Industrial Talk is onsite at the OMG Quarterly Standards Meeting and chatting with Thomas S. with Digital Core Technologies about “Digital Twin and innovative solutions for success”. Tune in and hear more about the importance of digital twin and Thomas' unique insights on this Industrial Talk.

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2023. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

THOMAS S' CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-s-a966a48/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-core-technologies-pvt-ltd/

Company Website:  https://www.dicortech.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM: https://www.neom.com/en-us

Fictiv: https://www.fictiv.com/

Hexagon:  https://hexagon.com/solutions/enterprise-asset-management

Arduino Pro:  https://www.arduino.cc/pro/

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

CAP Logistics: https://www.caplogistics.com/

Armis: https://www.armis.com/

Saviant Consulting: https://www.saviantconsulting.com/

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

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LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

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Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

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The post Thomas S with Digital Core Technologies appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're onsite at IoT Solutions World Congress and talking to Shamik Mehta, Director of Industry Solutions Marketing at Hitachi Vantara about “The Never Ending Pursuit to Innovate to Positively Impacts Lives”.  Get the answers to your “Innovation” questions along with Shamik's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

SHAMIK MEHTA'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shamikmehta/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hitachi-vantara/

Company Website: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

hitachi, Mehta, data, problem, iot, companies, solutions, industrial, people, bag, customer, conversation, world, vantara, manufacturer, industry, recorded, information, asset performance management, disappoint

00:00

Hey, industrial Talk is brought to you by CAP Logistics. You want to minimize downtime, absolutely. increase reliability, you bet ensure operational profitability. Yes, you do. That means you need 24/7 365 insights into your supply chain, look no further CAP Logistics, go to CAPLogistics.com or just call them. They're great people 800-227-2471 also Industry IoT Consortium. At industrial talk, we always talk about education, we always talk about collaboration, we are always talking about innovation. And if you're a business that has any desire to be resilient to the future, you need to be able to educate, collaborate, as well as innovate with other industry professionals. That's a must. Industry IoT Consortium brings that all together, you need to be a part of this community, you need to be connected with these leaders that are all apart the industry IoT consortium, go out to ai consortium.org. Find out more again, you will not be disappointed. You're just going to be happy. Again, welcome to industrial talk. Once again. We were broadcasting from IoT solutions World Congress and we caught up with a jet by the name of Shamik Mehta. Again, you'll hear in the interview, but I met this guy virtually, and he does not disappoint one bit he's with for Hitachi Vantara, we had a great conversation. We discussed everything at this particular event. Because you know why? Industrial talk is in expanded ecosystem. I'm using that term quite liberally. But it is about solving problems collaborating, and definitely educating should make doesn't disappoint. Let's get on with conversation.

02:07

Dog ontogeny, so listeners, by all you know, should make from a television screen or a monitor. I've never met him in person. I'm now I'm meeting him in person.

02:19

And it's so good to be here. I recognize you instantly.

02:25

Yeah, there's a lot of good looking people around here. But I'm the ugly one. So it's easy.

02:29

All right, you have the best hat is the best. He's the best dressed guy over here. Just being here.

02:39

Now, you know, what is I get to live my Discovery Channel Live, I get to talk to everybody who who has the solutions. And I just sit back and soak it up. You know, eventually, I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. But I'm, I'm Scott, the AI guy. Like just just keep on soaking up information. So for the listeners, let's let's just sort of level set their show me give us a little background of who you are. And then we're going to venture on into a touchy fib Daraa.

03:03

Absolutely. I'm sure Shamik Mehta. I'm director of Industry Solutions Marketing at Hitachi Ventura. And I've spent the past 2025 years working in the world of high tech marketing, product management. Everything from semiconductors starting in nicely designed to renewable energy, product management, EVs and battery leasing for fleet management, internet of things when we were calling it machine to machine and we were equipping solar arrays with IoT sensors inside the inverters. And we were looking and collecting data from inverters on three gigawatts worth of solar projects from around the world in seven countries. Yeah, and wind turbines and everything in between and anemometers. And making sense of all the data and figuring out when to service the panel's will never clean them and all that and they talking about 911.

03:54

So you see, this is interesting, because I, the conversations have just changed so drastically. When we were here, what, three years ago? Yeah, okay. People are saying, yeah, now we put devices out there. And then it does this is sort of rudimentary, but it's been around but But now, the conversations aren't just real tactics. It's like, do this, grab this be able to make these type of decisions? And, and I think Hitachi Ventura is leading the way that you guys, not, I mean, you guys embody, from my perspective, the just this energy and innovation, because you never stop. It's always like something else. Yeah. Hi.

04:36

Well said, because we've not only been like an innovator in this IOT space, but we have been creating and simplifying business problems by saying, let's focus on the outcome that customers want. Customers are not interested to learn about an IoT platform. That's not what they do. They don't yeah, I'll be customers, I think, hear a word of term like an IoT platform and they are great what One more silo of data that this vendor is now going to control. And we are here to tell the customer ask the customer, what problem for you keeps you up at night? Is it asset performance management? Is it using computer vision? Is it using artificial intelligence to drive insights and tell you things that you did not know, before? You were sitting on it all the time.

05:25

The companies have tons of information, there's data, there's just but they don't know what to do with it, it doesn't have value. And it's a constant problem.

05:35

Just because you have data does not mean it has bad. Yeah, too much data is actually a bad thing. As too much data, that's a bad thing. Because if you cannot understand the data sources and ownership and what is inside the data, then what good is

05:52

it? No, in fact, I don't know you probably do know should make is there's a point of diminishing returns, like okay, this, this is MIDI data. And this data can be sliced and diced in so many ways that makes sense. But then, you know, there's some, there's some thought out there and they just keep on collecting different types of data. And it just eventually just sort of, okay, I'm, that's like,

06:15

I'm gonna give you an example of what happened on Monday, when we got here from San Francisco, San Francisco, to Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt to Barcelona. The halt the layover in Frankfurt to get to Barcelona was only an hour and a half. From international third said,

06:31

that's incredible, that's tight.

06:33

So guess what happened? We got, we made it here. My my colleague, Bjorn and I, our backs did not. So then we landed the Barcelona, we had a we had an email from the fans are saying, Sorry, your backs don't make it. But the good news is, the bags are already in the next slide. And it's coming over. So we had to just figure out whether we wanted them to deliver the bags to us, or he wanted to wait a year or to pick it up. So we went and checked the Congress that was handling loss baggage for the thunder, a company whose name I forget, right. And we also had had an email from distanza saying, upload your records on our website. So we did that address where we were staying all of our contact details everything else. When we went to the global company that was handling Lufthansa and a few other airlines for baggage Yeah. And we went there, they had to enter all that information all over again, all the information on the status page, or wherever we were description of our bags, blue color, with rulers without rulers, whatever we entered, all that information at the clerk had to enter that information in their systems. Again, that meant that it is silo of data that this company has, and that Lufthansa has, and they do not talk to each other.

07:45

It doesn't have to be that way it does. And outside of the fact that somebody's fat finger in your data into another system could be you know, introduction of errors, and then all of a sudden, your red bags, a blue bag, or whatever

07:56

it might be. This is a great example of IoT that can be used, or it's a matter of data integration. But more than that, because those two companies have to agree on a partnership, it is going to change the way they do their business. This is Digital Transformation 101, where you're not just telling the fans or ended up partners to open up all right API's and access each of those datasets. It is transformation, which what the companies are completely transformed. And we are not even talking about adding an IoT sensor or an RFID on the back or an apple tag that continue the location to the back. If I were to introduce that complexity, I would just actually made the problem worse, because now I have an old T sensor source of data, which is telling me where the bag is located. But it provides no value because I'm not gonna be able to go pick up my bag from the Lufthansa plane myself.

08:48

Yeah, see? It's the solution is available and plus be in a customer. You know, I, I want a good experience. That's not a good experience.

09:02

That's not a good. Yeah. And but if they were to have data integration, if they had embrace digital transformation at that basic level, think about the amount of customer satisfaction and efficiencies that this unleashes, my back is lost. I only recorded one time, and it's all taken care of.

09:21

So using that analogy, we flew in on Delta. And really, for the first time I've been we've been flying forever, right? There's there was communication to us about, Hey, your bag is being loaded on the plane. Like, oh, cool. I leaned over to my wife, hey, I love it. And then and then the bag is on its way. And it's just, you know, we find ourselves the market itself should me because just we've got an expectation and I call it the Amazon expectation that better. The better dazzled me If my package better get there yesterday, right, right. And we we carry that expectation through all aspects of our art or our life.

10:10

I know, I think it's a great thing that the tanza handled our facts so well that by the time we landed in Barcelona, we had an email telling us, don't worry, your backs have been found, and they're on their way to you. I love that. Yeah, it was just the act of avid to add that information to times made me realize that I'm heading to an IoT show, what are the best of the world? Yeah, and here we are, before we even get to the show, where I'm trying to figure out a data integration problem that I'm experiencing live as I get there,

10:36

and it's not a it's not a it's just a basic one, quite frankly, here field field field field field field field.

10:44

It was resolved peacefully, we had to stay at the airport for another hour and a half to get our backs. It's not a problem at all. But that's kind of outcome that we try to focus on, right? What is the outcome with tons of your package happening that you want to solve? Let's work backwards from there.

10:58

I do like that. What else is Hitachi Ventura bringing to the table here at IoT solutions World Congress,

11:04

we are showcasing our smart manufacturing solutions, manufacturing insights, everything from a supply chain control tower to digital game boards, and asset performance management of factory assets, whether they be in one factory, one location or another one another country. Similarly, in energy, we are showcasing smart energy solutions, we are doing image based computer vision based asset inspections, and identification where we can take a look at a transformer and make out figure out exactly whether the transformer or whether that insulator is showing any signs of wear and tear and defect and might cause a fire sometime.

11:43

Are you seeing any, and this is always the case, that my experience some people that there's a there's a learning curve that has to exist here where people are beginning to feel more comfortable with what's taking place and how this whole digital whatever Renaissance where we want to call it is impacting their lives in a positive way manufacturers are we getting to a point Shoemake where the solutions are, are easy for the my expert, I'm a manufacturer, and I can't bring on any more complexity. But I know I need to do this, are we trying to drive towards simplicity for these solutions

12:28

we are. And I think the easier you make the visualization of the solution, the easier or make the adaptability of the solution into what the customer is already used to without forcing them to change their databases without forcing them to change. They're not well known tools and dashboards that they want is a way to go. So we need to have modular scalable systems that does not disrupt the customer's environment, but adds to it. And we think if you know exactly the customer's outcome that you're trying to help them achieve, you can get there. If you don't have a clear understanding of that. I think vendors will try to push what they think solves the customer's problem and forces them to move to a new solution or a new tool or a new visual dashboard, that disrupts things. If you don't have everybody on the ground floor on up and agreeing to the new tools that they're going to use. They're just going to make things more complicated. How are

13:28

you addressing from a client perspective? All of this is great. All of those are wonderful solutions. And and quite frankly, if you're a manufacturer, if your energy, whatever, whatever industry you're in, you need to do this. No matter how painful it is, but you find trusted, you know, people companies to be able to help you with that journey. How are you? How's Hitachi vantara addressing this need for reskilling upskilling existing workforce?

13:59

Yes, the question. We have about 240 to 280 openings for software engineers as we speak. And it's getting increasingly difficult to find candidates to interview for get hired. We think that the skills gap is severe. We think it's widening every year, and the demand is out of whack with the supply. Yeah, we have a lot more need for competent, well educated engineers than the world is putting out today. As a result, not only us but we find our customers constantly investing in retraining of their workforces. One of the things that we are helping manufacturers do is establish a digital game bubble. Where you know, when a shift changes, you typically have the operators get into a room and to post it sort of drawing on a whiteboard, change the knobs and conditions at work to get them to yield that they did and what brought problems be observed in a machine. And all that information is usually just passed down to Macbooks, to conversations and institutional knowledge. But as many of these workers start to retire, and new ones are encouraged to join, there has to be a way to capture that information, we do that using what we call a digital camera works. It's a giant touchscreen, where inputs are recorded, is shared with other factory locations and other workers in other places. So now that knowledge is not only just best practices in that factory, and what happened on a particular day that got them a good result. But those learnings are captured forever used for training purposes, shared throughout the company, and is overall positive virtuous cycle.

15:44

If you see that you're you're right, I think supply demand that type of reality that test is impacting, specifically, let's say the IoT world, I mean, companies like yours, and others, and professionals like you and others, you you, you push the envelope in a positive way you create new use cases that were not there, because you realize that, hey, we got this technology, and hey, there's another technology we can, you know, marry them together in some way. And then we solve this problem, this is the use case, right? That, to me is a real sort of point of tension, because you guys are moving at a different rate than me. And, and I might be reviewing version one or two. And then you guys come knocking on the door and they say, Hey, we got version 15. That thing, but it's not. But that's what we have to do. And I sort of, you gotta grab that tiger by the tail, if I'm a manufacturer and just say, this is the reality of it, get going.

16:48

It is another great example of simple technology it uses in our booth right now, where we are going to be using LiDAR, you're counting the number of people and the flow, or the heading past our booth are coming towards the booth. Get out of here. You know, we are we have a live cover over two days. By the way, we shot three times as many people before lunch walking by our booth into certain direction than we did all day yesterday. Which means that today was just I think, heavier presence in the show not see today. Right? Yeah, you're right. So we've been doing this counting? Well, that information can be recorded. And and you know, we plan to share it with the organizers. So they know exactly which direction were people moving in? And that helps.

17:29

Okay, so just sort of sparked an interest like, where are the flows going? Right? Do they just naturally come this way? And go up? Or? Or how do you how do you lay lay out your conference floor so that your flows are really easy and sort of sort of the put us into the casino, you know, you get in there and yeah, check it out there just being able to sort of roam around. That's a hell of an idea.

17:54

We have all the reports, able to export them. And by the way, no personally identifiable information. And it's all live events. Yeah. So all we do is record the follow a certain direction versus another one and it gets recorded. That's just help the organizers next year plan to flow people better.

18:13

Yeah, but that means you're gonna have to put out other whatever LIDAR sensors in other parts of it.

18:20

No problem. All you need them is in a few alleyways. A few of the main out. Yeah. And you have

18:25

to come on by to see that dog. I think that's what I want to do. Oh, I will. I'm shameless. Absolutely shameless with that. Oh, my gosh. So we've got a lot of stuff happening at Hitachi Ventura. This is the first time you're at the show first

18:39

time you me personally at this show. Yeah. She's been here. Hitachi has been a number of times. Yeah, you guys are still responsible. I'd be our silver sponsor of the show.

18:51

The silver. See, it's cool. You guys rock man, I got to tell you my perspective. There are many companies that I work with, and all of them absolute joy, don't get me wrong. But I find Hitachi Vantara always been very innovative. Sort of never stopped thinking has a passion to solve problems, help companies succeed. And and I think that that's an admirable quality or culture that exists at Hitachi Vantara. How do people get a hold of you should make

19:28

should make doc Mehta and Hitachi ventura.com are on LinkedIn. I'm on wireless. Next.

19:34

Thanks a lot. Good man. That's exactly it's better to meet you in person as opposed to on a terminal monitor or whatever it is. All right. Once again, you're gonna have all the contact information for some eek out on industrial talk.com. So if you're not, you need to get a hold of this gentleman need to get a hold of Hitachi Ventura, and begin to that digital journey. It is a must. They'll make it as painless as possible, but just recognize that decision has to happen. Again, we are broadcasting From the IoT solutions World Congress, it is an exceptional event. You get to meet people like Shamika and others who have a passion to help you succeed. So put that on your bucket list. We're going to wrap it up on the other side. So stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network. Again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. Shamik Mehta. Go out to his backyard. By the way, I'm looking at it right now. LinkedIn, and it looks like he's got a new mug shot out there looking quite dapper. Shimmy, you gotta connect with them. They never stopped thinking that Hitachi Ventura and that is a wonderful thing. And you need trusted individuals, as I keep on saying, to help with that digital transformation journey should make doesn't disappoint, go reach out, please do that. Also, the industrial talk, expanding ecosystem, it is a platform that celebrates you each and every day, you need to be a participant in it. Because we need you to collaborate. We need for you to continue to innovate, you need to continue to solve problems. And that is a collaboration, conversation. So industrial talk is here for you. Go out to industrial talk.com. Connect with me. See how we can get you on the podcast, have a conversation or two. It's wonderful. And we truly appreciate what you do in industry, in manufacturing in oil and gas. And I think there are a lot that just amplify your message. All right. Homework Shamik Mehta, you got to reach out to him, connect with him. All right, be bold, be brave, dare greatly. And you're hanging out with Shoemake and others within industry and you're gonna change the world because you are. So that's what you're all about. Thank you very much. Once again, for joining industrial talk. We're gonna have another great conversation from IoT solutions World Congress Barcelona, you can bet on that.

The post Shamik Mehta with Hitachi Vantara appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're talking to Stan Schneider, CEO of Real-Time Innovations (RTI) about “Solutions that enable autonomous success”.  Get the answers to your “Autonomous Innovations” questions along with Stan's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

STAN SCHNEIDER'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stan-schneider-102466/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rti/

Company Website: https://www.rti.com/en/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, data, stan, rti, world, industrial, cars, problems, innovation, vehicle, autonomy, technology, collaborate, company, cloud, solution, intelligent, connectivity, run, trusted

00:00

On this episode of industrial talk, we're talking to Stan Schneider Real Time Innovations or RTI, about autonomy, the technology that is needed to encourage and to facilitate autonomy, you need to listen to this podcast. Let's get going.

00:20

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 hardhat, grab your work boots, and let's go,

00:38

alright, let the celebration continue on industrial talk. This is where we highlight and celebrate you industrial professionals all around the world. Because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly innovate like nobody's business, you're solving problems, you're keenly focused on that. And you're making my life and the lives of many around the world. Yeah, you take that to the bank. As mentioned, we are talking to Stan Schneider, CEO of RTI, and we're going to be talking autonomy. But there's, there's this whole level of innovation that is needed. So let's get cracking.

01:18

Be like it or not, it is here to stay. You better be in the game, you better find your trusted innovation team to give you the give you the lowdown on what is taking place in industry, what is happening in industry, from an innovation and technology perspective, because it is necessary for you to create that business of resilience, that career of resilience. And I can't I mean, the conversations that I have all the time is how do I how do I, as a company, leverage innovation, leverage technology, to help my business, be better in the future, whatever it might be, get greater value out of my assets, whatever that is, that conversation happens all the time. And the only way that I can give you guidance on this is you got to find trusted, advisors trusted, because there's a lot of buzz out there. There's a lot of noise out there on innovation. So Stan, yeah, you can definitely trust that gent, and you can trust the people at RTI. Alright, couple of things, before we get into the conversation that I want you to put on your calendar. All right, we need to get back to normal, right? Whatever that is, whatever that next normal is, let's, let's lean on each other, to be able to do that. Let's have that, you know, that ecosystem of people driving to get back to normal, whatever it might be, I want you to put this event, this wonderful event on your calendar. It is of course, the IoT solutions World Congress, and it is May 10, to the 12th. It's in Barcelona. And I've been very fortunate to be there at a couple of times. And it is a spec tacular event. And it is Chet I mean, you're you're tripping over people who have just mad skills. And it is a great, great venue, to collaborate, to network to get the most and solve problems and find the individuals or find the companies that can definitely answer those questions trusted, right. And that's what we're all about. Now, I'm going to also just sort of just encourage you, you need to be a part of the industrial talk ecosystem. What does that mean, Scott? Well, it is, of course, an entertainment platform, but an industrial entertainment platform that brings out the human side of all of these incredible leaders, industrial leaders. But the best part about it is that you get to collaborate, and you get to connect with people who are just all bent on solving problems, and helping each other achieve whatever success they're trying to achieve. Over the years, I've had a number of conversations as you are well aware. And the conversations always, always, it's never really the technology. It's always the human side. Who can I work with? Who can I collaborate? Who can I trust with? Who can I do? Who can who can who can I? Those are always the questions, always the topic, because everybody, everybody wants their business to succeed their career to succeed, who do I collaborate with, to make sure that that happens? So I'm going to challenge you on these conferences. There's a ton out there, you, man, you go out to this website called 10 times.com 10 times s put an S on that and you'll see All of the events around the world incredible website, by the way, and but the reality is, is that what are we doing? What are we doing to get the most out of these events for your company, for solving problems, and I'm going to just share with you how we approach these conferences outside of the fact that we broadcast Yes, one. And that is just a great way of being able to get the attention that you so desire and deserve, right. So we broadcast live at these events, it's fun, it has nothing short of fun. And then we create this video, and the video is fun. And it highlights all of the wonderful things that are happening at the event and the energy. And it just is a great, great combination. one two punch on how to get that attention to you so deserve but the reality is, is that Gone are the days that we just go to a conference, drank great bourbon and eat great food and and Yuk it up with many people, it could still happen. But I think we have to be far more pinpoint focused on why are we there? How does it impact our bottom line? What is the return on our efforts, right. And so you have to think, think in a way of being able to say, Okay, I'm going to IoT solutions World Congress, there's a pre pre activity, right pre, then there's during, and then there's post, I break it up in those areas, if the pre activity includes I need, I need to schedule schedule, firm connections with my existing customers and my quality or whatever quality connections, I'm going to do that. And that requires a lot of pre work a lot of work upfront. Because when you get to that location, when you get to that site, when you get to the event, you're ready to go, you're ready to roll, you're ready to have that conversation on how your solution, your focus, your, your whatever it is, can help solve problems. And then you fill it up. And then you just keep because the reality is, we could go out to LinkedIn and say, Okay, I'm just going to try to find some quality leads out there. And it's just the cost. But the reality at these events, these events that bring everybody together, they're all there, face to face, human interaction is key, get the most out of it. Okay, so you go to the event, you're on a podcast, you're talking about the subject matter you're talking about, you've already done your pre work, you're out there, now you're, you're doing your stuff right there, you're broadcasting, it's great, you're getting a value added, you know, asset right there. And then. And then the real goal, real rubber is is that you follow up, you nurture, you have to keep at it, you got to you've got to continue to nurture the relationships, listen to what is being said, what are the problems that are being communicated? How does your solution Listen, how your solution could solve problems and be able to have that conversation. But the best part, and the most important part is that you're desperate, you're focused on that individual success, right? It's keenly focused, I want that individual, that company to succeed. To do that, too. You've got to open doors for that customer to it's not only just saying, Hey, we got a great solution. Here it is. It's wonderful. And it could be that right. But I want a relationship. And I know many water relationships that go beyond that. It's like, Hey, I hear what you have to say, I know our solution is good. But I'm destined and focused on your success. And therefore, therefore, I'm going to introduce you to this particular individual. And you make that introduction, you're part of the solution. Talk about Goodwill, talk about the way to collaborate. And I'm telling you right now, trusted individuals, important solutions, innovation important. But the reality is, you don't have all the answers. And that means you need to collaborate. And the more you collaborate, the more you have that conversation, you will succeed. And you'd have to succeed because you're that important. You are, you're just that important. All right. Let's get on with Stan Schneider. So I was very fortunate to be able to interview Stan at IoT solutions World Congress in Barcelona, great guy, and you'll quickly recognize that he's definitely smarter than me. He is. He's got a real sense of honesty, and a desire to truly solve problems. So as we start talking about trusted people, Stan is one of them. And if you're looking and if you're trying to say, okay, autonomy is an important component to my business, and I can't send us data to the cloud, I need something that is right there. So that there's this quick, quick response. Like, let's put it this way. Automobiles. Yes, you need quick response. Stan knows all that. His team RTI knows all that. And I think that you need to reach out Schneider CEO, real time innovations. They just go by RTI. That's the website. So enjoy the conversation with Stan. Stan, welcome to industrial talk. Thank you very much for finding time in your busy schedule to talk to the best. And I mean, the best and the well educated listeners that industry has on industrial talk. How are you doing there, Stan?

10:48

Great.

10:50

The last time we spoke it was in Barcelona. And again, I think I shared with you prior to this conversation that I can't even remember that. I feel like I had hair that that time. Well, it's I'm so glad that you said yes. And you and and the reason we're doing this is one absolutely want to know what's what's happening at RTI, what's happening with standard, what's all of that that's all important. And also, we need to talk about getting our life back in order and whatever that looks like from the IoT solutions World Congress. Before we get all into that, give us a little background, Stan on who you are.

11:26

Hi, I'm Steve Schneider, I run a company called Real Time innovations, RTI, we are a software framework provider for autonomy are the largest in the market by a pretty good margin, we build a software that allows you to put together intelligent distributed systems outside of the cloud. So people think AI is everywhere. It's really not it's mostly in the cloud. And we are trying to enable the real world to be more intelligent by taking smarts and letting them run outside clouds. So

12:03

so I don't have to go to the cloud with your with your solution.

12:07

Now we use things like you know, we call it autonomy. Everybody says you say autonomy, right? Things vehicles, and we are in 250, autonomous vehicle designs of an amazing variety of things. But

12:21

I gotta ask the question, is it really going to happen? Well, will the future just have autonomous vehicles where I could just jump in, get on an autonomous vehicle or my car will be autonomous? Will that ever happen? I mean, really?

12:37

Well, sure, autonomous vehicles are everywhere. Now you probably don't realize that, you know, we started out doing flying things. Lots of autonomous flying things, much easier problem but jumping in his car and dry as soon as you get the, the, you know, bio prejudice out of your head that people are better drivers and computers, you can do that. I started my career crashing cars for a living. So did you really? I did? Yeah. University of Michigan. I was a biomechanics impact.

13:14

Researcher. Yeah, the first one? Just FYI. I don't know, Benny, you're the first one. Congratulations.

13:21

He said I was so I was very excited about that is a long time ago. But you know, back then, we were working on things like, you know, smarter airbags, multistage airbags and Side Impact Protection Systems and crumple zones and crushable steering columns and child seats and wheelchair restraints, and on and on and on. We have all of those things now and more along with you know, stuff like any blood brakes and electronic stability control and any drunk driving laws. And back when I was there, I was all excited because 45,000 people a year in the US were dying in car crashes.

13:58

See, that's pretty cool. We take it for granted out right? We just do. We,

14:03

the sad part is that today, right? I mean, pre pandemic, I suppose there were still 40,009 year kind of crashes. So from a safety perspective, you know, we're driving more miles so it's better per mile. But you know, we couldn't even run tests more than 35 miles an hour. It's just too much energy above that. And I don't believe you can ever make cars safe without fixing the number one safety problem in cars, which is you

14:34

well, maybe pre pandemic but postponed or right now during pandemic I never tried so

14:39

yeah. changed a lot of things but I I do think that you know, at least from a statistical point of view, our task will many locate merit, many environments will be better than non autonomous to go through it soon. And it's a you know, The computers will make mistakes you would never make, you know, they'll they'll, some of the famous ones will mistake a truck for a sign making go under something like that. But you make mistakes that computer and ever make falling asleep and

15:15

driving drunk. And personally, I think it's going to map out,

15:19

you know, everybody, everybody's done that they shouldn't do that. And it's just, yeah, so I do think there will be a time when man in place, you know, it's not going to be everywhere immediately. The autonomous vehicles are coming and they will be safer.

15:37

See, I'm all into it. And and, and I'm, I'm very bullish on it. I think it is definitely going to happen. Yeah, it seems sort of, you know, Logan's Run ish, I guess future. But the reality is, is people smart people like you are making it happen and thinking through it. And it, it just gets better. And so, Michael, my my hope is that all I have to do is jump in I don't have to drive, and I'm safer. And I have to deal with traffic either. I could just sort of sit back and you know, hang out. Alright, let's talk a little bit about IoT. In our conversation prior to this conversation. I thought this was absolutely brilliant. And and listeners agree or disagree. Don't send me a text. I don't want to hear it. IoT. IoT is poorly defined. And I agree with you 100% on that one, because it's, it's like the miscellaneous file, right? Yeah. So I tore through the internet of things. And it's like, things and give us a Why do you say that?

16:42

Well, everything, by definition is a thing. That's very everything. So Internet of Things doesn't really mean much of anything, except that everything has a computer in it. And everything is connected, and awful hard to name anything, they won't have a computer and be connected and just a very few years. 2030 years out there. I mean, computers are increasing in performance and decreasing in costs of this stunning rate. I went to the University of Michigan, I remember going to football games, it'd be a stadium with 100,000 people in it. 100,000 people and you just feel like this little thing, right with this huge press of intelligence around you and humanity. Well, computers increase in performance 100,000 times every 25 years. So when I was a little thing in that stadium, I imagined that entire stadiums available for the computing, I have today, in 25 years from now we'll have 100,000 stadiums, a factor of 10 billion, no more than 10 billion 10 billion in 40 years. So it's it's more than than

17:53

But it's it's even even that timeframe. It's compressing even faster there is there's a philosophy out there. By the way, that's bucket list stuff for me. I want to go up to Ann Arbor, I want to be in that stadium, just just to see it. Because it's it's perfectly shaped. It's like perfect bowl. I like it. Alright. Yeah, I digress.

18:15

10 billion action 50 years, it's just it's, it's hard to understand that it really is the only thing that matters, you're building a system that has to last for the next 3050 years, even 20 years. It really is the only thing you should be thinking as the only factor that matters is how do you take advantage of intelligence, which people don't people don't get today. But I do think the IoT is really pretty much divided into three huge I call them spheres, buckets, whatever you want to call them. There's the device monitoring bucket, which is most of the consumer world in a lot of industrial world to is where you have a device, and it talks to a single cloud service. It may be lots of devices, but it's just, you know, one cloud service since I think like your Nest thermostats or your Fitbits.

19:11

Right here, baby.

19:12

Right, exactly. It's connected to a single cloud service, and it can monitor and control things. In the industrial space, you'll hear about, you know, predictive maintenance and things like that where it's monitoring device. That's one class another class. That's probably the biggest class by the way, good. Sort of the easiest in a lot of ways. The other class is optimization, intelligent optimization, where you sensor eyes, a factory or pipeline and you collect a whole bunch of data and you get it up to the cloud. You think about it. And you use that to optimize the system, typically not very real time. Maybe only optimizer once a month, you're going to change how you manufacture something or what you manufacture based on market or something huge class a lot of the big platforms out

20:04

there, isn't it? Hold it before I forget, isn't there an overlap between the device? And then the Intel optimization? You need a bunch of devices to create that? Intelligent operations? Right?

20:15

Yeah, but it's not I don't know if any strong statement, of course, there's overlap everything, it's everything,

20:22

right? Things

20:25

are things I don't know very many device monitoring things that are also integrated in where they're trying to control and activate devices. That's integrated in with a big data collection AI for more many, many different types of devices. Maybe there are it's I'm sure there are actually take that back. It's not. It's not a huge thing. It's not really my world anyway, my world we live in the edge autonomy world third big sphere, where, instead of having the intelligence in the cloud, the cloud might be a player, but the real intelligence needs to be in the edge in the field, where it's running a car, or a medical robot, or power system, or a defense system, or radar or something, you have to have high performance, high reliability, you could never really count on. I would never, you know, safety research, I would never delegate my safety to anything off vehicle. It's just too many too many failure modes.

21:25

So so the edge as a whole is is there's a there's a speed, right? So I have everything sort of there at the site. Right? If I sent that information to the cloud, there's a there's a latency is that is that the benefit of this?

21:43

That's a benefit. Reliability is probably a bigger benefit. The ability to handle lots of high performance can activities another benefit. You know, you just it depends on the application you're trying to do. But the real, the real benefits to having intelligence there with you as you can make sure it's always available, make sure it's always fast, make sure it's connected in the right way. And we sell connectivity technology that says data centric, and I can explain that if you want.

22:22

Yeah, I do. Because well, you're just, you're just full of interesting jargon, that I have no idea what you're talking,

22:28

right. Well, I mean, I mean, trying to make it as simple as possible. In the intelligence world data is everything, right? So data in the cloud is the reason Facebook and Google have such a good map of you is I got lots of data about you. And you know, data is everything, everybody, everybody sort of gets that today. But in the cloud, you have, you know, to make a model of you at Facebook, I've got these months, years decades, to figure out stuff about you and connectivity between you. If you want to make a data centric model of an intelligent vehicle that's moving, the world changes every millisecond or every several milliseconds anyway. And so you have to, it becomes not about the data itself. What about the data flow, getting the right data to the right place at the right time, right, please might be an AI, or an intelligent algorithm that has to have enough data about its surroundings to make decisions. And those decisions happen have to happen in 20 milliseconds, not 20 weeks. And so it's the same concept as it is the data centric cloud world. It's just now really more about data flow that is about the data itself, you have to get the right data that you

23:54

provide it, can I say that there are different avenues of data. Like sometimes data could go into the cloud, because I don't need it right now. I mean, it's goes up there, it's fine as a, but then there, there's data that has to reside on premise, or in the edge or whatever. So that I, I have the necessity to or have the capability of accessing it, or it delivers insights rapidly. Or there are other avenues like that. Not everyone has to be at the edge.

24:28

No, it's definitely there's always layers. Like there's an architecture called the layer data bus, which is a good example of that where you have a go something inside the vehicle, the car people and people get cars more than other things, even though it's only a small part of the opportunity out there. But you know, cars have Lidar is in radars and Video Intelligence and other kinds of sensors and actuators that has to run and that that environment has a very high speed data flow rate. requirements to get the right information to the right intelligence the right time. So you can make decisions. You know, if you're, if you're not in the car, if you're some control center, something that's monitoring 50,000 cars, you might want to know things that are derived from that car, like where the cars are, how fast they're moving, whether they have people in them or not, whether they have some maintenance problem, if there's somebody stuck, what do you do, if you have an autonomous vehicle, it's stuck in a construction zone, you can't really drive anybody there. But I'm actually on the board of an organization called the tele operations Consortium. Not that I think you can delegate safety to a remote operator, you can certainly delegate getting unstuck, to remote on prayer. And that is another layer of different kinds of data. They don't necessarily need direct access to the LIDAR cloud, but they may well need direct access to the video to see what's going on. And then there's a you know, another layer even above that, where you're going to optimize the use of your vehicles and decide whether you're going to deploy them all to Northeastern Phoenix, or, you know, even take some out of that market, or what kind of vehicles might be more effective, or who pays the most money. And the certain kinds of things you do in the cloud today, which is really becoming more of an optimization tells you an optimization problem. So those things are all mixed together.

26:22

How? Oh, great, this is what you know, you've just started, you tripped a lot happening in that little segment, you trip connectivity, this that do this, but I don't even know where to start and tell you

26:37

where to start. Talk to me. Start with the data, start simple start with the systems do I need out of this system, data is coming out of the LiDAR, what data is coming out of the operators or whatever. And they try to build a system designed around the system as components, like object oriented designs that are really designing around objects, which are almost always mapped to physical things. If you instead just turn it all around, it's a complete, I have a great slide where I show an upside down picture of a lake in the forest look, nice reflection, it looks okay. But there's something wrong. You flip it over and everything sort of changed. If you just think about what data do I have, what data do I need? It's why it's called data centric. You start with a data, and then you can build the components around that data, everything gets very much

27:42

easier to deal with. See, I like that I

27:44

like that much harder than you think to actually do that. But

27:47

yeah, because if I saw a, you know, this big old cauldron of data, right, and swirling around, I even have a hard time figuring out that, is that data? Do I want that one? That what that what does that bring? Right? That requires some skilled eyeballs. It's not my eyeballs, it's somebody else's eyeballs. But to do that, I like the fact that you have the data. And if that data is allows you to be a better, you know, make better decisions, then yeah, you might. And then, then if that's the case, then yeah, okay, let's design something around that. And I guess my

28:24

Go ahead. My favorite architecture diagram has exactly two boxes. It has the application, whatever it is, you're doing, yeah. And then, you know, at almost any level, and then inside that there's another box that says data. And what data Centricity does is logically makes it look like all the data in the entire system, this could be this 50,000, vehicle, cars and all their lidars and all their you know speeds and motor currents or whatever are all logically available, any application that asks for it. With the right call quality of service, like delivery requirements, the security and all that kind of thing. It makes it way easier to write applications, and way easier to do things like make a mobile if the, if the application can just request its data and I need it, you know, maybe I need it with 100 milliseconds delay. That's the latency you're talking about. An ad guy, I know how big it is. And I know all that kind of thing. If I can meet that spec, I can be on the vehicle I can be in some controller on the vehicle, I can be in the cloud, I can have the vehicle drive around and change networks it doesn't matter because my applications only dependent on the data. It just makes it way simpler design. It's a it's a definitely a leap of faith in your thinking as a designer to think about the data first because for most people, it's it's

29:56

and there's there's a lot of companies out there that have been collected data they just have data data, I've got data, and then they they deployed these systems, but they really do not take advantage of that data for point of clarification. Stan, you mentioned it a couple of times for some of the individuals that don't know, can you define LIDAR? What does that mean?

30:18

Lidar is basically Laser Ranging LIDAR shines, a laser usually scans. So think of it doing that. And it's, it's measuring how far away each of those scan points are. So just like your old fashioned CRT monitor would scan the screen and draw a picture, it's doing almost the inverse is scanning an environment and giving you 3d distances, everything in the environment, and they can be pretty fast, and they can be very accurate. But of course, you pay money for both of those features. You can have cheap ones that just do one line basically, will give you some idea.

31:02

But everything else is the price is coming down,

31:05

right? You see him sitting around me, the mechanical ones spinning around on the top of vehicles, those are relatively high end, ones that are may have a lot of ability to get a lot of lines. And they they get a new update every time they spin around. There's some fancier ones that are all solid state that use phased arrays and things like that to change where the where the lasers scanning. It's cheaper, it's not as accurate. Can be faster someday it'll be fast and cheap. Faster, better, cheaper, right, choose any two.

31:39

Yes, but but but it's gonna happen. And I agree with you on that one. It just is because they're smart people like you and others that are that are going to make that happen. And I mean, the future's bold. From my perspective, I wish I was younger, just but you've been doing it for looking at your stack card out there. 17 years, you've been? You've been leading the way for a long time.

32:05

I mean, you've seen the data centric world since Yeah. So yeah, it's been a while. It's a it's an exciting space right now. It just is. We see it everywhere. Yeah. Medical and, you know, we read,

32:25

I'm reading this book, and it talks about technology convergence, I don't have it in front of me. So I'm not going to spout the title of it. But it's, it's that convergence. And then people like you can see other technologies that that are going out there. And you're saying, Hey, I could use that that helped me here and it, and you put it all together, and it just creates a more I don't know a better solution going forward. It's really nice to

32:52

at least sell integration technology. So I'm 100% behind integration is the hard part, I find a bigger blocker out there. And that bigger blockers just flat out confusion.

33:07

And I'm the president of that fan club, because I try. But it's you're right there. There's a lot of confusion out there. But

33:16

we have I mean, there's an alphabet work activity space, there's an alphabet soup kind of activity technologies out there. And everybody, they all use the same kinds of words. They send data, they're latency, they have throughput they have and in reality, they're just completely different. There is different is trains are from tennis shoes. Yes, they're both transportation technologies. You can't interchange them. And so we actually have a we have an online tool if I can login to that comm. And you can answer a bunch of questions. And it'll tell you at least which standards are somewhat appropriate to your world. See, that's cool. We did that originally to stop people from calling us with problems? We can't so.

34:07

So let's create a tool. And yeah, we could solve that. No,

34:10

yeah. Well, we want to talk to the people that will fit, I can ask you five questions and tell you if you're gonna buy our product. And there's simple things like if you said the word millisecond in the last two weeks Do you have more than 10 programmers? They aren't like, you know, give me your design specs. They're just very simple things that you can ask people to find out if you're even in the right Galaxy

34:37

seat. I think that there's a necessity. And I like the simplicity of that approach. I think that there, there tends to be a greater amount of complexity that doesn't need to be there, which then creates greater confusion. So if there's any way of being able to simplify that message, I'm all in because I guarantee you the majority of People? Well, let's put it that way. I'm definitely not a target market. But I like to see what's gonna

35:07

kind of kill you have a nice little online tool, the AIC did a great piece of work called the industrial Connectivity Framework that has all these. It's like 130, dense pages of PDF, I would not expect most people to read but we sort of distill that down in just a few questions that direct people where to go if they're looking at MQ, TT or Kafka or DDS or what say,

35:33

that's a Moscow

35:36

is all automated. And we're not trying to sell anything, we're actually trying to direct people to go to the right way. So we don't deal with the ones that are going the wrong way.

35:46

He mentioned I consortium.org are in industry IoT Consortium. There's a there's a new rebranding out there. And I'm, I'm struggling with the new branding of it. It's in industry IoT Consortium. That's a mouthful, but they got a lot of smart people

36:04

founded or co founded the IoT solutions World Congress.

36:08

Look at you segue again, if this whole RTI thing doesn't work out, you've got a a great and beautiful future in podcasting there, Stan. So tell tell us why. Tell us why IoT solutions? WorldCom.

36:23

That's a disaster.

36:27

Yeah, wow. Very go. Disaster. Don't compete with me. Let me ask why. What? Why is IoT solutions World Congress important to you?

36:38

Um, well, it's been evolving with everything else. This year's plan I love their reorganizing around technology, yes, classes instead of other things they've tried in the past. I think that's really useful. It's, you know, our my company sells into a dozen verticals. So organizing my vertical doesn't help us at all. But we sell a very narrow value proposition, right, we saw only the people answer our five questions. Clearly, way easier if you're going there to get an idea of the components, you know, connectivity and security. And they're, they're all almost obviously somewhat related. You can't have conductivity without security, for instance. Yeah. But it's so much easier to understand the thing and remember, the number one blocker out there is confusion. If you've divided it up into the server component, technologies, people get it better that way. And there's companies like, you know, we have a security solution to but we we will be in the conductivity section, because that's really we have security that works with our kind of that kind of activity that they don't sell a security solution. We just have one that goes with our stuff, which is more common.

38:03

Yeah. See, it's interesting, and you bring up a good point there. One, there are companies out there that are reluctant to true, you know, we do we make our things this way, this is how we have been doing it forever. And that's, that says sort of legacy mindset. And that's fine. I believe that if you are a company that has a desire to be successful in the future, your journey, your strategy, your strategic thinking has to include all of this, this wonderful innovation such as what RTI does, the other area that I think is necessary, if you say that is a fact that is a reality, it got to participate. Then events like IoT solutions, World Congress, and the people that go there is a great resource to start learning and begin your journey. And to find trusted people like Stan. How's that? Did I did I nail it, Stan?

39:05

Yes, pretty good. For you, you know,

39:09

hey, my big game today their stamp be game now my game?

39:14

Definitely. You know, in general, most people go to things like this to understand the world. Confusion is the biggest blocker. The confused mind says no. And, you know, it's a big risk. I mean, our average customers probably spending a couple 100 million dollars building this new intelligent system. And obviously some of them you know, the famous ones like the Eevee autonomous vehicle, they just vehicle design, spending multiple billions of dollars in a decade and to go into that without understanding what's going on is, you know, is not going to happen. So it's it's a good thing. least to go and see how others work and some people are afraid it's all vendors. Well, vendors know what they're doing. I hate to say it, but we've we failed. We've got 2000 applications out there. We failed hundreds of times in that right. And we've learned a lot and we definitely have some ways to help people think about their problems. It's different.

40:23

All right, we got to wrap it up. How does somebody get a hold of Stan and RTI and why that's important outside of the fact that if you're contemplating this, I think you need to at least go to it's rti.com.

40:34

Right. rti.com Easiest URL there is out there

40:38

I can remember it

40:42

will tell you a whole story around now. Um, yeah. Glen, RJ comm you can learn all about the company. You want to connect with me the best place on LinkedIn, just go to LinkedIn for stationery. There's a lot of standard nighters in the world, unfortunately, but yeah. Close to the space.

41:00

Yeah. So you asked that listeners go to Stan Snyder. Put a little comment there, RTI. You'll see it go t greenery, Ana's header, quote, yeah, that that's the Stan, reach

41:18

30 unique LinkedIn page is all a bunch of stories. So yeah, if you like stories, you can go there and read about why we did the company. And that's cool. See why I left my, my Stanford

41:32

academic careers is getting ready. I said, you got a little PhD at Stanford.

41:37

Yeah, a PhD from Stanford. And I left I left academia because essentially, I figured out 95% of academicians are working on problems that simply don't exist. Which I mean, that's not a dig at research, because after 5% changes the world, but if you're in research, you got about a 95% chance of doing nothing useful.

42:02

That's a whole other conversation that would frustrate the hell out of me.

42:06

Yeah, it's it's frustrating in a company. If you do nothing useful. You fail and you get to go do something else. Yeah. Nursing, you can claim you're leaving for decades. And next thing not being having any followers. That's a

42:21

whole nother conversation. It's like digging a ditch and filling it back in.

42:27

To get me in trouble with my academic track against it at all. It's just it's a tough game. Yeah.

42:35

It is. Running a company to be fair, but to be fair, I agree with you. 100%. I've been there done that. And, yes. Don't Don't be squiffy about running a company. You've got to. That's a that's a whole nother conversation.

42:53

You say the word slipping.

42:54

I could say squiffy. You want to put it out on a bumper sticker. You could say squeaky No, no, no, no, no, no, it's it's good now. You get you get it's like, squiffy today, I can't believe it. I got that from a movie. I can't remember where but they are. So I'm squiffy. Wow, is it

43:22

yeah hard working fast paced enthusiastic person who works in a restaurant or bar

43:32

Stan, thank you very much for being on industrial talk and saying yes to something today. squiffy run away have a good time on that one. All right. Thank you, Stan for being here. Great. All right. They're not

43:51

I do end up traveling anywhere. Let me know. I'll hang out with you.

43:56

Yeah, let's see. Hi, beer factor with Stan. You want to hang out with him? You want to have a beer with your factor. Hi. All right. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Do not go away. We will be right back.

44:09

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

44:18

All right, that Stan? Absolutely incredible conversation, Team RTI. They are focused on your success and you definitely could trust them. Reach out, go out to Stan Schneider's stat card out on LinkedIn reach out and connect. You're not going to be disappointed. All right, again. Let's get to this next normal, whatever it is, that means go into these events IoT solutions World Congress may 10 through the 12th go out to their website, find out more. Again, that is a great a great event to put on your calendar. Because they're all They're just laying it be apart. Be a part of the industrial talk ecosystem. We're just focused on entertainment. Bringing out that human element, and definitely solving problems and being able to collaborate with a bunch of people from around the world. You need to be a part of it. It's easy. Go to industrial talk.com Find out more. So a lot of fun, be bold, be brave, Daring Greatly hang out with people who are bold, brave and daring. Greatly like Stan. You're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation.

The post Stan Schneider with Real-Time Innovations appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're talking to Eric Simone, Founder and CEO of ClearBlade, Inc. about “The obligation to making technology simple and consumable for the masses”.  Get the answers to your “Technology” questions along with Eric's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

ERIC SIMONE'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericsimone/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clearblade/

Company Website: https://www.clearblade.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

software, building, infrastructure, industry, eric, 29th annual, company, ibm, selling, people, systems, masses, mainframe, late 80s, work, assets, fluke, iot, technology, industrial

00:00

On this Industrial Talk, we are broadcasting from the 29th annual SMRP conference in St. Louis. And we are talking about making technology simple, frictionless and available for the masses. Let's get going.

00:19

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 hardhat grab your work boots, and let's get

00:37

right once again, welcome to Industrial Talk the number one industrial related podcast in the universe. And I don't think I'm overselling that and we are broadcasting live from the 29th annual SMRP conference here in St. Louis, Missouri, wonderful venue, incredible. If you want to educate yourself, you come to this thing in the world of maintenance, reliability, asset management, and now we're throwing in technology in a big way. Big time. I want to thank Accruent and as well as Fluke Reliability. If I go up to their handy dandy website, I'm going to find a couple of things here is Fluke Reliability provides maintenance and reliability professionals, but data to do the job asset by asset, wherever they are, try to argue against that one, you cannot do not come to me and say I can argue that. And then of course Accruent. There. They're about real estate. They're about facilities are about asset management, of course, gaining insights to transform how your organization manages its physical resources. You need that they're great company. Both are great companies, great people, great solutions, no fuss, no muss, find out go to their website, you will not be disappointed. Alright, I'd say. We've got Eric Simone. ClearBlade is the company. You're the founder, right? I am. You're the bigwig.

01:52

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I like to pretend

01:56

he's smarter than me, which is pretty much everybody. And we're going to talk a little bit about modernizing in the infrastructure with intelligent assets, which is pretty doggone cool. But before we go down that road, because I'm going to geek out on that, give us a little background on who Eric is.

02:12

Sure. So, again, Founder CEO of ClearBlade, we've been at this since 2007. So we're not a young company, but we're not old. And prior to launching ClearBlade to focus on intelligent assets and edge computing software and, and IoT stuff, right, but I had a career at IBM, a couple of stints at IBM did some of the deal, Michael, I did not know I was I was a Michael was probably in grade school. When I started my career at IBM in the late 80s. I started off doing Air Traffic Control programming, no way. The DC area on mainframes. So it was a I was a young mainframe, were back in the late 80s. And then I spent a couple of years there, I did a stint at Johns Hopkins Hospital, I get to build patient intake systems as a 23 year old back in the day. And then I rejoined IBM in the Chicago area and sold was an engineer and sales engineer a client server software. So I saw the transition from mainframe to PC. And then in 94, I decided to leave the corporate world and move to the Bay Area and and do my first startup called compete, which we sold to a public company called efficient compete compete Incorporated. Yep. You had that compete. Competing corporate. That's great. Yeah. So it's, it's now proficient here in St. Louis. And that was a very, that's what moved me from the Bay Area to Texas. And and as of a week ago, I moved from Austin, Texas, back to my hometown of Libertyville, Illinois.

03:49

Good move. You wanted to do that? Yeah, I

03:51

did a number of reasons family, their sporting, sporting, and I wanted to put my kids into the same high school I graduated from, so they could get the true Breakfast Club experience. Many years later.

04:06

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. The first one. All right, let's do it. Let's venture into this. One of the themes that I like that you constantly and we're gonna we'll talk about it that you constantly sort of harp on in a nice way. Not a bad way. But it's, it's your obligation. You, as a coder, you as a programmer, you as a creator of systems, you're obligated to simplify. Yep, you're obligated for the end user to be able to achieve what they need to achieve without the fuss or muss because I would imagine you know that if it's hard, I'm not using it.

04:42

Totally true. I've seen it my whole career. So I used to be a programmer. Let's put like that. If you call me a programmer, my engineers here that don't laugh. But you know, I know enough to be dangerous. I know enough about what I've been through. Going from mainframe to PCs to the cloud. Bay Area craziness. And one thing that I've learned is we've got to make technology consumable by the masses. Yeah. And IoT specifically, has been, it's such a buzzword. And it's such a movement, it's real. And it's really difficult. And we have got to put software in the hands of the professionals on the plant floor. maintainers on the railway, right? In the buildings, that's not intimidating. It just has to be intuitive to use, and they shouldn't have to learn anything about coding or any of this technology example,

05:35

when, when I started this, you know, media thing, and I did it out as a result of trying to gain attention from my other company. I was concerned, I was nervous, because I just know, I'm entering into something that I really don't know. And then I was just surprised at how easy things were. And and, and I recognize and realize that there are just companies, they recognize nurses are saying, hey, for the masses, that's where the, that's where the value lies. And so and it is drag and drop, whatever, you know, you're not going to get yourself sideways. And

06:08

it shifted to in my mind just just a few years ago, actually, really 10 years ago, because as an engineer as a computer scientist, right? I sacrilege to say you don't need to code, right, right. To me, it's like, of course, you can't do this without coding. And I was a proponent back in the day of these visual drag and drop builders PowerBuilder, visual age was IBM's. And I built a whole business on that. And what I learned from leaving IBM and building that first business was, this stuff was great when I was demoing it around Chicago, right and selling it. But now that I have to use it at scale and these big projects, it doesn't work. Yeah, it really and this is why you don't see these tools again, right. And I actually see the industry making the same mistake for low code like, so no code is is a little bit different. It's not drag and drop and use these specialized tools. It's fill out a form and use, like, if you were to buy something on Amazon, you enter your credit card information, right. That's what no code means. It means I'm typing words to say things like, allow the farmer to say turn on fan when temperature in greenhouse 16 is above. Right, right, right. Yeah, turn up 75 degrees, or whatever. And they're just typing that in. Right? So it's natural language, usually language,

07:28

natural language. That's pretty tough. And cool. Now, you're going to touch upon a subject matter that I'm quite interested in, is because we have all this buzz out there about industry for Dido and digital journey and blah, blah. And and one of the areas is just infrastructure. Yep. That is, it's like, you know, that is a business that's been around forever. And it's just, you know, we've got assets that are 70 years old, what are you thinking? And I don't I don't have an answer of how you do that.

08:01

Very carefully. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons we focus on infrastructures, because that's what the the industry led us there. Right. So as we started selling our software, we were selling into industries like rail, yeah. Big iron, right? into building facilities, into aerospace into agriculture, right. And so when you start looking at the definition of infrastructure and critical infrastructure, it's things like energy, water, transportation, agriculture, right. So so when I looked at those boxes, like, okay, that's, that's broad enough for our software. I mean, there's a lot of criticism, sometimes you get for thinking broad and having that vision, you can't possibly attack all these industries at once. What if the software's not industry specific and customizable enough for any of these industries? And then you go work with the partners that know those industries, know those customers? That's, that's our go to market strategy. And that's what we do.

09:07

When you say that you're going to work with these partners who are partners, like what do you mean by partners?

09:12

So great question. People who know their customer, who know how to bring the best technology to bear both hardware and software, but are building bespoke solutions over years of development, their trusted advisors that know your manufacturing operation or know your rail operations, or know your aerospace operations. So when they know about our company ClearBlade, and they said, Look, we can combine ClearBlade software with the sort of sensors and gateways and it can stream data into your ERP system, your your enterprise, your enterprise systems, right, right. And then we can give them results in a matter of weeks or a couple months by configuring Software as opposed to building from the ground

10:02

Great stuff, don't get me wrong. Okay. So I'm just my, my, my head is swimming, because let's take, let's take utilities, let's take the infrastructure of utilities, there's a lot of a lot of things happen in there. And a lot of people are talking about it. And I think to your point, I think there's a gap and the gap is people that really know what the problem is. And really leaning on that there are just companies that are out there saying, Yeah, we're going to be doing this and we throw it out there. But do you really understand what's going on?

10:39

We don't, I'll tell you right now, I've got customers, that their, their full picture of what they want to do doesn't really get revealed to us until later. But what the partners know, they're, they're playing in their mission. So so we are, we are a vendor of software, right? You should, we shouldn't be in there directly selling anything, we should be working with a partner. And to to understand that bigger mission, right? If working with a utility specialist that understands what they need to do to modernize their existing infrastructure, and then applying the right software products, and hardware products to that solution. We've got great examples, we can tell you all of the reasons why our edge compute or IoT or AI is fantastic. But without that specialist in the middle, you're going to have we're going to struggle, because you've got to be able to identify what the business

11:39

and you know it, this is human right here, if you lose credibility, if you don't have that, that, that that subject matter expert, whatever, that individual that has the street cred that understands that business, and you come in and you you go round that individual, yeah, you're gonna screwed up and and then all of a sudden, whatever strategic initiative that they want to do, it's just thrown it's like, this is This is bull.

12:06

Yeah, you got it. And I'll tell you, our biggest challenge is, people that make their money, building things paid by the hour, not saying these companies are bad, but there's a lot of people out there building the same wheel over and over and over again. And they make a lot of money doing that. And there's internal fiefdoms in these companies where look, it's really cool to go build an IoT system, because that's your, you're an engineer, your software engineer, this is what you're paid to do. But it's not the most efficient way to go about doing but

12:39

that is been the point, especially with the infrastructure companies, right? They have these these, you know, patchwork type of legacy systems that it's like, yeah, I got that one, oh, I bought that one, they sold this, and they don't talk together, and then all of a sudden, you're trying to figure out what to do. And that's it. It's just, and that's just one organization over here that has a different set of

13:01

oh, it's, it's so so going back again, in time, which I love to do, you go to the late 80s, right. And one thing I learned is these enterprise systems, they don't go away. They, these are major investments from these companies, they evolve, right? And you better know how to work and play nice with those big systems, and be a valuable component. So play nice with others other software, other hardware, and be that flexible, flexible piece of software that can tie this stuff together. Yeah.

13:34

That's, that's where it's at. That's where it's at. And if you have any of that strategic to you, let's just put it this way, the infrastructure, the world of infrastructure has to do it, there has to be some way of strategically transitioning, it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to happen. Well, who knows, right? Just gonna have a lot of people.

13:53

And I'll tell you intelligent assets, right? That's a term that we use, that is focused on the operator, the maintainer, the business person. And that's a shift for us. Because we were selling to the technology, people look here, here, your picks and shovels, before the pandemic. And then what happened during the pandemic, is the customers that continued to buy, were buying in buying the value of intelligent assets by adding sensors into their operation, adding edge gateways in but using our intelligent asset system. So when we looked at the future, which looked pretty bleak a year, year, year plus ago, right, so let's go double down on that and make our intelligent assets system better and really focus on the end user, not the IT department and the developer. Now, of course, we can't cut those people out. But we already built for them. So once we built this application over top of it, to work with the people that run the run the machines right out in the field, then And they started using it, then it starts getting involved say, wait a minute, what are you using here? Oh, let's open it up and do more and then we give them that capability to so we just go in in a different manner. Now

15:10

see, and I like that because that is really where the rubber meets the road are the operators are the one that keep the assets running and doing whatever they have to do. And they do a great job.

15:17

Well doesn't happen. Software nerds, right. So we there's so much to build. We shouldn't be building it all. There's other high level things to do with AI and ML and other stuff. So upskill that stuff, right?

15:29

There's a lot out there it is. I don't know how you guys keep up with it. Even I get it's never boring. It's never boring. How do people get ahold of you?

15:39

Eric Simone at ClearBlade.com e si, m o ne. Okay, good.

15:45

Oh, you don't have a.in there. No dot between Eric and somoni.

15:50

You know, the dot gets scraped away anyway with the server. So it's actually meaningless. That's it. That's it. Technically it is. No matter. Just so you know. You can put as many dots as you want in there.

16:06

Make a note of that listeners. The dot doesn't matter. The dot doesn't matter. Was that on a bumper sticker, the doc doesn't matter. I love it. Wonderful. Thank you very much for being on Industrial Talk. By the way. You did a great job at the roundtable. dealio SMF. Be

16:21

glad to get moderators.

16:24

Oh fest right here. All right, listeners, don't worry, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. After the break, we're gonna just make sure that you get get the right information about Eric. And if you need to get a hold of them kind of get on you. We're not going to be disappointed. I'm just telling you right now, you're not going to be a disappointing

16:38

answer as many dots as you want in there. Yeah. Because the server doesn't

16:41

care or whatever. It doesn't care. Dot person. All right. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.

16:47

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

16:55

All right. Eric, smoke, thank you very much for being on Industrial Talk. And we were broadcasting from the 29th annual SMRP conference. Booth is in your pipe and smoke it. We've got to make technology simple. We've got to remove the friction. We've got to make it available to the masses and put it in the hands of the operators. And that is a must if we are to succeed in this digital transformation world that we are venturing into. We can't put any roadblocks in the way that's Eric Simone. Reach out to him LinkedIn also thank you to crew and as well as Fluke reliability for your sponsorship. Go out to their both websites. Great company, great people, great solutions, solving problems. accruing Fluke reliability, make it happen. happen. All right. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with people like Eric. Be bold, be brave and daring greatly. You're gonna change the world. Alright, we're gonna have another great interview from the 29th annual SMRP conference shortly

The post Eric Simone with ClearBlade appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Paul Casto, APM Industry Principal with GE Digital  about “Managing Business Case ROI Risk”.  Get the answers to your “ROI Risk Management” questions along with Paul's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2021. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

PAUL CASTO'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-casto-2b8bb218/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ge-digital/

Company Website: https://www.ge.com/digital/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

projects, roi, organizations, business, companies, paul, industrial, maintenance, reliability, asset management, people, risk, create, deliver, plan, focused, area, professionals, technology, asset

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

again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk the number one industrial related podcast in the universe. And it celebrates you industrial heroes, you are bold, you're brave, you're daring greatly. You're solving problems. You're innovating, and you're changing lives. You're changing the community, you're changing the world each and every day. If you're passionate about industry, yeah, this is where you need to be. Because we love to educate. We love to collaborate, and definitely love to innovate. Alright, in the hot seat, podcast, GE Digital is the company. And what's great about this particular conversation, we're going to talk a little bit about risk management and ROI on your asset management projects. Yeah, you need to deliver. So let's get cracking.

01:14

We're also sponsored by occurrent. And Fluke reliability, go out to their websites, both companies passionate about into your asset management, your your maintenance, and making it easy for you to achieve that uptime that is necessary for your for your, your project for your, your business, it's important, that's accurate, and Fluke reliability. Alright. I've been gone for a couple of weeks. And the reason I've been gone for a couple of weeks, I've been very fortunate to be able to attend broadcast from smrp, which is the Society of maintenance and reliability professionals. That was in St. Louis. And then I just zipped on up to Cleveland for the manufacturing and technology show. And both events were just absolutely spectacular. But here is what I learned. Write this down. I know you know it, but I'm gonna have to just say it anyway. Everyone, and I mean, everyone was talking about upskilling reskilling, how do I? How do I deal with my resources that are necessary to keep my doors open? And my business moving forward? Now there's a couple of conversations that are associated with that. That's one, we need people always, always always you need people? And what are the strategies around getting that done? And then to what innovation? What technology can we deploy to help create that business of resilience? So when we're at smrp, they're talking about keeping that asset up and running, managed properly, and and delivering results? And then at the manufacturing and technology show? What do we do? How do we keep people coming in? What do we how do we inspire, inspire our youth to be in into or get into manufacturing? Get into the profession of, of just, you have no idea what was just out there. If you are considering I just ask that you look at this stop. Because if you're young, and if you're considering a profession, I'm telling you, it's ripe, it is spectacular, it is innovative, you're you're going to be at the cutting edge of technology cutting edge of strategic directions for these particular companies. They need you. And that's why this particular podcast is here. Because we want to make sure that you get everything you can go out to industrial talk.com. And we have an education platform. We have all these great articles representing all these wonderful, skilled industrial professionals. You got to read them or listen to them. We got the videos out there. It is truly a great place to be able to begin your journey in the world of industry in the world of manufacturing in the world of industrial for Dotto. It is all out on industrial talk.com We try to have fun, because it is fun. We try to make it entertaining, because it is because it deserves that type of attention. So anyway, let's get on with this interview with Paul. So my a bit very fortunate. He was very busy at smrp. And I believe he is chair of smrp this time around. And boy does he has stuff to say and it's stuff that is very important, especially in today's world. You know, we talk about some of the challenges that have taken place within the COVID COVID pandemic, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, they're real. Don't get me wrong. It's challenging. But one of the great Things that I get out of it. And it was great to see people at these events, getting back to normal, collaborating, and really from the heart, and a desire to truly collaborate and solve problems. Paul is leading that effort at smrp, we're going to have a number of other great conversations. But if you go out to his stack card, yeah, he likes education. He, his, his business card is just way too small for how many things that he does is just as so it's not worth even trying to get all his education. God he is so committed to

05:38

asset management, reliability, maintenance, everything, he is a leader. So anyway, with that said, enjoy the conversation. Paul, welcome to industrial talk, thank you very much for finding time in your busy schedule to share and impart your wisdom and knowledge into the world of asset management, maintenance, and reliability, big time, I'm sure the listeners will grow to appreciate. I mean, you got some mad street cred out there, you do. And I was looking at you, and I'm not going down your bio, but reality is, if you go out to his LinkedIn profile, it's not as impressive as the bio that I received, because it just has you like education. And you're constantly educating, which

06:24

is that it's a fast changing world. And if we're gonna, you know, remain relevant, we have to keep our skill sets up.

06:32

You know, that's that's a whole nother conversation to have. That's a whole nother topic. Because I, I don't know how anyone, especially today, in this particular world, is not committed to some form of disciplined education, whatever it might be read a book, I don't care, whatever it might be. Daily, because you're absolutely right. It's, it's blistering fast even I can't keep up with it. Well, that's not saying much. Yeah, don't don't lose. Don't think about that listeners, I can. So for the listeners out there, Paul, give us a little background, little 411 on who you are. And then we're going to venture into managing business case, ROI risk, which is an important topic.

07:17

What's your so I'm Paul caspo, I've worked in this maintenance reliability asset management space for a number of years, I had a great opportunity several years ago to lead the reliability team for Eastman Chemical, they were really an industry leader Well, before I got there, and that's where I started my foray into really asset management, asset performance management, that that whole space, they were a user. I left Eastman with some other plans, but ended up with Meridian doing asset performance management, or I just call it APM. Globally, for a lot of customers and a lot of different industries. And then, as time went on, we had a buyout from GE. And so we're now at GE entity and my current work is a lot around, I would call it maybe front end engineering, helping customers identify what their business outcomes really are figuring out what kind of value they need to create, to achieve those business outcomes. And, and then after we do all that, we can worry about potential solutions to create the ROI, those three things that really need to be linked together. So I'm doing quite a lot of work in that area, as well as risk management, I'm doing some, some more of all things graduate work around risk management, and how do we manage the risk of ROI. Many times people build business cases and the business cases say I'm going to deliver such and such ROI, but, but deliver less.

08:53

It's interesting, especially the topic of risk management ROI, the financial component around the maintenance, reliability and asset management profession. Not to not to say that there's been snake oil salesmen out there, there have been and they, they they sort of diminish, unfortunately, the realities of an asset management reliability program within an organization and you're going to have to try to sort of distill that and get rid of the negative stuff because the the value is there. Is that not right, Paul?

09:29

Yeah, that that is correct. A few years ago, I actually did a study around this area, we went into our CMMS system pulled out all of our labor hours, all of our, our material hours, everything that we could put together in terms of, of the cost of these projects and looked at the returns and, you know, a good self respecting reliability project, in actuality should deliver over 100% return. Now, it goes up and it goes down. Some of them aren't nearly as successful as others, but it, it is a really high value area to be working in, if you can figure out how to properly execute it.

10:12

So that just brings us to the point of let's, let's talk a little bit about that from a. How do you develop now? I'm not going down the road of the CMMS. And, and bad data and pencil Web? That's a whole other conversation. I got it. But how do we build a the elements of a business case so that we can begin to truly and discipline a insights into the financial benefits associated with this particular case?

10:40

Well, the first thing we have to do is we really need to understand the business outcomes, what what are the drivers that the businesses are looking for? You know, as engineers, many times I say, we get caught up in the elegance of the technical solution. And, and we decide we need to implement this new technology, without really considering what we're there to do. And what we're really there to do is to create value for our companies, and to put together projects that give our companies the best opportunity for success. That's possible, you know, we live, we live in a probabilistic world not a deterministic world, and nothing is for sure out there. But when we start looking at projects, and return on investment, the place to start really is what are we trying to accomplish from a business perspective? The second part of that is what value do we need to create? And then and then we'll put together the project?

11:39

Just for clarification, what are some drivers what sort of give us an example of what outcome of a business give us just sort of a basic ones like, I'm a business, I'm looking at this?

11:51

Sure. This great example, a few years ago, I had Vice President calling me up, and they were very professional and nice. And he says, You know, I could deliver another million dollars to the bottom line, if I could just get over some reliability issues with my equipment? Well, I came out of the construction industry. And what that meant to me was, oh, boy, I really better get cracking here. So that's a great example, he could deliver another million dollars worth of profit to the bottom line of the company if he could get the equipment to run. So that's a great, great business proper.

12:26

See, and I can see that because you're you're talking with that particular example, an asset, the uptime production. And so that that's real time. And And typically, something like that just requires a little analysis on those assets that they've targeted, does that correct? Well, sometimes it's,

12:45

it's a little harder than that. But we do need to go in and do an analysis of why are they losing this? You know, what, what are the problems? And and, you know, what we'll find is, we'll find that some of the problems are definitely equipment related. There have been unexpected breakdowns, other other issues. But I typically also find that there's opportunity on the operation side, they're not running their equipment up to standard, they're not following good processes. And I have to say, to this vice president's credit, we actually contributed more than a million dollars, you know, we did an analysis went back and talked to him, and he focused quite a bit of energy around running a better operation, we focused on getting the equipment to run better, and together, we actually contributed more than then our target.

13:32

Wow. That sounds cool. I like that. I like that approach. And I like that focus. So what we have, from a from a business case perspective, we've got to understand the outcome of the business. Got it? Number two, is, are there steps in this that we need to be aware of?

13:51

Yeah, well, you need to understand the business outcomes. And then the next step is to figure out what value you need. And there are different types of value. You know, there's what I call hard value, that that's the easiest part, it shows up over on a company's financial statements, we sell more product, we increase the revenue, we reduce our maintenance cost, or our spares cost, we lower the cost of goods sold, both of which improve gross profit, that's one kind of value. Often what happens is we may go in and work with a customer and we may focus for six months in an area. And let's say we reduce the maintenance costs 10%. Now we have a choice. Do we take that out of the budget? Or do we reallocate that to another area of the facility that needs improvement? I call that firm value. And then of course, there's risk reductions. And that's at the heart of what we do in reliability it is it is finding that we've got a bearing problem a month before the actual failure, ordering that Barry planning the work and replacing that bearing and nobody even knows about it. So there's a lot of risk reduction activities and and then lastly, there's our intangible values. It's it's how we do our work. It's all of those things that fall into that category.

15:05

So, back to the example that you provided about a million dollar bottom line value, you were focused on the assets, but then the VP would be focused on the operations, which, which would pretty much fall into say, let's say, tangible value, that, you know, how can we be more efficient, whatever that whatever that focus needs to be? I like that. That's correct. Give me an example of risk reduction sort of nebulous. From my perspective, what is that?

15:39

Well, let's, if we think about these projects, let's just think about what happens with a project. Oh, we may do some front end engineering, then we do detailed design. And if it's a software related project, as many of them are today, we do some internal testing, we do user testing, then we go live, right? We go live, and many times the customer doesn't have a plan. What happens after we start this new system up? Whether it's a CMMS system, an APN? system, some other system? We started it up? Now what so there's a lot of risk associated with that. And those, those those risks, if we aren't thinking and planning ahead, could be in a variety of things. No, Postville go live value creation plan. How about this one, this is huge. And all these projects, it is an adaption governance, and a chain management plan. We're changing the work processes that everybody use, we're changing the technology, they're tools. And if we don't put an adoption plan in place, that's a huge risk that can negatively impact the return on investment. Now, the flip side of that is we typically think about risk in a negative sense. But let's step back and say, how about if we manage these things? Well, how about if we have a good value creation plan, we've done great change management, we're focused on the business outcomes, there's an upside to risk, you know, without any without risk, there is no opportunity. But if we properly manage this, we can actually create additional value.

17:12

I like it. And you're absolutely right, I think what happens is we get, we get all just sort of sucked into the value of all of this and the hype, and it makes sense. And it looks good on paper. But then when it gets down to execution, that human element comes into play, and then it gets a little squishy, and I like the fact that you have an adoption, governance plan and change management, and everybody else. I very rarely do people say, Gosh, I like change.

17:44

You're, you're you're correct. Yeah, people, you know, they want to know, well, why should I change? What's in it for me? Why do I need to do this? What are you going to do with this data after I start recording it, all kinds of things, you know, that come together everything from from creating a platform, you know, the old burning platform of why we need to change to integrating short term wins into the whole program, everybody has, you know, wants to play for a winner, and they don't want to wait two years to be a winner.

18:14

No, nobody. It that's, that's sad. Because that happens quite frequently. And, you know, you have the people that are saying, hey, it's gonna take three to five years, I can't even think in those terms, three to five years. And before I, I get a win, or I, and after a while, you're just sort of feel like you're digging a ditch out there, you see the value, but you're still digging a ditch? How do we create a situation where we can experience some short term victories? You have to be proactive

18:47

about that, you know, I always think about implementation. And when I talk to people, I sort of propose a new, a new way to implement, you know, we, we often, you know, go live, we've trained the masses, we've shown him Oh, go do criticality analysis, go do FMEA. Now go forth, and use all these new tools and technologies, yet, we need a more focused plan, we need a focus plan of those. What are the high value areas out there? What are my constraint points? Where am I spending too much money? And and then what are we going to do around those those things to create a value plan where we can actually actually deliver that value. And while we're doing all of that, we're going to plan proactively short term wins, you've got to think ahead. You know, you just can't wait for things to happen. Because as we just said, everybody wants to see progress and they don't want to see it. 24 months they want to see it three months, right? So you have to plan these things. It's you just can't wait for them. This is hard work. You know, this may sound easy, like you know, that this was really hard work of planning in detail what you're going to do. It's

19:55

interesting culturally that typically US companies mean, in general, we look at quarterly financials, we just do. And and we're very rational, maybe I did the same thing, right? Very rash. And if I don't see value to my bottom line, because I'm looking at it, I'm looking at, and I want to see some values. Now, I think that that is a great approach. Now, when we start talking about that planning, making sure that you have those little victories planned out, you're monitoring it, I think it goes a long way with developing that sustainable discipline going forward, right, because it is a human equation when we start talking about deploying these solutions.

20:42

It is and and you know, it's a step by step process. You know, like I said earlier, we need to know, what are the high value areas? What are we going to do once we get there? Oh, we're going to do root cause analysis? Or we're going to do FMEA? Okay, then the question becomes, who's going to do that work? Well, you're going to give it to Bill and Bob, who are already at 110%? Are you going to really step back and say, I'm going to make resources available? And then what skills and support do those resources need to be successful? And, and then, of course, we've got to build some, you know, a project plan and metrics around that plan so that we, we can proactively monitor our progress.

21:23

And if you're going to want to pull out that ROI, you're going to have to you can't just pencil whip this, you can't just so here's my challenge, Paul, and how do we do this? His organizations are fluid, they're coming and going, people are coming and going and going there. And if you don't have a, an organization that has some sort of continuity between people coming and going, then you're you're ready resources that are available that you dedicate it to this particular project becomes suboptimal, for lack of better? How do we organizations create some sort of continuity and manage that risk? Because that's a risk to be able to sustain it going forward? You got the big, you get the victories? How do we do that?

22:12

That's really hard. And in a lot, yeah. And let's think about this happen over the long term. You know, our most successful customers or people that I work with, a lot of it starts with leadership at the top, you know, the leadership understands reliabilities important, it understands that we need to create value. And many of those organizations have grown those leaders up through the organizations with different roles and different assignments. And they understand all that. Now, what happens to those organizations later on, you know, there's the lifecycle to everything, sooner or later, those people may or may retire. Now, the leaders that have established there, and if the organization has renewed itself, then great, but lots of organizations, then people come in from the outside, they weren't raised the same way in the same culture around reliability, it is really hard to maintain that over the long term. It takes great leadership, real vigilance. And it takes a dedication by the company to understand well, you know, these are key elements to our success. And that's a risk, you know, companies, you know, we're mostly working with asset risk risk around unexpected failures, risk around injuries and safeties, and si s and compliance. But companies have these enterprise risk management organizations, that's they're worrying about bigger risk, you know, they're worried about people and, and money and finance and hedging, and, you know, the overall organization. So that's a risk that may not be managed just by us, but needs to be managed by the company at a

23:55

higher level. Yeah, and you're spot on, because I've been fortunate enough to be a part of a number of organizations. And that has always been the greatest challenge. It's never, it's never about whether these programs will deliver because they will. It always gets down to the tenacity, the focus, and I would have to say energy of the team, the individual, the leadership, and creating that continuity, because it's, it's, it's out there. And what always fascinates me, Paul, is we've had this conversation like we were at smrp 29/29 year we're still talking about companies that need to begin to embrace the principles behind asset management, reliability and maintenance and and that it's out there and professionals like you and others can constantly strive to figure that out, and it just always fascinates me that we're still having In this conversation over and over again,

25:03

well, I'm gonna go back to what I said a few minutes ago, the reason we have this conversation over and over again, is because it is really hard, right? It's easier, it's easier for leaders to go, you know, a company to go out, I'm just going to go buy some new equipment to increase my capacity. Well, they go buy that equipment, well, that's sort of a proven process to buy the equipment, it's all equipment, they start the equipment up, you know, that's much easier to manage that it is culture, and people it takes, it takes discipline, to stick to these processes that we know that work, it takes discipline, and it takes leadership to make sure that we're sticking to those things. So it's not the it's, it is like a goldmine, or maybe I should use a bariatric, put this value in barrels of oil here lately, that this is an area that is very fruitful in terms of benefits to companies. But but it really is hard.

26:01

One last question. And I've always I've never had a real straight answer. So let's say I'm an organization, I'm pretty inefficient, I there's, there's a lot of low hanging fruit, we develop a plan of creating some victories, and we do everything that we need to do and we, you know, year one, we've got massive savings, we've got massive and positive ROI. Year two, it starts to, you can't you can't achieve the same success because you're just becoming more efficient. Is there a point where it just starts to, like you're as efficient as you possibly can? Or is there always going to be a positive ROI?

26:47

Well, the better you get, you know, those last incremental values, you know, you're exactly right. It's easier upfront to do a lot of things. And the more mature we get, you know, as I sometimes have the old saying, is the juice really worth the squeeze? Right? You know, how much money is it going to cost me to get that last percent of availability? And is it worth it? You know, there comes a time when you need to optimize everything. So the answer is, you know, that's typically a long road, you know, to get from, I'm just starting to, to where now I really needs to be optimized. But but there is an optimization point associated with this.

27:29

Yeah. And what's interesting, unfortunately, when you start to deploy maintenance dollars, right, dollar, it's $1 off the bottom line, dollar dollar, right. And it's not a depreciated type of expenditure. And so what happens with the fluidity of organizations, other leadership's come in, why do I have to spend that dollar on the maintenance? And then it then it's, it's, it's a cycle? Yeah.

27:55

And it shows up, if they cut the maintenance costs, this monkey shows up on on on your neck. That is why that is why it is really important for us to have good sound business cases. You know, McKenzie did a study a few years ago, and they looked at large software projects, you know, when we have those, whether it's CMMS, or, you know, SAP or whatever it might be, yeah, you know, typically, they found that typically, those projects delivered 30%, less than the projected ROI on those projects, right. So our leadership sort of starts to view a lot of this as a risky business. This is risky business. So. So that's why it is really important for us to have a good well developed business cases, good execution plans value free, and we need to start delivering, we have to deliver what we promise. I like the fact that you have to deliver, I think God are the days when you can sort of just sort of ride on in on a white horse and say, I've got the technology solution, and then right on out and it never, never achieves the objective. And then everybody has a surly or salty opinion about what just took place. And then they just, that's why the culture. That's why there's a reluctance to deploy some of these things because everybody's been burned. And I mean, everybody.

29:15

Unless you're true, Greenfield and that just started from scratch. Maybe that's a different nap. But that's rare. That is big time rare. So anyway, that that's just, that's where we're at. All right. I want to make sure that everybody understands how do they get ahold of you?

29:34

They can reach me, the easiest way is probably by email and that is called Dos Passos. da s. E. o@ge.com. They can reach me there. I'd be happy to talk to anybody give them you know, give them some resources. There's lots of material out there. We were just together last week, that week before last smrp and that that stuff is online. So lots of info Automation.

30:00

It's, it's if you're thinking that it's hard to find information listeners think again because organizations like smrp, Paul, others, other practitioners that are passionate about reliability, asset management, maintenance and, and developing the solutions around that. It's all out there. It's an important professional. I've always been very bullish about it. And I've been, because everybody just is so collegial. Everybody wants to help everybody to be successful. It's an it's an interesting culture that exists within the, the realm of maintenance and asset or liability and all that good stuff. This is alright listeners. That's Paul. He's with GE. And we were definitely talking about ROI. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side, do not hesitate or do not go away, because we will be back and we will have this conversation on how to get ahold of Paul. So stay tuned.

30:58

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

31:06

All right, a final shout out to Paul Casto. Go out to his card. Paul castle on LinkedIn. You know, you type in his name, that's ca sto comma, G, you will find Him and you will realize how much work he does within the maintenance, asset management and reliability space. He is a leader. So don't hesitate contacting them. All right. Again, we've got to educate. We've got to collaborate. We've got to innovate. There are challenges facing industry going forward. Heard that smrp heard that at maintenance and the technology, manufacturing and technology show. Absolutely important. Go to industrial talk.com We're gonna continue to add to it we're gonna continue to highlight great, great professionals and companies dedicated to your success. All right. Be bold, be brave, daring, greatly hang out with people who are bold, brave and Daring Greatly like Paul, and you're going to change the world. Thank you very much for joining the industrial talk podcast. We will be back with another great interview shortly.

The post Paul Casto with GE Digital appeared first on Industrial Talk.

In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Lance Dofflemyer, Chief Data Scientist at MR Systems, Inc. about “The Power of Data and Unification of your Water Data Assets”. Get the answers to your “Water Data Solution” questions along with Lance's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Lance Dofflemyer Interview

Thu, 4/29 10:10AM • 28:52

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

data, facilities, people, water, systems, lance, talk, important, process, utilities, plant, beverly, industry, insights, industrial, NOEM, ml, Rider, MR Systems

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. Alright, welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast where we celebrate you industry heroes. That's right, because you are bold. I hear it all the time. You are brave. We talk about it all the time, you are just Daring Greatly each and every day, we are living through a great time and you're changing lives and you're changing the community as we speak, all around the world. take that to the bank, we are living through incredible times. It's exciting. And you know who's leading the way you you industrial professional, alright, in a hot seat in a hot seat, Lance Dofflemyer. He is the chief data scientist at Mr. systems. Now, Mr. systems, they are incredible when it comes to water. But you know, we were talking about data because there's gold in that data, the data that makes the product better, safer, asset runs more, let's get cracking data.

01:24

It's like we

01:26

just like your mining data that just makes everything better. And that's what Lance is all about. I mean, it's just an incredible that we take it for granted that water just comes out of our tap. And water is very important to our life. Absolutely, Doggone it, but it's more the fact that we just take it for granted that it's going to be safe. And that it's gonna I like it. I drink a lot of it. I got a lot in front of me. But before we get in that interview, okay. You know, I always talk about being bold, being brave, daring greatly. Those are not platitudes. Those are not just something that I just sort of, sort of, you know, stirred up and said, it was a great words, no. industry is all about bold, thinking bold, being bold, visions that are bold, that are brave, that are just like, okay, we're going to do it. Why not? Why not? and answer that question. And then Daring Greatly put it out there. Just, we're going to do it. We're gonna take action now bold, brave and daring greatly. And always talk about, hey, hang out with people who are bold and brave and daring greatly, and you're gonna just absolutely move mountains change, VA world. So you might have noticed a couple of times. She's been on the podcast a couple of times. Her name is Beverly Rider.

02:45

Beverly Rider is an inspiration. We got to our stack, our LinkedIn Beverly Rider. Yeah, just plug in Beverly Rider. And she looks at the world in a very unique way. She wants to change it. She is doing that. Right this very moment. She is an inspiration now. I met her as the Chief Commercial Officer at Hitachi America. And at that time, we had a great conversation and we were talking a lot about stuff. Find it out there on IndustrialTalk.com you will be inspired. And then she said, I'm going, I'm going to an organization called Neom. So you're going to get on your Google and you're going to type in Neom, and oh, you're going to say Saudi Arabia, and then euro are going to be dazzled by what is taking place at Neom. She has accepted a position as executive director with that organization. But

03:42

But talk about bold, brave and daring greatly. That's what Neom is all about. That's what she is doing her team, everybody in Neom. That's what they're doing. They're taking all of this great innovation that exists out there today, which it does. And they're applying it to a community, the community of the future. And I got this thing that's quoted from me, it preserves 95% of the name of nature within Neom, which is over in Saudi Arabia and its community of the future with zero cars, zero, straights, zero carbon emissions, bold, brave, daring, greatly, making it happen. How about that? You need to reach out you need to just go to that website, and you will be absolutely stunned. I remember. And I remember why my there's a lot more out there. So I'm not I'm not going too deep into it because you got to go out to that website. And I remember looking it up. And finally I said and I and at that point in time, I contacted a couple of people I said you've got to check this thing out. You've got to see what's going on there. It is spectacular. This is exactly right there. what the future looks like.

04:57

It's exciting. Beverly Rider boom.

05:00

Kudos, thank you for changing the world. That's what she's all about. All right, I want a paper, right? And pencil,

05:09

we got an A, we've got an event that I want you to at least consider going to. It's the digital summit brought to you by IoT solutions World Congress, I am running a side event when I say I am.

05:23

I have people that know what we're going to be talking about. And I just sort of sit there like eye candy and ask them questions. But I do have a utility background. And so we're going to be talking a little bit about the electric utility, right? The electric utilities, digital transformation journey.

05:39

And what makes this an interesting conversation, when you start talking about the utilities, we take that for granted, lights go on, everything works just fine. But when we start talking about bringing on alternative generation, which we've been doing for some time, but now it's really gaining a lot of traction, that puts a lot of stress on utilities. What do they do?

06:04

For me personally, it's a digital. It's an innovative solution. We're working with Intel, and a gentleman. His name is Mike Bates with Intel, and Phil carry. And he's got his consulting he, he was with Southern California Edison. And we're just, I mean, we're talking about this digital transformation, being applied to utilities, because because a Beverly Rider is is an inspiration to us. And those people that know him are an inspiration. We're going to transform doggone utilities. And that is what's going to be and it's may 11. To the 12th. You got joint sorry for the long intro. I just had to shout out to Beverly Rider and and this particular digital summit side. There's gonna be more it'll be out there on Industrial Talk. It's, it's exciting. As you can tell, I'm going to geek out on it big time. All right, let's get on with Lance.

07:01

You know, cool stuff. We live in a really exciting time, because of Lance, because of Beverly, because of Mike Bates, and Phil Carey all of these individuals that are saying, why not? Why not? Let's change the world. Why not? All right. Enjoy the conversation with Lance. Lance. Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast, absolute honor that you have joined, and you're going to be sharing your insights and wisdom into water with the listeners of the Industrial Talk podcast. How are you doing? That? Scott? How are you? Thanks for having me. Well, it's a pleasure, because I love this topic. So for the listeners out there, let's get right to it. Give us a little 411 on who Lance is. Sure. I'm Lance dolphin, Meyer with Mr. systems. And we are a water and wastewater Integrator for the southeast United States. And all we do is water southeast, just southeast. Can you go northeast? Can you go? Northwest? As you see, I'm doing my little

08:02

thing I'm getting Can you go anywhere? We can go anywhere? Yep. I like that. I like that. All right. So what what are we talking about when we start talking about integration? What does that mean?

08:14

That's a good question. So we're in the field of process controls. And to kind of break down that that term, it doesn't really matter what manufacturing facility we're talking about. It could be a pulp and paper mill, you got trays on one side, and you got paper on the other. If you go to a you know, a cookie plant, you've got raw ingredients on one side, and you got cookies on the other world water, we have a lake on one side, and we have clean drinking water on the other. everything that goes on in between that is the process. Now, humans are really bad at, you know, controlling complex processes on their own. We're not very good at sub second decisions and staying awake 24 seven, so

09:00

I try. I try it doesn't work.

09:04

So we design industrial control systems to control those processes that manufacture whatever we want. And that's where the term process controls comes from. So what is the problem we're trying to solve here? what's what's that problem statement that we're trying to solve? Sure. So one of the issues that's come up in the water industry is really a siloed approach to water. And what I mean by that is that water utilities have historically evolved in an isolated manner. And to kind of give a background of the lifecycle of water, we have a lake on one side, and we pull water from that lake, we treat it, we send it out to a distribution system, which can range from a couple of sites to hundreds of sites that just manage moving water around the people. People businesses use that water and it goes to a collection system, and there can be a few to hundreds or even 1000s

10:00

Have collection systems, then that water is collected and sent to a wastewater plant where it's cleaned and put back into the river or lakes and the cycle repeats. So the nature of the water industry has largely evolved in a siloed fashion where each one of these facilities kind of operates on their own. And the challenge for water utilities is how do I know comprehensively what's going on in my entire watershed? Because I have all these data sources and mixed solutions that make up my water system.

10:32

So what we've been doing with utilities is, I'm gonna stop you real quick. Sure. So listeners, the process looks like this. And correct me if I'm wrong, lakes and rivers, that's where our water source, that's where our watershed where we're getting our water from there, we process it, we put it into the drinking cat category. And then there is at the other end of that drinking category or process is the collection, and then you put it back into the rivers and lakes. And then the process continues to go around and around and around. Got it, right, yep. Good.

11:06

So we've been working with utilities to really bring all these data sources into one application,

11:14

anything from a single application where they can navigate particular screens or dashboards or insights, so they can see what's going on at any facility at any given time.

11:27

And, more importantly, we've been standardizing these data sets so that they can be used for advanced analytics and data science and ml and things like that.

11:40

Why is that important?

11:42

It's important for a number of reasons. So anomaly detection is one of them.

11:48

If we can, you know, evaluate sometimes, you know, in some of our applications, there's, there's millions of data points coming in in real time,

11:56

it's quite difficult for a human to review that data in real time and make a decision off of it. And so, you know, anomaly detection is is pretty key on that.

12:08

By aggregating the data into one single pipeline, we can also introduce new KPIs or important pieces of information that are applicable to that municipality, you know, information that they would like to have had and know it's beneficial, but just had no way of getting it.

12:26

I have to, I have to ask what that example would be, I'm taking it for granted, I go to my sink, I pulled that water, it's all good. And and whatever is happening today, I'm okay. What what additional information can they glean, that makes it even better, I that's an interesting challenge that I share. So someone examples working with recently, as we had a large wastewater plant that

12:52

they, you know, they'll process, you know, anywhere from 40 to 60 million gallons a day. And they get sent a lot of water from a number of different sources.

13:04

Those sources are in other remote geographical locations. And I know the flow that they're sending, and I know the flow that the plant is receiving.

13:13

But what we what we don't know is if any flow is getting lost along the way, so by connecting all these facilities, I can ensure that the the flow that we're sending that facility is actually getting there. Or we can start to detect that, hey, maybe you have a pipe that's broken, or you have some loss along the way, I mean, just very simple. It doesn't have to be this complex, you know, ml algorithm, it could just be, you know, basic subtraction, that that can provide insights that they previously didn't. So I'm certainly 10 here, I want 10 at the other end, but if I'm sending 10 here, and I get nine here, that that's a flag that says, hey, we're losing something. And and it's important to be able to retain as much, you know, water as we possibly can. That's an important component to the whole process. Absolutely. So

13:58

let's talk a little bit about I hear what you're saying I have these siloed type of assets that I'm dealing with today, I get data from this one a data from this one, I've got multiple systems that I leverage. But I do I want to bring it under one umbrella, just want to bring it under? Where do we start? What are the actionable points? Where do we start? Yeah, I would start with the vision of what you're looking for. And the reason I bring this up,

14:25

it just kind of gives you a target and you can kind of start to make it more concrete from there. But now I would kind of ignore the the budgetary and resource constraints and really just start with what as a municipality do we want to see how do we want to connect our facilities and what type of information

14:43

and the reason that's important is because we can do quite a bit with quite a little with today's technology.

14:50

solutions are becoming much more cost effective and even even, you know, free or little to no cost.

14:58

So, you know, we start with

15:00

division, we'll go with them and say, you know, do you want to see all your facilities in one app? Do you want to control from a central location? I have to interrupt real quick, what's the pain I'm dealing with right now to push to, to push me forward to talk to labs? Like, I'm a municipal water? What What am I sitting here? I'm going, dang, we got to get a handle on this. What's that pain I'm dealing with right now. To talk to you.

15:26

Why do I want to talk to you?

15:29

Yeah, so I mean,

15:32

there is a huge need to understand what's going on at all the facilities in real time, because,

15:42

you know, we go in and work with a lot of these facilities, great people, great resources,

15:47

but they operate independently. In, that's just kind of the lifecycle of a water and wastewater plant. You know, as, as the population grows, these facilities, you know, will either build new ones, or these new disposable new ones, but often they just expand within the facility. And so you just have a mixed bag of control systems, you have a mixed bag of vendors that come in, and you just kind of have this conglomerate of systems. And it's, it's difficult to

16:15

streamline that and standardize that into one system that can operate and talk to one another. And that's really what we do is we go in and kind of evaluate, where are you at today? Where would you like to be? And how can we get you there in the most cost effective manner, which makes sense because I, me, if I was a municipal water, person professional, responsible for making sure that the water is good, making sure that I get it processed properly, the liability is probably pretty high. And if I don't have good insights into the data, I think that there's a possible risk there might be my off base here. No, that's absolutely right. I mean, it's, it's a pretty critical process, you know, we, it is, you know, we, it's not really a job, but we make the statement that, you know, we can't mess this up, or we're going to be on the six o'clock news. And that's, that's really the day to day that we live in. You know, you're right, people take it for granted that, you know, they turn on their their faucet and water comes out. And they don't really understand how many 1000s of people are behind that to make that happen. Again, amazing. That's true. That's a this truly celebration of people that I mean, again, there are things that we just take for granted as consumers of these products. Water is one.

17:29

So I sit there and I go, Okay, yeah, I approach Lance, I want to be able to get a clear picture of where I'm at and come up with here I am today, this is my future state. Let's talk a little bit about solutions.

17:44

Then when do you start pulling in the stakeholders.

17:47

So first we we engage and just see what they're currently working with, we'll do an evaluation of every single piece of technology that they're working with. And and process controls, it's, you know, we typically start even down at the center level, how we're monitoring that that process, you know, flows, pressures, temperatures, things like that, and the equipment, pumps, valves and so forth. And then we'll work our way up the topology, and just kind of get an idea of what we're working with. But we want to bring the stakeholders in very early in that discussion, because we're working with these plants. A lot of these, these great staff that are there have been there for decades, they grown up in these plants. And it's they really have, and

18:30

there's not much churn out there, thank God, I'm glad there's not that much churn out there. Yeah. So when we're talking about going in and updating their their plant, or you know, changing the way things are done, we're not just changing a plant, we're changing something that a lot of times these people have built themselves, they've developed these screens, they've developed these control systems, they were there when this, you put this system in. So you can't really go in and just say, Hey, we're gonna update this and it's going to be better, we have to understand that this is a part of who they are as individuals, this is a part of their identity. So we really need them to come on board and have their input early on discussion so that their voices heard. And we understand that we're trying to do this to help benefit them, not just the change something that they're passionate about, and they you know, they've they've created themselves.

19:17

Very wise, very insightful. Absolutely. I believe the reality is

19:24

the future, the innovation, and people like you, your company, and others are looking for ways of being able to make it better, safer, more reliable, all of the stuff that's important for a sustainable Do you find many of these water treatment facilities?

19:44

They've been around for many years?

19:48

Yeah, they've been around for, you know, in some cases, decades, and it's just a mixed bag of what's in there. And, you know, a lot of times it's it's more cost effective to expand the plant.

20:00

than it is to build a new one. And so you just have kind of generations of, of a plant within a plant. And that that, you know, makes it a little bit more difficult when we're trying to standardize and bring all this data up, you really have to work with a number of technologies. And it's possible, you know, we do it a number of cases, we're working with

20:18

one of the largest wastewater plants in Georgia right now, to do just this.

20:23

We're taking, you know, two to three decades worth of controls and standardizing it and making it one unique, standardized system that's being replicated up and analyzed, they just got tired. In this particular water, they just got tired of all these multiple systems and multiple sources of data. You can't really, if you're pulling data from one side, and another side, it's hard to reconcile or whatever what's important, there was a, I would imagine that that, that becomes unwielding, right, it just becomes a mess. It does and that. And that's a great point. Because if you want to make data rich applications, you need to spend most of your time at the edge where the data is being generated. You know, a lot of people when they think of data science and ml, they think of this top level operation where we're just going to throw some algorithms at it or throw some insights at it. And then we get this great application. But that's really backwards. Because, you know, you could have the best ml tools available, you could have the best data scientist, you could have the most pretty trends and the most beautiful graphs, but it's not going to mean anything if your data isn't good. So we spend most of our time at the edge or the

21:34

edge for the listeners. Sure. So edge is really just where the data is being generated. It's where the control is happening. It's where the process is. And so when we're building our data, we're, you know, doing data engineering on our data pipelines, we'll spend the bulk of our time at the edge or at the plant where the data is being generated. And the reason we do that is good as one single source of truth. Meaning that we want every single piece of information that I need to understand that data point at the edge, and I send it all the way up. so that by the time I bring millions of data points up, I'm not trying to sit there at the server level, figuring out what those data points are, we've already defined them at the edge and it travels with the data. So it's already scrubbed, you're just saying, here's, here's a bunch of data, I don't need that. I don't need that, that might be important, this that the other thing. And then when you do finally send it up into the cloud, where it's, you know, you put some processing on it, you've got good data. Exactly. Sounds good. Sounds all wonderful. What are the roadblocks.

22:39

So roadblocks are, you know, initially, it could be stakeholders, you've got people that are reluctant to change, and that's natural for humans, you know, we're all in that category, we all just kind of want to get the work and we've got enough good stuff going on. And when someone comes in and says, Hey, I want to change everything, you know, they're, they're pretty reluctant. And you know, you just have to be patient. I've had some people that were, you know, extremely against the idea of digital transformation at first, and you're patient with them, you hear them out, if they have legitimate concerns, you address them.

23:13

But what I found is that, you know, you can usually just work with them one on one, and, and when the over, you know, you start to understand, okay, yeah, you are having issues at your plant. Yeah, we could solve that. Yeah, we could provide that. And they kind of come around. So you know, everyone's resistant to change. But if you're patient with them and work with them, you can win them over, and they can usually become your your biggest advocates. The thing comes to mind as Can you incrementally approach improvement, in this particular case, instead of Big Bang? You just say, Hey, here's a problem. Let's let's just, let's just tackle this right now. Is that a possibility? Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's a, it's a wide spectrum, you could you could do everything from the ground up, or you could just tackle one individual problem. And you can tailor a solution just for that particular problem. We had a case recently where

24:08

they are doing, we had a couple of PhDs that were, you know, trying to do something new with the process. And the process wasn't monitor, they didn't have any control, no monitoring, no analytics, and we came in and in a week had something up and running for them that they could start collecting data, and making great decisions and tactical decisions. And, and, and, you know, let's just be candid here, it's got to be safe, it's got to be healthy. It's got to be it's got to meet all those needs, and we can't, and that's that's an important component to our, our water system.

24:41

The other area that I'm intrigued with, and especially, that is security, right? I mean, once you start to go down the road of data transformation, you're sort of, in essence opening up possible penetration points, what Talk to us a little bit about that security component.

25:00

It's really the most important in this this connected age, especially for the water industry. And it's, you know, no one's immune to attack.

25:10

So we have to be very vigilant. There's a lot of smart attackers out there and thankful there's a lot of smart people combating that. So typically, where we'll start is we'll make a data pipeline. So we'll start at the sensor. And we'll track every single stop that that data takes all the way up to the cloud. And the reason that's important is I need to know how that data is traveling even within a piece of software. And we'll have some some applications where the data might move 20 to 30 times before it even lands in the database or in user. And the reason that's important is that we'll take these diagrams and we'll work with it groups to say, listen, we're not trying to blast holes in your firewalls. We're not trying to open things by up, I need this source to talk to this destination only on this port at this times. And this is the type of protocol I'm using. And it's encrypted. You know, just having an intimate knowledge of your data pipeline goes a long way when you're working with it groups. Yeah, you want to get up front with that, too. Unfortunately, many implementations, that's security conversation is after the fact after everybody's like, yeah, that is great stuff. It has to be up front to be able to ensure the level of security but not because everybody starts talking about cybersecurity, and you're trying to prevent me from doing work, whatever it might be. And I am and you got to disagree with that, just because it's all a part of that whole digital transformation, journey, and future success. It just has to happen.

26:41

Alright, we've got to wrap it up. How does somebody get ahold of you?

26:46

LinkedIn is a great way. And I'm on I'm on there quite a bit and love the posts and love to talk to people. So that's just me there. Lance DOFFLEMYER, last name Dofflemyer. Did I get them? He got it. He got it. Perfect. All right. And I would imagine there's not many duffel miners out there in let's not get you man. You got your own little, you know, LinkedIn domain. Man. That's yeah, that's pretty doggone Cool. All right, listeners, you're gonna say to yourself, Scott, how to? I mean, I hear you. You're not. It's gonna be out on his podcast. It's gonna be out on his landing page. Just go to Industrial Talk calm and find out more. All right, Lance, you were wonderful. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Good talking to you. Hey, listeners, stay tuned, we're going to be right back. You're listening to the Industrial Talk, Podcast Network.

27:46

Again, lads, thank you very much for being on the Industrial Talk podcast and talking data, talking about the power behind data, everything that I mean, we need to you know, you're building a community of the future no data. You're gonna have to figure that out too. That's what it's all about. Thank you, Lance. Thank you, MR Systems for what you do. Remember, you got to go out to NEOM type in NEOM, Saudi Arabia, find out that he will be dazzled by that doggone website. It's exciting. It gives me all giggly and hopped up on goofballs. Also remember paper and pen. So let's put this down may 11 through the tail 12 2001. This is a digital summit brought to you by those wonderful people at IoT solutions World Congress. They're going to be talking about electric utility does digital transformation journey and it is a journey. You just got to start. All right. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with people like that you're changing the world. Thank you very much for joining. We are going to have another interview right around the corner. Thank you.

The post Mr. Lance Dofflemyer with MR Systems Talks About The Importance of Unifying Water Data appeared first on Industrial Talk.

In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Ricky Watts, Industrial Solutions Director at Intel Corporation about “Utility 2.0 and Modernizing Utilities Supply and Demand through Digital Transformation”. Get the answers to your “Utility 2.0” questions along with Ricky's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

utility, systems, innovate, companies, intel, ricky, modernize, industrial, substation, talk, renewables, people, platform, world, innovation, power, conversation, run, moving, infrastructure

SPEAKERS

Scott MacKenzie, Ricky Watts with Intel Corporation

Scott MacKenzie 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 get All right. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast. Another show that is dedicated to industry heroes. That's right, you if we're out there on the old video, I'm pointing right at you. You're an industry hero because you are bold, you're brave. You dare greatly. you innovate. You're changing lives. You're changing the world, and you're solving problems. Did I leave anything else out? No, I don't think so. We are all as an industry bound together. And we have these ties. Everybody is interlinked. That's why we must educate, collaborate. And definitely, you're an innovation. So keep innovating out there because we depend on you. hotseat industrial talk hotseat. His name is Ricky watts. And he is the industrial solutions director with a small little company called Intel. You might have heard of them. But anyway, let's get cracking. We're gonna be talking about utility to Dotto.

Scott MacKenzie 01:19

Yeah, again,

Scott MacKenzie 01:21

another utility conversation. Alo, I mean, you gotta admit, I love geeking out about this whole utility stuff, but it's really becoming a, an interesting challenge to be able to manage supply, manage demand, and innovative people.

Scott MacKenzie 01:39

And innovative companies that constantly say this is better, better, not just for before the demand side, but better for the supply side. It is a brave new world. And this is a great conversation once again, and we're going to be talking about a number of things. Ricky's, Ricky's got some passion, big time, you're going to enjoy this conversation in a big, big way. Before we get in to that conversation. I want to just remind you, that industrial talk.com is a platform where you can educate where you can collaborate, where you can definitely work with the individuals to innovate, because we're innovation is and if you don't think that we're not bound together, that we don't have ties in industry, all industries, if you're talking about utilities, yes, it has ties to manufacturing, if you're talking about manufacturing, yes, it has ties to reliability and supply chain, and and how does that whole beautiful

Scott MacKenzie 02:44

You know, network work, it requires that you educate because

Scott MacKenzie 02:49

everybody is just learning so much. And there's a lot of innovation going on out there that you just have to keep current. And that's what industrial talk is all about. Just go there. And if you see anybody you want to reach out to do so, because they're putting themselves out there. They're looking at this world. They're very excited about what is happening and what's changing in it. Alright, let's get with Ricky watts. Again, Intel is the company Ricky watts is the individual hotseat. His card is really pretty cool out there on on LinkedIn. And

Scott MacKenzie 03:24

it's, it's funny to hear just just like we

Scott MacKenzie 03:30

had a conversation with Dean with Hitachi. There's just this level of excitement that exists with this innovation and I know that Intel, Ricky, his team, and everybody there they're looking at ways of being able to do that, that bring the innovation to make you know consumer our lives. If I'm a business our lives better if I'm just a consumer, I flipped the switch our lives better. They they are looking at the world through the lens of innovation. And I love it. That it's it's a geek fast. Don't get me wrong as a former journeyman transmission lineman, I love utilities. I love what I do. I love the people within industry just it. It just keeps on getting better. All right, enjoy this conversation with Ricky watts. Ricky Welcome to the industrial talk podcast absolute honor that you found time and you're you're a hard man to get ahold of you are running and gunning there at Intel. How are you doing? I'm doing well my friend and yourself. Wait, thank you for asking. I'm doing well because I get to talk to you. And we get to talk about utility to Dotto we get to do and I and I'm gonna geek out on this one I am I'm gonna geek out. Listeners we've been having a just a dandy conversation prior to this particular recording. And he brings the passion. There's no doubt about it. You're gonna find out that Ricky brings the passion. All right before we get into the utility to dot o Ricky give us a little background little 411 I'm looking at your

Ricky Watts 05:00

We didn't stack card. It's impressive. Give us a little background. Okay, so yeah, so Ricky watts, you can tell by my accent, I come from this little island, outside of Europe, they're all called the UK. But, but I'm living over here in the US now working with Intel looking after the industrial solutions, what we call segment market and to look after the markets within industrial, including utilities. So and let me tell you about ourselves. So I spent 28 years on the road, I've lived in China, I've lived in India, I've lived in Europe, I've lived in six or seven places in the US, Russia, Nigeria, Middle East, you name it, I've been there. So I came out of the telco world Originally, I was trained as a radio engineer, satellite broadcasting, moved into the software world, I've done many, many roles was in South Africa for five years, you know, working on modernizing their comms infrastructure. But nowadays, I'm really focused on what we call, you know, these industrial segments in the utilities market. And

Ricky Watts 06:03

what I'm trying to look at is from an Intel perspective, there's a lot of technology that we talked about, that's coming in your around this utility to dot zero, yeah, how an Intel and how can we bring these technologies together, that really innovate, drive to the next level in terms of what we can do here? You know, the the reuse of renewables in the manufacturing? How do we use power? How do we generate power? How do we understand the use of that power, all of those system level activities, bringing all of that together, and that's really one of the passions that I got is bringing all those pieces of my background together to drop down

Scott MacKenzie 06:44

in the utility space as a whole, on very reluctant to change, because they have a system that is pretty stable. And very, we take it for granted here in the United States and others where we didn't we flipped that light switch on it is on what is driving the necessity for utilities to innovate and change?

Ricky Watts 07:06

Well, I think it comes from a few areas.

Ricky Watts 07:10

You know, there's if you look at it from the fact that the utilities are looking at how they use in power and how they're generating power, okay, so those are the two things the usage and the generation side of it. So look at the generation side of it, we know that we're getting a lot more things on the renewable side company, wind, solar, these renewable things that are coming in micro grid technology, solar powers on people's roofs, with, there's a lot more places that we're generating power than we did before, when it was generated at the central plant, you know, if it was nuclear, or coal or gas or whatever. Now we got power being generated everywhere. So they got to be how do they do that? How do they bring these things together? That's a challenge for them. You know, how do you distribute that power? That's a real big challenge for them as well, then, of course, we've got the impact of governments, whether it's the US government, whereas the EU government doesn't matter. governments around the world are saying, hey, one of the things we got to look at is this idea of climate change, you know, you hear it all the time, you know, and how are we affecting the planet and through the use of our power, so there's regulation that's coming, that's driving change as well, the regulations coming down. So we've got renewables coming in, which the the utility companies want to tap into, they want to do it intelligently. They've got government regulation coming, and then I'll go down to what is his brass knuckles? Can I reduce my cost, and you know, how important that is to utilities, you know, they're regulated, the way that they charge is very much driven by you know, regulation. So they got to look at how they can reduce a car. So these three or four things that are going on is saying, hey,

Ricky Watts 08:51

what I'm doing today, can it be done differently? Can it be done more cost effectively? Can it allow more flexibility? And can it reduce, you know, the use of carbons, okay, so reduce

Ricky Watts 09:05

carbon usage in the way that I use and consume power? So that's the technology that I think we've been working on an Intel is looking at those things, how can we do that, and that's what you call that utility. 2.0. So and that's really about modernizing, whatever call the utility infrastructure, and where I focus on where we've been focused on a team is much more on what we will call the operational side, the control system side, you know, you talked about the idea that the socket, you know, plugging in power comes out the systems that are doing that have been there and designed over many, many years. You know, I mean, it's a very reliable and robust infrastructure. Yeah. If you're gonna modernize that you better be sure you know what you're doing when you do.

Scott MacKenzie 09:50

So listeners what I hear and I think that this is an interesting conversation from for, from the perspective of industry to dot O. Utilities as a whole have to really run

Scott MacKenzie 10:00

With multiple generation options, you know, they're just like these micro grids that exist out there. And that that reality, unfortunately, or fortunately, or whatever you want to call it is not going away, and it's going to be bigger. That's one, two, there's a lot of pressure from a regulatory perspective, governments, what are we doing? How do we manage climate, all that good stuff is also impacting that utility. And of course, utilities are not that I'm telling you, I'll be the first to admit, I don't want my power to go up. And therefore the utilities are obligated to make sure that that pop power is down. And then

Scott MacKenzie 10:38

how do you take that, that soup of dynamics and be able to control it in such a way that delivers power to my house? Me because it's already and others and manufacturing in a stable way? Did I sort of summarize that up? You did you did you know that. So you can use it on a bumper sticker, it's, it's a bit lengthy, but you can use?

Ricky Watts 11:02

Yeah, it's like what I'm coming to you when I'm moving,

Scott MacKenzie 11:06

you're gonna run into something because it's too long.

Ricky Watts 11:09

But, but your point is very valid. So let's try and break this down. So you know, the most difficult task really is that those systems that you talked about, that are out there today that have, you know, involved in the distribution of power, so we've been looking at the substation market, you know, substations are absolutely critical in the distribution power, you know, they're very complicated, they've got a lot of legacy systems in them, they've got a lot of operation systems, what we're working on inside Intel is, we want to modernize that infrastructure. And we want to modernize it on a modern compute platform, you can take these things, these applications that are running in this environment, the manual part stays the manual part, but the systems that operate and run it and look after those that are what we will call the legacy appliance, they sit on an old piece of equipment, we can now modernize that and put it into a modern type of computer architecture. Now, it takes time to do that, you've got to make sure it's safe, you've got to make sure it's secure, you've got to make sure you're complies to the standards, you know, and ultimately, the most most important thing is any new technology should never result in you making things worse than they were before. It must improve, okay?

Scott MacKenzie 12:27

You want to shut initiative down, make it worse. And I guarantee you people just, yeah, they're coming after you.

Ricky Watts 12:34

So you start there. So we've been building that we've been working with utility companies on this modern computing infrastructure, taking those legacy systems, moving them on to a modern compute infrastructure.

Ricky Watts 12:48

But you talk about utility 2.0, why is that important? If you do not get those systems modernize, you will never truly be able to get to the next level. Because you cannot bring in new technologies such as AI, you can't bring in new technologies that are going to be connectivity, you're not going to be able to upgrade and add in new services, you're not going to be able to innovate, but the level that you want on the usage, you talked about the usage, you know, if I'm going to look at usage, how I'm intelligent, the using power, where the word intelligently comes in, well, what does that mean? I need to look at data, I need to analyze how I'm using something. Am I using it efficiently? Are my systems using it at the right time? Can I match the usage of my power, maybe to one, I've got a renewable this generate the sun shining really well today? Therefore, I'm generating maybe more electricity from renewables, could I map that to somehow at the factory and that the guy can up his production or that time, whenever it sounds kinda like Star Trek II, but that's a reality, what's what intelligence is, and you need a platform that can host those systems allow renewables to be very flexible in terms of the way that they come in, and then map that to the usage on the other side. And that's kind of what I will call that common platform at the substation that allows to connect the control systems with what we're going to call the evolution of these intelligent systems on the usage side as well. So you know, when you talk about utility to Rado, number one thing, let's start looking at modernization. As we modernize, can we database it, keep it running, keep it safe, keep it secure, hey, I can lower the cost as well. By the way, this is a lot cheaper, these 26 boxes that you are paying for, we can now put them on one box. Cheaper, smaller, less power. Now we've got that then we can start to sort of do some of the other things. So again, we're on a journey. absolutely the same doesn't. As you say, I didn't switch off the lights on a Friday night and Monday morning. The world has changed. It's not like that. But we definitely didn't reboot it. Yeah, we're done.

Ricky Watts 15:00

Quick finish.

Scott MacKenzie 15:03

No, you didn't thank God, you didn't reboot it. Java's coming out your socket that you know.

Scott MacKenzie 15:10

Right.

Scott MacKenzie 15:11

What is interesting from A to point out is that you bring up a good point about the necessity to truly modernize the realities in the marketplace, specifically within the utility area is that these these generation sources are not going away the necessity to be able to manage that demand side. And it is really a data driven solution. Can I incremental eyes it?

Ricky Watts 15:41

My approach, it's like, take a substation over here. It's a, it's a substation, and then and then approach it from your perspective. Yeah, I actually think I mean, there's two ways to do that, you know, again, I'm not saying you just throw everything away. I mean, you know, the stuff out there that works, you know, so what you do is you look at your infrastructure, and you start modernizing it incrementally bringing new things. So I always say, you know, again, let's, firstly, you've got to go for a lot of testing and proving and make sure as I say, you comply. Then you look at your substations, you say, okay, so where can I start on this journey? How do I do this? Okay, so you can bring in a substation, so yeah, this concept, and you've probably heard of it for Brownfield Greenfield. Yeah, yeah, I'm not saying that you have to rip and replace everything in one go, like, oh, let's take the whole grid and shut it down. And then, you know, hey, give us a year, we'll turn the grid on next year, we will be good to go. Okay. That's not it's gonna be incremental. So you're bringing in we we work with the utilities, we install the platform, we start with the simple stuff, first, less intrusive stuff, you know, that's in the in the substation, maybe some of the lesser critical things, we don't want to get protection relays yet, maybe just some of the distribution stuff, we start bringing that in. And then what you do is you eventually you start a migration path of the services bit by bit in the backend, what you want to do is make sure that your control systems environment,

Ricky Watts 17:07

are all systems green, is everything working, okay? I need it to be easy and consumable. So the system technology that's at the backend, that says, hey, you know, I can now see a new computer screen with new things that are going on, I can compare that with my legacy, we need that fusion of what I would call, hey, those are old systems and those new systems so and you'll start moving them across one by one. So yeah, incrementally, we'll look at the systems and the technology in the substation, move it slowly across. And eventually, you'll get to, you know, sometime in the future, you know, a platform that really, I suppose this replaced all of those legacy assets, you know, from a compute environment, all the compute control stuff that we're looking at, there'll be system level control that goes not just back to control systems, but, you know, technology to interface to that as well, you know, not just for the utility company, but for the people that are using the power as well. So you know, that management aspect that we talked about, that orchestration system needs to come both ways. I, as a user, need to understand what I'm doing. So I want to have some, I want to have some understanding of what's going on

Ricky Watts 18:16

a company like pg&e, Florida light and power, he patrols these companies. Yeah, they want to manage and understand their grid as well, from a generation perspective, am I doing the right things? Am I doing it safe? So you're going to see control in a way, go to directions, it's going to go to the end user, and it's also going to go maintain is, you know, with the the generator as well, you know, the utility company that's doing it, because I think that's important. If you truly want to innovate. Me, and you, as users have got to understand what we're doing our impact where it's coming from? I mean, wouldn't you like to know, when you're doing something today? What's the power coming from? Is it coming from renewables? Is it coming from nuclear? Is it coming from coal, you know, because now, you know, we say to ourselves, well, I didn't get the socket result? Well, you know, the kind of nice to know that, well, if I did it, the things I want to do, I don't know, as a user simple stuff. If I switch the washing machine on in the afternoon, I use renewable power. So my impact on the environments produced, if I do it in the middle of the night, simple example, I'm going to use power that's being generated from gas. So my carbon footprint goes up. So I think I know it, I think I sort of, I guess I'm geeky or whatever. But I like the idea that if I think of the younger generation now that are very aware of these things, giving them that information, allowing them to innovate with those systems as well. So again, incremental change, very safe, very secure, modernisation of the systems in a very, you know, controlled way. Once you get that and you start to accelerate and you'll see that accelerate

Ricky Watts 20:00

As we seen the need for, you know, new systems coming in, you'll be able to innovate new services. I mean, there was a fascinating thing. I believe in the telco world, they used to take about 18 months for a new service to come in. Okay. We know I just got to step in and seems like everything takes 18 months.

Ricky Watts 20:20

You know, every project that you know, you've been on it, ah, it's about 18 months to deployment. It's like, Yeah, but it is funny. It used to be two months, but it used to be about 18 months for service to be generated a new service in the telco world prior to the modernization of the infrastructure. Wow. Now they can bring in new services, my understanding is in the 15 to 30 minutes. Think about that. I've got a new idea. I want a new service. And, okay. In the telco world, you could argue, well, I've got a new app or something that doesn't matter. In the if you think about the utility isn't utility to Dotto. I don't know what those services and those applications are. But if I want to change something, I want to do something. If if an idea takes 18 months to implement, again, that's an awful long time for impact. So this technology transformation is going to allow many different things to happen. Again, I'm going to be often the if you know it, but you're absolutely right, you're talking about speed to realization, right, you're compressing that time, which is just super important. And it sounds like you're saying I'm going to remove the roadblocks. I'm going to remove the friction, and I'm going to make it as easy as possible. So nobody has an excuse. Yeah, exactly. That's, that's what I that's the journey I think we're on Yeah, I think we start off with the basics, safe, secure, reliable, high performance, we modernize the compute platforms to do that we reduce the cost of doing that for the utility companies. If we reduce that cost, that gives them more opportunity to innovate. I mean, we always know, if I'm saving money, I'm more likely to continue to do something, you know, bottom line. Absolutely. That's, that's important. I agree with you on that. So if you're looking at that transformation, and you know what it's like, there's a trust factor in any new system, especially who you tell it is, you know, the engineers and the people that run those systems, they've been doing it for a long time. They know what works, they know what doesn't work, you know, so when they see innovation, they're going to be very cautious. But when we reached a tipping point, where the trust levels of that innovation have passed, the point of this stuff works, it's, it meets absolutely all the requirements, it meets the safety standards, it meets the security standards, once they get that level of trust, and you start to see it, I think what you're gonna see is you're gonna see that rat curve, that that evolution go really, really quickly. And I think we're probably a little way away from it now in terms of that curve moving up, but we're a lot closer than we were two or three years ago, and you and others within Intel, and what you're trying to do requires an education, you're looking at an industry that has been very successful at delivering quality power for a long time. Yeah. And, and there is that need to educate. And I think you guys are doing a good job at that. And this conversation is always necessary, and it just takes time for people to consume it. Let me ask you this. Is This Really? I mean, come on, let's be truthful here. Is this pie in the sky? Or is this doable stuff? It's doable stuff. It really is doable stuff. I mean, you know, I've been working at this for a long time with my team. I've been working, you know, looking at many systems, the interaction, the systems, Ai, you know, modernisation of grid infrastructure is really doable. It works. It does what it says it does on the tin, you know, so we're proving it, we're making sure to do your point about training and educating and gaining that trust. You know, we're not doing this without going through a lot of work with the utilities companies to make sure that they are absolutely.

Ricy Watts 24:12

On top of this, they understand it, they agree with you, it meets the requirements, all the stuff that they need to know like, imagine that you're not just operating in a vacuum, you're not just sitting there going, Hey, we're around this water cooler and and we're we're drinking our own Kool Aid. No, you're incorporated and you're bringing in from a collaborative perspective, the professionals that are out there in the utility market, correct? Yeah, yeah. be working with the utility complex. We're working with the supplier community as well. One of the things that Intel does really well is obviously we built this thing called a chip. You know, we would never use that what what up guys do

Ricky Watts 24:49

you know?

Ricky Watts 24:52

You know, what we do is and you know Intel does really really well, is that what they do is they build from that up with state

Ricky Watts 25:00

Say, Hey is a compute platform. And they work with the ecosystem so and a utility would be an end user, but they're system integrators that need to be involved companies like black and Veatch and people like that. Yeah, there are suppliers like ABB and Siemens and Schneider's, we need to work with those guys as well. So it's not just about Intel. And what we're doing, it's about this entire community, evolving atashi, these companies like that they're innovating. So they're innovating

Ricky Watts 25:30

at the same pace that we're innovating. So by working together with them, so not only working with the utilities company to show the architectures that can work showing the compute platforms that can work, working with companies, Dell, we provide platforms, companies like VMware, that provide software platforms that are optimized on Intel, to run their workloads. ABB Siemens, system integrators supply companies, we need to work with the entire value chain on this transformation as well. It's not just about Intel, it's not just about the utility. It's about everybody in that value chain, you know, and that is critical to us. And again, so we work with our partners, we innovate, we show what can be done, we keep innovating, we look at their performance metrics, we work with those companies. And ultimately, what we do is we build a system of partners, an ecosystem that deliver to what the utility is going to need, because the utility is going to go back into its supplier and say, Okay, I love what you're doing. Where do I get it from? I want it. What am I?

Ricky Watts 26:38

Okay, I have a great thing, but it's just in a lab. You know?

Scott MacKenzie 26:45

We got to make that is a good, good point. That is I

Ricky Watts 26:51

I liked the fact that you were talking about that value chain. I'm not sure I just what's interesting, and maybe I could be completely wrong is I see more companies willing to collaborate, and take that little and and take a little slice of that pie but and work with people such as Intel, and so on, to come up with a solution that truly is beneficial to the end user made the manufacturer that whatever it might be it, I'm just finding it more and more each and every day. Yeah, no, I would agree. I get Yeah. You know, we're all people. I mean, I know. We're all companies, we're all run on profit and loss. I'm not saying that you, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Everybody wants to be competitive. Well, yeah, you know, what I found in this when I have these discussions, whether they with government, people, whether they're with utility companies and partners, whether they're with my family and friends, there's a genuine desire these days to be aware of what we're doing around the planet. And I know it sounds cliche, yeah. But you get that in every company that I'm aware of has this interesting thing called rise, which is really, you know, our impact on the environment. We call it the rice strategy. You know, we want to be looking at renewable sustainability, real key key values. Most other companies I mentioned before, whether it's ABB, Siemens, Schneider, they all have the same values as well. You know, we're as much responsible for the profit and loss of our companies our company's success. But we're also within those companies. We're becoming very aware. So when you talk about that partnership and that collaboration? Yeah, of course, we all want to be competitive. Absolutely. But ultimately, we want to work together. And the reasons we want to work together is because I think you're seeing this align goal that comes through all companies in that value chain, even to the end users. I mean, I want to be aware of what impact I'm having on the environment, equally as much as I want the companies that I buy services and goods from, to be aware of that as well. So I think that responsibility coming in that enhances that collaboration again, absolutely. I know that companies that we work with are going to want to be competitive, they want to want to say, Hey, you know, my widgets slightly better than the other guys. But collectively, we are all working towards bringing that utility to that zero, through. You know, we need everybody on board working that we need the utilities, companies, we do governments, we need supplier community, all of us working together. And again, I've seen you know, I've worked collaboratively in Europe, in in the Americas, in Asia Pacific as well. Everywhere I see I see a genuine ness of genuine way of working, wherever you are. So yeah, I'm seeing that kind of help create that kind of momentum, as I call it and keep and keep moving forward. So yeah, collaboratively with respect, but also maintaining competitive as well, which is what you want. You need competitiveness. you innovate through being competitive, competitive, as well. You're amen to that. That's a whole nother conference.

Scott MacKenzie 30:00

You're spot on that one big time. All right. We're gonna have to wrap it up, unfortunately, Ricky, I love this conversation.

Ricky Watts 30:09

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Hey, are you active out there on LinkedIn? I am. Yeah, you can see my LinkedIn profile on there. Ricky Watts? So yeah, absolutely. You know, anybody wants to reach out to me, please do happy to talk to anybody working in this area. So, you know, you know, as I say, you, you can see, it's my passion. As much as it is, I work within the company, we've got bad deliverables. But I am really passionate about this utility 2.0 concept. I actually think it's just,

Ricky Watts 30:41

to me, it is one of the greatest evolutions that I think I'll ever be witnessed. In my lifetime. I mean, it for the right, yeah, I agree with you. 100%. It's a, it's really an exciting time. And it is bringing some of the best innovative companies together to solve real, real challenges and opportunities. For the for me a consumer and I like that there's nothing I can argue about that. It is it's going to be great for you. It's gonna, it's going to be great for our kids and our grandkids. You know, you know, I say I'm passionate about it. And the grandfather makes important to me. So yeah, anybody would like to reach out to me, find out what we're doing and Intel and my team is doing, please do. Happy to be part of the podcast today. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you and to talk to your listeners. Now. listeners. That was a dead frickin sexy conversation. I enjoyed it. We're not going to hear you're going to you're going to say Scott, I need I need more time to get that contact information, fear not. We're going to wrap it up on the other side. I'm going to have all of that information on Ricky's podcast out on industrial talk Comm. Stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

Scott MacKenzie 32:03

What did I tell you, Ricky, thank you very much for being on the industrial talk podcast, sharing your utility, your insights into how to just make that whole grid, more modern. pushing the envelope. Really just love what what's taking place in your team and Intel and the desire to be truly innovative when it comes to the utility space supply, demand, all the good stuff that's associated with it. All right, reminder, gotta go out to industrial talk.com. Industrial talk.com is where you're going to be able to educate, collaborate, and definitely innovate with people like Ricky, his team, Intel, everything else they want to connect. Go to industrial talk. COMM find out more, because I'm telling you right now, you will not be disappointed with that. Ricky guy. All right. As a reminder, be bold, be brave, daring greatly. Yes. Reach out to people that are bold, brave and daring greatly and you know what you're gonna do? change the world. That's what we're all about. Thank you very much for joining the industrial talk podcast. We're gonna have another great interview right around the corner. Stay tuned.

The post Mr. Ricky Watts with Intel Corporation Talks About Modernizing Utilities through Digital Transformation appeared first on Industrial Talk.

In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Kathy Henrich, CEO of the Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition about “Transforming the Workforce of the Future and Bringing Regional and Personal Prosperity”! Get the answers to your “Digital Transformation Education” questions along with Jennifer's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

You can find out more about Jennifer and the wonderful team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and how you can up your Digital Transformation learning game through CSI by the links below. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

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The post Ms. Kathy Henrich with Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition talks about Transforming the Workforce of the Future appeared first on Industrial Talk.

In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Jennifer Abele, Senior Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee about “Strategic Partnerships to Engage and Innovate the workforce of the future”!  Get the answers to your “Digital Transformation Education” questions along with Jennifer's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

You can find out more about Jennifer and the wonderful team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and how you can up your Digital Transformation learning game through CSI by the links below.  All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

JENNIFER ABELE'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-abele-2859684/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/uwmilwaukee/

Company Website: https://uwm.edu/

CSI AND MARY BUNZEL'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marytbunzel/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/uwmilwaukee/

Company Website:  https://uwm.edu/csi/

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CAP Logistics:  https://www.caplogistics.com/

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

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Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

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Safety With Purpose Podcast: https://safetywithpurpose.com/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

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