Mr. Kevin Price Discusses The Future of EAM In Industry
In this episode of the Industrial Talk Podcast, Kevin Price, Technical Product Evangelist and Product Strategist at Infor, dives deep into the future of Enterprise Asset Management (“EAM”) solutions. Kevin draws from his extensive EAM experience of the past and lays out a bright and exciting future of a dynamic InforEAM, Mobility and Cloud solutions. Find out more about Kevin by the links below and reach out to connect. Also, get your free InforEAM Toolkit and exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy. Both links designed for keeping you current in a rapidly changing Industrial Market. Enjoy!
KEVIN PRICES'S CONTACT INFORMATION:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevineprice/
Infor EAM: https://www.infor.com/about/contact
YOUR INFOR EAM TOOLKIT:
Click on the InforEAM Toolkit picture above and receive the following “Must Have” EAM reports:
- 7 Steps for implementing reliability-based maintenance
- 10 steps toward a paperless operation with mobile EAM checklist
- Asset intensive industries, finding the straightest path to the cloud
- EAM vs CMMS, don't get fooled
- Infor EAM Brochure
- Infor EAM Overview
- 9 fleet management challenges and how to resolve
PODCAST VIDEO:
Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access and One Free Licence for Future Industrial Leader):
OTHER PODCAST RESOURCES:
Mr. Ruben Stancel Discusses building a Seamless EAM platform
Podcast Transcript:
[00:02] [inaudible].
[00:04] 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] All right, let's go. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast. My name is Scott MacKenzie, so glad that you are here. You industrial juggernaut. You have joined the number one industrial podcast in the universe. I'm pretty confident about that as I look at the guest here and Martin. Anyway. Yeah, thank you very much. We're going to have another wonderful conversation with a gentleman by the name of Kevin Price. He is within forum. We're going to talk, we're going to, of course, we're going to talk about the future. We're going to talk about the past. We're going to talk about the solutions that in four camp provide and why he is such a spectacular resource, so hang on. It'll be a great conversation. All right, Kevin, it's all about you right now. 100% and now you're going to have to make me work for this because this is the Mike and you're about five feet away from it. No, I've got to work with professionals, Kevin, and we're going to have to work with that. I get it. So Kevin, now, how long have you been with [inaudible]? Tell us a little bit about your background, where you come from and why you're such an incredible professional.
[01:25] Absolutely. So I started in the enterprise asset management space in 1997 so 22 years. Geez, that's uh Huh.
[01:34] Hey, it wasn't a pretty system back then. Oh, of course. At least challenges to say it as best. Yeah. When I came into the market, we're
[01:41] still actually working with DOS systems and there was a system out there that we had called maintenance pack running on Dawson. It was with data stream at the time and we started working with some Microsoft development funds and they said, man, it would be great if you took the application and put it into this thing that we have called windows 95 and 98 and would be wonderful for us to do that. So we did, we upgraded it from what we had in dos, we put it into windows environment and we were going to call it maintenance professional again. But we already did that. We needed a two somethings. So we shorten it down to two and launched that out a long time ago. And then more money came from Microsoft. We did some things on the active server pages that were popular at the time and did the thing.
[02:21] I was mobile and just kept moving on and on and on and any brought it here pretty much 2006 when we were acquired by n four. So it was an interesting day. It was itchy from the standpoint of back then. Uh, we were in the process of doing things on the web because in 2001, we took our applications, we modernized them and then made them available on the web. So we were one of the first people to offer a multitenant SAS product at the time. And Oh, absolutely. It was wonderful because we were thinking this is going to be the wave of the future. This is an opportunity for us to be able to take it application, make it available in a subscription way so that we could take the onus off of somebody installing it locally. So we did that a while. We kept developing that and it was because of the architecture that really got us there. We decided to make a database, do what a database does and store information. We decided to take the presentation, do what presentation does, and just make it look good and integration and built out in a big way. And for lucky, for us, it really worked out. The architecture proved positive.
[03:17] Well, I'm telling you, you are, you're ahead of your time because now that's what everybody talks about today. In a sense that SAS at that solution, that cloud, all of the steps associated with that and you guys were ahead of it,
[03:29] you bet. But it was a bit of a gamble because at the time a lot of people were tarring their horse to different types of structure, different types of architecture. They were going against the oracle model or they go in against the Microsoft DNA model and all these other types of things. We just wanted a way that would make it available for many different platforms, meaning browsers, whether it's going to be chrome or internet explorer or safari or what have you. We didn't want to be tied to the front end and the back end. We wanted to scale in a big way. We want it to be our own. We wanted to though, important factors. We want it to be a product. We didn't want it to turn into a bunch of platform development pieces. So to do that we had, we had a modernize
[04:06] like a just a cohesive product. It's like, yeah, or here it is. Not exactly, we didn't want to be similar. That was a project. We always call it our product versus project because we don't want you to have to be in a situation where we give you a code set right now. You gotta develop it on site and then you get to have certain types of resources available. We wanted it to be a cohesive set of product. And you know that, that, that, that mindset that what you just described is why people have a sour taste in their mouth. You Bet. When, when you go to a potential client, a prospect and say, hey, we've got a great solution for you. What is it? Oh, it's the, oh no, thank you. We went down that road a couple of times and, and uh, I've, I'm balled because of it, so I don't, I blame you. I'm ugly because of you and it's not, has, it has nothing to do with you. It's just that's the experience that people,
[04:53] well, you bet. In the competitive space. It also meant that they would focus on certain areas of the product but not others. As an example, you'll find mobility was an external add on. It was an external thing for us, man, mobile is is who we are. When you go out in the field, you're doing work, you need something with you. If I can get that technician to actually record as they work instead of workforce and den record, I immediately say them between 45 and 50 minutes a day.
[05:17] It it, it, it makes complete sense. There was no argument to say no. I'd like it the older other way because the, the technology, the ability, the hardware that is there ready to go and if I'm at the asset or whatever that thing is and I start got that done. Real time visibility into whatever you're looking at. Absolutely. Yeah.
[05:40] Be able to do a lot of things. I mean just because it's a digital component now you have dropdown selection, you have radio button selection, you have complete audit trail support for it. Now. In the past, it used to be really seen as a big brother type of thing. We were doing an implementation long ago when we did mobility, we did it an old windows format, and we would document where that technician was because we would say, okay, it was done at this particular location. That means it was done here. Well over time, what we started noticing is that a lot of technicians were doing work at the same location every Thursday. And we're like, oh my God, why is that? Why are they doing it every Thursday? The reason why is because the guy that was there, he also had a kitchen. He had really good Chili.
[06:18] So we had a bunch of technicians that were bushing in their time at that particular location. And then all of a sudden we found that out when we reported it and we let them know it was big brother and now all they're not going to touch this piece of equipment, not gonna touch this mobile device anymore. So in the past it used to be, it used to be seen as a game, as a tool or a big brother aspect to their lives and now it's expected, especially as you get people out of college and they're used to using
[06:43] the solutions are ready. Yeah, and that, that, that ability to adopt quickly. You Bet. I mean, ed, let's say a few years ago, let's say five, 10 whatever years ago, it's that adoption it maybe the technology was pretty superior at the time. It's still, I don't want to go down that road. I don't want to do that.
[07:03] It's tough to find trades that are coming out of school right now. It really is. It's a lot of industries, but the ones that are coming out, they're coming out with the expectation that I can do this and mobile already, that I can do this in a tablet already that I don't need to have to go back to another. The last thing you want to find out. It's coming out of school where you have all these advanced techniques and you come and a guy goes, yeah, I realized he'd been doing things on mobile. We get this green screen that I want you to be able to type everything in. It's just not gonna happen.
[07:26] It isn't and it shouldn't because I don't think that, I mean, come on, if you have a green screen, I think there's other problems we've got to sort of address because that does it
[07:39] thing of the past or, yeah. Yup. The other thing too, there's a focus on the past that we really didn't focus on, but we do now is usability. The idea of usability. To give you an idea, just on the mobile concept and usability, back in 2012 we were rolling out our first iPad application. Now we've done other ones before. We've done windows environments. We've done the big bricks that used to be used. We should call them a long time ago. Okay.
[08:00] Didn't like, uh, was there, there was a PR Panasonic tough book. Tough book up. Oh yeah. Those. Those things were amazing at one. Those things are military grades here, brother. So what happened is this
[08:14] is, we were going through it. We're like, we're going to make this, we're going to relaunch it. We're going to do a new code set. We're going to make it highly usable. I want to get it to the point where it's just like an ATM. I can be able to put my card in. I get them. I didn't have to be taught that. I can just pick it up. I want to do that with work management applications. So we rolled it out. You log in, it's the same login that you have when you log into the browser. You download your work for the day, you can update your activity, book your materials, do different things. This is going to be great. It's easy. So I was thinking, you know, my daughter right now is eight years old. I'm going to take it to her if she can use it.
[08:44] If she can pick it up and use it and understand what I'm talking about, then I've won. Right. So I walked in, I saw I had to translate a little bit for the eight year old. I had to say, okay, let's just imagine that Mama's car breaks down. I have to go out and fix it. So I'm going to, I've walked her through it. I said, I'm going to open it up, opened up the work order. I went to the piece of equipment. I said I'm going to get a new tire. I'm going to put it in. And then when I got to the, to the, the comments, I'm going to write notes. I'm going to tell her what happened so that she can come back and see it. And then the first thing I started pulling up the keyboard started typing it in. The first thing she said was, Daddy, why you gotta type in your iPad?
[09:15] I don't have to type my iPad. And I thought for a second, you're absolutely right. You shouldn't have to type it. You should speak to it and it should hear you and it should write down the words that you're saying. And at the time this was a thing that was just expected because she could do it in her application, and this is a thing. At the time though, it was a Siri control and you had to put the development framework and you had to roll it in. Right now these types of things are commonplace. You're right. I should be able to open up now. I can open up my phone, I can go to my work order, I'd go to my comments, I could tell you what's wrong with it and it just automatically types of donuts. It records it. So a lot of these feature functions that are just nuances that you're not expecting or demanding, they should be there.
[09:52] They should be already there. You don't think about a lot of those things. When I log into the application, I should use my face. I should have face Id. I should be able to eventually get to the point where I can tip, pull my watch out, my apple watch and look at the piece of equipment, tell it what's wrong and it responds back to let me know what it does. We're getting there. That's the future. That's what we're trying to get you back to document and on paper, putting it into a mobile device, make it a to where it can transcribe to ultimately in the future these types of mobile solutions, we'll be capturing the condition of the data, but also prescribing to me what I should do. Tell me what actions I should take in detail because today you know, tomorrow we'll be able to do that.
[10:31] Absolutely. There's no question. Absolutely not sitting there like in the past where change just sort of lumbered forward. You're right. Speed is just everything tight tied to get it to market in a jet second and you know that that's going to happen. It's going to come. So what we have to do now in the present is we have to modify the application to get prepared for that. So to do that we have to look at the asset registry in a different way. We have to look in condition monitoring in a different way, condition assessments in a different way because we have to get all those materials and those components in so that the processing of that data from a machine learning perspective can spit me back actions that I want to do. That makes sense because in a sense, you know when we start talking about machine learning, AI, whatever you want, it's just a defined parameter.
[11:15] It is. And to get to that defined parameters you have to do the upfront you do, you know, Herculean lifting you do. But once that's done, Yup. That's when it becomes really simply in efforts or doing failure code analysis that have always been the principles of RCM that have always been the principles of asset performance. But thou are putting in a scenario where they can be automated. So in time I should be able to subscribe to a preventative maintenance measure that I inherited a system and then over time gathered the data so it can prescribe me what I should do. It should tell me how to do it. Just the same thing that happens with your printer at home. It gets a paper jam. It tells you which drawer to pull down. It tells you where to go. It tells you to pull it out.
[11:54] It's still very hard, Kevin. I still, I mean you make it sound like it's a what Paducah did, but it's like I'll start to break out a sweat no matter how, how big that number is. Go there first. I know you'll start beating down the machine. Yeah. This happened to that same child that thought I should say
[12:11] speaking to it now. She's excited that she can change it. It doesn't work. She gets pissed off and calls me, but I ended up fixing it. But these will still happen because you need, you need us gray hairs to help you out. Every known. Yeah,
[12:20] that's right. You're listening to it on the podcast. It's don't ever forget about us pretty wise
[12:27] and that, but at the same time that's, that's another problem to be another grain workforce that's out there. We got a lot of knowledge in the Noggin now. How do you take that out? How do you got there? There's framework. Well, I mean it's not as tough as you think. It's Herculean effort, I'll be it. But the ideas behind it is those workers, those condition monitoring, the gray hair is going to tell you when it, when it looks like this, it feels like this and it measures like this. This is what you do, that this, this, this, the right parameters. Those are things that I can pay attention to.
[12:53] But you got to start doing that now because what happens, and I've been on a number of projects where, Hey Scott, ah, we got this big old tsunami of individuals that are getting ready to retire. What do you think we need to do? And it's like, you know, this is going to happen but you're not there yet.
[13:09] No. What do we need a assist them to be able to support that. So we've done a lot is we've expanded in this asset performance management evolution that we're doing. We're expanding to condition assessment, collection process. So we have more checklists. We have more derivatives that come from checklists. We have a lot more failure detailed. I go through it, all those types of Datas that are in people's head, we want to be able to put it as much as we can to institutionalized in the system so that they can then pass that on to a more automated way. Now, what I've always viewed off, and I'll ask you this question because I'm curious to what you think, oh, let me start doing that. Do we actually dumb down the future mechanics?
[13:42] Okay, so here's, here's my big beef. First off, you're trying to create a situation where you, in essence the organization is boring. And the reason you see that because it's your system, your, your, your technology will always tell you, yeah, you, it's getting ready to sorta have a problem going out there. Nothing fails the world today. Just FYI. People make a lot of money on catastrophic failures. Absolutely. And, and I want to come in and I'm riding my white horse and I'm going to be the hero of the day, man. But [inaudible] that's got to change. And that's, yeah. And even though you think you're dumbing down your, your, you're changing the focus today. Transfer of knowledge. It's all it is. I think so too. Yeah. I, I, it has to happen. You're not dumbing it down because you'll still have to have that innate ability to be able to understand what's going on. You still need to turn around and you still need to do some [inaudible]
[14:35] gonna be out there. Um, I think I've told you the joke before, but the joke goes along where there was an actual, um, guy that had a ship that was at a dock and nobody would fix it. And you tried forever. Today, try to get all these people to come and look at it. No one would come fix it. Volleyed Code. You just listen. I've got a friend that knows how to do this. I know a guy. He's going to come up fix it. What's his name? His name's Jim. Jim comes out and he's old, backs up all bent over. He has a small tool bag. He lays it down and um, he, he reaches into his bag. He looks, he decides not to bring anything. He goes into the boat, he goes to the engine room, spends just about an hour looking around trying to inspect it, comes back out to the dock, opens up the bag, grabs the hammer, goes inside, takes a good look and smacks it on the side and then tells the guy to start it back up and to start it up and he said, I can't believe you just did that.
[15:18] He said, we've had like 10 people come look at this boat. Nobody can get that done. He said, I'll send you a bill. Don't worry about it. You go on your trip, you come back. He said, okay. The guy came back, he saw a bill, it had two lines on it, it was $10,000 and he'd look at the lines and I had one line in there that was 50 bucks and that 50 bucks was for the Hammer. The rest was $9,950 for the knowledge of knowing where to hit it. Yeah, so being able to transfer that knowledge of that guy had is the most important thing. Now, how do you capture that? How do you bring it in? Just like you're saying, this can be a Herculean effort to do this, some of these things, but if you don't do that and prepare for the [inaudible] yeah, the technology will come. You've got it. That sounds like a uh, LSU type of guy wasn't a Clinton guy was [inaudible].
[15:57] Oh, that's, that's, that's, that's funny. Oh, that's funny. My buddies is the voice of LSU, so we need to talk about that. I grew up with, his name is Christopher Blair. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah, I like him already. A is a wonderful guy. It's a great organization. He came from Georgia Southern, no one over there. So they received them really well. Alright, good deal, Micah. Okay, so let's, let's shift gears a little bit and we've talked a little bit about the past president and where we're going in the future and, and how your organization is trying to recognize what the future is and then be able to build that in, into the, into your system slowly, slowly. I understand you gotta do it in a very methodical way. You can't just sort of, yeah, I'll pencil whip it and get it on out there.
[16:43] So one of the biggest, what are your challenges? What are your, you know, things that are, it's like, okay if this, just, if we could deal with this man. Oh Man. So one of the difficulties we have, because we decided to be a product versus a project solution, it is making a one size fits all work. So if I were to go into the food and beverage industry and understand what those problems are and develop a judge for that industry, I would succeed really quickly. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. But we have that application in 16 languages, single and double bite. We have it around the world. It's hosted, it's locally installed, it's under different verticals. We have people that are using it for the large Hadron accelerator in Geneva. We have some people that are doing it for automotive. Very cool stuff.
[17:22] Very cool. We have people that are using it to sweep the floors. We're having another. So we have to develop these as objects that work under any circumstance. So when you're doing the idea, we'll we want to gather data to understand it. How do we do that? Well, condition assessments and checklists and these types of tools that we have helped build that as a data source that they can be pushed forward. Now that'll work. And Duke University, that'll work concern. It's a challenge. It's a really difficult thing. If I, if I were to draw a picture just because I'm a visual guy, you've got this sort of, and we talked about this, this sort of generic backbone functionality. It is just, it's there and I can, I can move it around to different companies, but then I have these specific objects that object is, is focused in on that industry, that that's rich industrial, whatever, that, that industry capability and then it just clicks to, to a certain extent that generic framework does.
[18:21] I mean, you can't, like, you can't expect, um, a linear asset needs that happened in a transit organization to be the same linear asset needs in a utility. You can't, you can't. So, but you can, you can be able to set a structure that can handle any, your asset management that, that then goes into the properties in the principles of transit and then apply those. But the difficulty comes into play where, what are those uniqueness, how much are they unique? Do I need to put him as part of my magic object model? Do I need to put it in extensible framework? And what partners do I need to look to? We, one of the, one of the God's sense that we have in our organization is we have tremendous partners. These partners are able to take our application and scale it in a huge way.
[18:58] Um, one of our partners out there Stratum Consulting and they even took the application to be able to create a craft brew configuration. So it's amazing they can be able to take the application, configure it ahead of time to be able to do craft brewing, to be able to do processes for around craft viewing. And you would think that, you know, that can be applied elsewhere. But it really, it's, it's really unique to their organization that brings it out, but the uses our application, all the objects underneath it to get there. But see what, what I hear you saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, one of the big things that used to bother me is just time. Yup. And, and there's, there's time and complexity. What you're telling me is that there you, you sort of removed the, to a certain extent, complexity because you're, you're, you're married, you're, you're, you're diligent about that structure.
[19:43] And then of course time, if I have an object that is dedicated in the case of Stratum Consulting, then my implementation time is reduced dramatically. That because I have this already, I plug it in here. Typically Click, click, go, and we call those implementation accelerators. As a general rule, that's exactly what it is. So if you take the application as is general sense, it's called the CloudSuite am enterprise edition and it's basic raw vanilla. But when you bring somebody into has that best practice expertise, they apply configuration on top of that. Yeah. It doesn't mean it's customized. It doesn't mean that won't be patched. It won't be upgraded, it won't be moved forward. But it means that all the nuances that they have experienced in their best practices as applied on top of that, and they can bring out their principles, they can bring even prepackaged computer based training ideas to be able to help you move quick. It can have prepackage prevented schedules that you may already know. It can have a lot of different types of details on the steps to be able to go through a preventive maintenance package. There's a lot of things that it can bring. I'll tell you one thing, uh, when I would implement these systems, right, I would one, it would be a minimum of 18 for whatever
[20:48] reason, everybody talked about 18 months, but it would always go a little bit beyond that. La is always click, click, click dollars. Cha Ching, cha, Ching, Cha Ching. In that mindset, in that reality, what are we talking about now? Well, it's interesting because the conversation we just had with him before the stratum, they said their average is nine months, not 18 come on. Oh, it's amazing. It can be a lot faster too, depending on the industry of what you're trying to do. Because [inaudible] take it even a step further in saying that we have cloud suite for different industries that are already built. So klutzy facilities management, we already built it out to be able to do a lot of the Philips facilities functions to be able to do space movement, work, move, and to be able to do allocations, to see graphical imagery, to be able to do mobility.
[21:30] We do a lot of that already for some of those two. And then they take it even further. See this is interesting. You listeners out there in industrial talk, what we're talking about is you've got this generic backbone, this, this framework. And then, and then if I have a, I don't care what it might be, I might be manufacturing widgets, uh, informed. I'd have an object that is specific to best practice in, and correct me if I'm wrong, manufacturing of widgets, we can pull it off the shelf and then stick it and collect it and then make some minor modifications because we're unique. Maybe. But it's not, you're not sitting there trying to recreate the wheel and it just keeps, it keeps grow and grow. Adding it allows me to do with its configuration sets on top of the application. It doesn't sit with an end or an end to it and restricting it.
[22:13] So allows me to be able to apply patches about right. And then everything moves forward and that's why I mentioned the architecture. We spent an inordinate amount of time on the architecture and then you have to, we did all this work because we wanted the database and do what a database does. The presentation, your presentation does reporting and so on so that I can scale. See that's just spent, it's it. It's brilliant in its simplicity. We think, well I'll God being from the other side when I've, I've done this stuff either. I see the, the, the brilliance of it. I really do. So you, you are a rockstar man. I and, and we can, I mean we're just constantly, we can talk forever, but we don't have time. We really could. Well, we're not going to talk about LSU and Clemson though. We did have different opinions on that and from the crowd, we've got a very heavy heavy from the crowd. Yeah, they're a good team. Yeah. You guys are the national champions, right? You beat Alabama three times. Well, at least. What's that? Well, yeah, but we have to play Alabama every year. We only play them when it matters. That's it. Well, every time we play it matters and we, we fail miserably. Tiger, come on, we're tigers. We'll talk cabinets. You know, it's just a better color. Oh Man. That's called podcast trash talk
[23:45] and now I'm uncomfortable and I'm feeling that uncomfort. Well, Hey Kevin, thank you very much. That is an incredible conversation. I love it. Oh, we're going to have to do a lot more. We're going to have to start talking about other things because you guys are doing a lot out of that pleasure. It's been an excellent job in you. It does. Real talk podcast listeners, you stay tuned. We're going to wrap it up on the other side. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you for being here, Kevin. Absolutely. And you guys, I'll talk to you in a minute.
[24:14] As an industrial professional myself, I was always passionate about sales, marketing, Branding expanding the marketplace for my company. That's what the industrial talk platform is all about. It's about you, the industrial company, the industrial professional and your legacy, increasing sales, gaining greater exposure on what you do and how you and your company change the world. Go out to industrial talk.com that's industrial talk.com contact me. Let's have a conversation to see how we can work with you on improving your bottom line and that you can be a part of an ever growing network of industrial companies focused on expanding and growing and leaving a legacy. I hope to hear from you soon and be safe out there.
[25:18] [inaudible]
[25:18] all right. In Ford nation, thank you very much for joining the industrial talk podcast, so glad that you are here. I am honored and I'm also honored to have that Kevin Price Guy on the podcast, passionate about what he provides. I'm telling you, I've reached out him on linkedin. That's the best way right now. I'm just telling you right now, reach out to him. Find Him Kevin Pricing. Slap in that in four, you'll find them with no problem. Type a little message. He's going to get back to Ya. And he's, he's chest. He never stops thinking. He never just stopped creating new ideas. Every time I have a conversation with him, it's Oh, blows my mind. My ears start to bleed. But anyway, that's Kevin Price Baby. And thank you again for joining the industrial talk podcast. We're just dedicated to you, the industrial professional providing the solutions that you need to be a success in this world. So be safe. Thank you. And we will talk again because we've got some more great interviews coming up.
The post Mr. Kevin Price Discusses The Future of EAM In Industry appeared first on The Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie.
About the author, Scott
I am Scott MacKenzie, husband, father, and passionate industry educator. From humble beginnings as a lathing contractor and certified journeyman/lineman to an Undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Business Administration, I have applied every aspect of my education and training to lead and influence. I believe in serving and adding value wherever I am called.
