted monitoring, these, I just, I think it's a no brainer, is that one of the new tools that that ROI capability.

08:22

What is that? Yes, we've actually always

08:25

had that capability, but it's actually been built into a web page, believe it or not. And so, you know, the issue with the web pages, it's, it's it's not where the work gets done, right? So the the ROI calculator is actually built into the application that sits on the tablet, so that the user, the operator of the alignment tool. They have it at their hands. And I always think about it, if you pick yourself as your service company and and you, you've basically gone to the place of work, you've gone to the site that you've got a contract with, you've just done the alignment. And maybe there's a question mark over, you know, well, we, we're not getting failures, you know? Why should we pay you guys XYZ dollars a year to come in and do the alignment for us. Now we don't really get that. You can immediately show them you've saved, like, hundreds of dollars in energy savings alone just by having the alignment service. And so we've heard definitely from some of our service partners who buy your equipment to do the testing for for customers who don't have the expertise or the manpower, and they love the fact that they've got this power in their hands now they can actually showcase to the customer, to their customer, this is what you're saving, yeah.

09:31

Oh, I think that's just brilliant, because that's what's everybody that's see. It always fascinates me when an organization, an operation, says, No, we don't need that. We don't need to do that. And what, I don't even know where to go.

09:48

Well, we've yet, we've had an Xcelerate where, you know, we've had some some customer success stories, where they've implemented a condition monitoring platform. And then the upper management said, Well, why do we need this? We have. Had a failure in three years. See, it's almost like that. That's why you haven't had a failure

10:04

in three years. See, and that that is always sort of the interesting challenge with any reliability programs. Because when you start out and you're saying, We're all in, thumbs up, we're doing everything we can, then they see dramatic, you know, results as a result of that effort. Then all of a sudden, because everything's running right, it tapers off. And then somebody says, Why are we spending all this money on this? And it just, it's, it's cycles. It just goes back up and down and up and down. I don't have an answer to that. I think how you sustain it?

10:40

I think that's, that's the challenge we face, but it's also an awareness on us. We need to make sure that we help our customers and our partners benefit, and, sorry, provide the benefit and provide the ROI.

10:52

Because, yeah, you do.

10:55

Yeah, definitely.

10:56

What's number two, what you said you had a couple of cool another, another cool things, yeah,

11:01

so that one of them is, is actually it's, it's what it's. We call it the video replay feature. So if you think about a shaft, when you know, when you where you see these in industrial environments, they're often not in clean rooms and often not in loads of space. No You can also, you could have a concrete strut or any or another bar or another device or another machine that's really nearby, and sometimes not as you turn in the shaft to gather the measurements you might knock something. Well, these are laser alignment systems. They're pretty precise. And so if you knock something, you generally then got a sort of, obviously do by accident. You've then got an error in the data. And so let's say you take 300 points, so you imagine it like an elliptical shape, and you've gone around 300 points, and maybe when you knocked that errant piece of metal, or whatever it was, you may have damaged four of your readings, so they're inaccurate readings. Now, previously, you'd have to go back and check manually, but with a video replay, you can actually replay it. So imagine a clock hand going around the face, yeah, and you can actually see where you knocked and got an inaccurate reading. And then you can actually remove those readings. Because you've taken 300 measurements, you've probably got enough if you remove four, remove those from the alignment, and then you get a more accurate data daily result. Now, without that feature, you'd have to go back and do it again. And so then you're delaying getting that plant back up online, which, of course, is going to cost you additional money. And also, the video replay is really useful, because you can actually see where you knocked as well. So you could actually write it in your new standard, or SOP standard process work, to say, right, when you come here again, you don't need to do a full 360 degree turn, maybe, you know, use a different sort of method that we've got within the

12:53

portfolio that's new, that

12:55

is brand new in the in the ones we launched today. Yes, yeah.

12:58

How do I get a hold of that? I mean, is it, do I have to buy the tool?

13:03

You can buy the tool if you want. Scott, nope.

13:07

So, so what we've also sort of

13:11

streamlined the portfolio. So historically, we had three hardware platforms with a variety of software bundles on top and that. And that's kind of a little bit confusing for customers. Know, which one do I need? Which one do I buy? Yes, and so we've streamlined that down to two. So the rotaline core, which actually still makes use of our what we've got a patented a single is a double detector. And there's a variety of benefits, which probably will bore you with, but that's the entry level sort of shaft alignment product in our portfolio, and that's perfectly acceptable for people who've got, like, simple machine setups, people that maybe just want to focus on energy saving, they don't have complex multi machine trains, or even need to do things like card and shaft measurements. But then you've got the rotellane Elite, which is kind of says what it does on the tin. That is the creme de la creme. That is the best alignment tool that we offer that is available on the market, and that's also got a button a variety of software bundles. So it's it's all about offering the customer the flexibility of what they need. So if they don't need features XYZ, then they don't have to pay for them. They just pay for ABC. And that's on both the core and delete. And the benefit of that is, is that their software licenses. So if customers are using feature ABC today, and then they maybe have some more advanced machine work they need to do in the future, they can purchase XYZ with a simple license file. It's field upgradeable, very cost effective, future proofed, and basically offers customers if they have what we typically might find is customers might buy like, three cores and one elite and then have multiple license files, and that will satisfy like an entire team, and so it gives them flexibility, future proof and and also, you know, maximizes their budget because they're not paying for features they don't need. So, and that's again, built on what we've heard from the market. That's what customers. One did. And so that's what we kind of love to

15:03

give this sort of off the off the cuff, when we apply these, these alignment tools, like we use them, and we're, we're really into them. What can I expect from an operation that motor, the the health of that motor going forward. How long can I extend? I know it's varies. I But I've just in the environment, whatever it is. I just, yeah, that's, I think

15:30

that's a, that's a, probably a tricky, is a tricky thing to give a finite answer on. But I think if we look back on what happens when you don't correctly align the machine, yeah, so you're generating extra heat, you're you're needing more more energy to make it move. You're generating more vibration, you're probably generating more noise. You're obviously shortening the lifespan of it, because it's running in a way that's not efficient. It's not optimum. And so fundamentally, by correctly aligning the shaft of any device or any any motor or pump, then you are extending the lifespan, and also you're reducing your running costs as well. You know, not only that, but maintenance costs. So it's it's generally a good thing to make sure that you correctly line the shaft. It's just,

16:15

again, I'm always dazzled by the fact that if I'm hearing noise, if I know that there's vibration taking place out there, and I know it, right, I might have the devices that are connected and it's saying, hey, got some vibration, you got some noise happening. And I let it go, that just blows my mind.

16:36

I mean, I could do it in my house. I don't care. It's my house, yeah.

16:40

Firstly, not all vibration is bad vibration, because sometimes it naturally occurs. And I think that's the benefit of having, like, the data set that we've got going back, you know, decades, where we've got millions of data points that we know it's huge, we can cross reference. And so it's that trending of the data. It's that sort of, you know, looking at how a device of a similar setup, so it could be like, made by the same manufacturer, and we can, we can spot those failure trends. And that's, that's definitely a huge benefit, because alignment, on its own is not going to solve everything. You know, you need to look at a condition monitoring sort of program across the across the

17:16

you know, is it still called a Zima?

17:19

No. So we we're actually, again, making it really simple for customers, right? Because we are Fluke, and we have a pretty strong brand in terms of a pretty strong legacy as well. Yeah. And so what we're looking to do is, we're looking to streamline things so the azema and proof technic products, or brands or product lines, they're all now under one umbrella called Fluke condition monitoring underlayment. There you go. So we're trying to make it simple

17:46

for customers. I like that a lot because it was, it was always, I'm not here to criticize anything, but it can be confusing 100% and I was always at a point where going well, everybody knows Fluke. Everybody his dad had a Fluke meter. Yeah, everybody knows Fluke.

18:07

There's also that trust factor. And what we've seen with things like buyers journey, where, you know, you get there could be nine or 10 people involved in any procurement decision, and like what you said earlier, if they've, if they're not, well, who's a Zema, who's prof technic,

18:21

yeah, see, see, yeah, that's right, yeah. You know,

18:25

Fluke is a very trusted brand. We've got a long legacy. And, and, yeah, it just it.

18:31

I like it. Fan

18:33

makes sense right here. Yeah. So with all of that wonderful stuff, is there anything on the horizon that gets you excited outside of these new products. I know you just launched them. I know is there anything that says, Hey, check this out. Oh, that's

18:51

a tough question, actually. I mean, along with all the not meant to be,

18:55

I want to know more. Are you

18:56

looking for more, like solutions or things that I go we're doing from a product marketing

19:01

perspective, it's up to you. I think you know what tickles least fancy. I mean, it's just

19:07

come on, yeah? I think from a product marketing perspective, we were obviously leveraging AI in a in a bit, in a big way, yeah, not just from a solution perspective, but how we help our customers, not just get to learn our tools, but also get to choose our tools as well. So again, going back to the alignment portfolio, how do customers know which one is right for them? And we're experimenting quite a lot with AI tools to help us get to those answers.

19:33

Yeah, you never you never disappoint. Lee, I like the conversation. I like the solutions that you guys are coming up with. Hey, how do

19:40

people get a hold of you? My friend? Yeah, you can

19:43

find me on LinkedIn. Just look for Lee Morgan Fluke and I should appear straight away.

19:48

If not, he's gonna have all the contact information out on Industrial Talk. So if you're not, reach out to him. So it's, it's irrelevant, don't, don't come to me and say, Scott, I can't get a hold of Lee. Well, you're not on Industrial Talk, so you. Got to do that. You are great as always. Thank you very much. All right, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. And once again, we're broadcasting from Xcelerate, brought to you by those wonderful people at Fluke as well as eMaint and everything else in between. They've got, they've got it going on. It's an exciting time for this, this organization. So once again, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be

20:20

right back. You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

20:32

That conversation was great.

20:35

Lee never disappoints. He's been on the show a couple of times, I think a couple of times. I know he's been on it for sure, but he never, ever disappoints. What is happening at Fluke is astonishing. It's exciting. It's, you know, I went to Xcelerate, brought to you by those people at Fluke. And I gotta tell you, it was spectacular. It was exciting. It was full of energy. I just highly recommend that you go to these events. They do a marvelous job, and not to mention the solutions are everywhere, everywhere focused on your success. Everywhere, yeah. I mean, it's, it's truly one of those looking at the shiny object over here, going, Man, that's pretty cool. And then over here, man, that's pretty cool too. It's all at Xcelerate, yeah, you just got to do it. That was a great conversation. He is a delight. Reach out to him. You gotta here's a stat card if you're out on video. Well, there it is. Go out to his LinkedIn stat card and man, oh man, what a great connection. Make that a priority. Industrial Talk again, is here for you. You industry, professional company, whoever you are, need to succeed. That is a telling of your story equation. You need to tell your story. You need to bring that human face to your solutions, to your what the success that you can bring to the marketplace. We need you to succeed, and that's why it's important for you to tell your story. Go out to Industrial Talk, right there. Industrial Talk. It's easy, peasy, quick. Say, Hey, connect and you will be talking to me, and let's figure that out. We want you to succeed. Industrial Talk, that's that's our purpose, that's our passion. All right, be bold, be brave. Derek, greatly. Hang out with Lee. You change the world. Go to Xcelerate next year, and you will not be disappointed. All right. We have another great conversation shortly, so stay tuned.