Angel Torres with Visual K

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

hexagon, airport, people, facility, solutions, assets, runway, airlines, talk, typically, industry, work, capture, basics, conversation, safety, maintenance, cutting, angel, flight

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Welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting-edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots. And let's get

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right once again, thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk. And thank you for your continued support of a platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world because you are bold, brave, you dare greatly you collaborate. You educate you; you innovate, you're solving problems each and every day. And we thank you here on this podcast, we celebrate you because we're just fans of what you do. Well as you so many a fan just walked in. One, you're welcome that we're broadcasting from hexagon live here in Las Vegas, Nevada. And I'm telling you nearly to put this on your bucket list. It was a spectacular kickoff last night. And they're doing wonderful, wonderful things at hexagon. It's a I mean, they're just so committed to innovation. It's really pretty cool. In the hot seat, you might have heard him before. His name is Angel Angel Torres. And he's with visual K, let's get cracking. Hey.

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And if that doesn't work out, he's got a just a bright future in podcasting. Oh, he's good. Man. I was so excited when I saw my calendar. And I said,

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we are. We are back. A little fatter. And I'm like you

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I'm like, Man reshape. My body is a temple No. Sort of. If you come to Vegas, it's not a temple.

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It's not a temple anymore. It's been.

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It's a something to abuse. So you know, sadly, but the food's been good.

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Not enough food.

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Not enough food. That's it. But you're having a good conference.

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We are actually this is our second on Hexagon life. The first one last year. Yeah. Last year, we had our first in person after COVID. So this is our second. This time around. We're really really busy. We haven't had the time to go to each and every talk or each and every session. Because we've been busy talking to a lot of people from a lot of different places. Is that good? It is it is actually because here's the thing, right? We come from the EDM acquisition from infor. Yeah. So we're still learning about hexagon. I mean, there's so much

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company in themselves.

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Not only the company, right? Because, for example, last night, when I saw for the first time, the new CEO, I, I've known that that transition happened, but I actually haven't seen him and much less in person. So we're meeting new people. But then hexagon has such a diverse portfolio of solutions. Right? It's overwhelming, it's

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overwhelming. That's a great way of putting it because I like I hope there's not a test. Because I'm gonna

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write I'm gonna fail it. So there's, there's the the overwhelming amount of products in the portfolio. And then, for us, as am partners, now we're trying to navigate and find those things that are complementary.

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See, how do you begin that journey? How do you how do you because it's such a massive portfolio, and you were primarily in the EAA M solution? And it's like, okay, I know, I know where we're at, right? But now with the hexagon relate? Well, the acquisition of of infor into hexagon now you have other capabilities that could sort of bolt in and connect to and

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right so it's one of those those situations when you think you know, all the answers, yeah, and they change all the questions. But in order for you to find your way around, you should start with a familiar. So for example, when it comes to power plants, which you know, we do they have

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mad skills, visual, okay,

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so there are solutions that talk to permit to work, security, safety, right, which we know there are solutions that sit on top of DCs the control system for the plant and look at alarms, and it's you know,

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with all the work you say you there are solutions, that's that's hexagons, hexagons.

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So you have your em and now you have all these different pieces. So we're starting from a familiar place, right? And then try to find pieces that we can fit into the mix.

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Have you had that moment in time where it was? Like, you can do that Right, right. We were just having a conversation. Do you have that capability? You

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have that? Yeah, yeah, there's an app for that.

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No way. There's an app for that. Isn't there a learning curve? Of course,

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there is an

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outside of the learning curve, where do you start? Like, you can't just do the big bang and say, hey, check that out, check that

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out. You know, no, no, no, I mean, you start, you start small. And obviously, you look for people who have been there before. Yeah. Right. So I guess that, you know, our first takes on some of these technologies will depend on either other partners, or hexagon itself to come and help us out. And that's how we learned

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what's on the sort of horizon for Visual Kei. You mentioned briefly airport facilities and give us sort of a flavor of what's taking place and why that's

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important. Well, facilities is one of those things that people take for granted, right? On airport, it's there and you've like,

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it's like, the, it's the macro version of just like, this is a facility what you do in a conference? And then, you know,

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but then each one is special. For various reasons, right? First, their purpose, right? This is a conference facility, a meeting facility, a concert facility, so it has to be flexible. Assets need to be in shape, so that if you're throwing a concert, the lights will come on, right? If you need to accommodate more people, these panels, they actually move, right. So there are all these moving pieces in a facility. And people typically don't realize that if you want to do a certain something, the assets need to be in a position where they can actually do what they're supposed to do. And sometimes, you know, there's neglect. Maybe they don't move these panels, like every month or so. So when they do need to move them, guess what, they're stuck. Yeah. Right. So that's, that's where we see am coming in. See,

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this is interesting, because even though I've had a number of these conversations with em, users, right? It never really dawned on me like like this, this could be a real rich environment for really improving the assets or insights into your business. Because you go into a conference center, you just brought up a really interesting these partitions, right, maybe you're right, they just don't work. Or how do you create a worker? And what are they? It doesn't, you know, right, and there's so there's lights and,

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and things that are supposed to work? Right? So and then, for example, if you look at airports, and we're looking at airports in the Caribbean, where most of these islands, their economies, you know, dependent upon tourism, big time, right. So what we've seen is that they're coming back to free COVID Or even they're sort of passing their pre COVID capacity. Yeah. But they also trying to attract new airlines, new flights. Yeah. Right. And then the question is, these these airports, they were designed to handle a million passengers a year. And most of them are operating the I mean, below capacity. But the Ministry of Tourism is actively pursuing new routes, new airlines to bring people into their islands, right. But they never do it in consultation with the engineers at the facility to do an asset assessment to see whether or not they're ready to take in a new flight. Right. So a visual key, I think, we are always striving to make sure the fundamentals are there, before we try to do anything crazy, you know, super cutting edge, because people tend to forget, right?

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Well, if there's low hanging fruit, do you need that cutting edge solution? Or do you, you can make significant improvements by just doing the blocking and tackling. And then you can then venture in but you've got to get that blocking and tackling down

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that well. I'm not good at sports analogies. But I understand what you're saying.

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Okay, I don't know but the basics,

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right, the basics. So typically what happens is, even if you want to do the cutting edge stuff, you need to have a solid foundation. Yeah, in order for you to

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get there. There's no way you're going to do the cutting if you don't have that

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down, right. So so what we've seen and what we, I will say preach, it's let's get the basics right. So that you can start building on top of

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in your conversations with These air airports in the Caribbean? I would imagine they this is sort of a unique conversation. I mean, they would do maintenance. Of course they would. Yeah. And then and then of course, but it was so. So the gap exists, that they just need more of a plan or is it just because you're bringing in more

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your volume or people you're bringing in more volume. But here's the thing. There's, and this cuts across many industries, there's typically a disconnect between the overall corporate strategy, execution of that strategy, and maintenance and engineering. They're like two separate worlds, right? And it's one of those things that when it works, no one, no one remembers what he knows, when he doesn't everybody's thinking about you and your family. Yeah. Right. So if you look at, for example, the mission statements across the board, and you look at all these airports, you know, they have really common threads. Reliability, quality, right? So the conversation that we've been having is, what does that mean? From a maintenance perspective? Right? So how do you measure quality on an airport? One way of doing so is number of passengers processed by the hour. Right? So if a flight lands, and they go through customs, for example, and then they have issues with the electrical outlets, at each one of the officers stations, that means that instead of having 10 stations, now they have five, yeah, which means that customers are going to have to wait longer, which obviously has an impact, not only on the airline, not only on the customers, but also on the perception of quality of that airport,

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is there a safety component?

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There's always a safety component. If you look at let's let's go through TSA, for example. Right? If there is a problem with the equipment, obviously, safety could be compromised. Yeah, right. Also, in terms of, you know, flight operation, safety, typically, you have your operations, people going out there doing their rounds, because they have to comply with FAA or whomever authority they report to. But whatever they find to be out of whack, it needs to make its way back to maintenance. Right? So typically, you have all these people doing rounds and checked all over the airport. But there's a disconnect. And sometimes it doesn't make it back to the people that need to fix it. Yeah,

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if you just keep on talking about the, the airport, the infrastructure, the facilities associated with the the airport, I mean, there's airports everywhere,

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there are everywhere there are and many more to come. all shapes and sizes. Because to you, me, we go through these large shops most of the times, but you have all these regional airports, you have all these private or ports, right? So it's, it's a special in the US, it's, you know, a very big industry that just keeps on growing.

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So we take an airport, and a target of when I say not go there, nobody sleeps and I can back off scot crap out of that. But you really come in with the perspective that Okay, let's get the basics down. achieve that create some how long would that take typically in a in that, trying to get that basic down? And then mentoring and anything that nature, you know, that picture that is so nurses, right? So

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when it comes to facilities, and facilities in general, especially with em, we do have templates, which makes the process a little bit simpler. Right? Specifically for airports. The runway or runways are a big deal. Right? And with any am springing

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up stuff, and it's like, yeah, runways are yeah, pretty important. Thank you very much right

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there. But then he said via yam, you have linear assets. Right? So now you're able to treat the whole runway and segment that in such a way that it's manageable.

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What technology that you're saying, Okay, this is cool. This hexagon relationship is pretty cool to get some mad solutions out there. Are there any really cool solutions that you're looking into from the for the airport?

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Right now we are looking at what's called the reality capture

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rehab. It can, right.

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So that's the way for you. Because typically, if you're planning and building a facility, you will have you know, blueprints, and you will have BIM models and all of that good stuff. But the truth is that most facilities we walk in, are 510 1520 years old. Right? So trying to even find the original set of blueprints. It's a challenge, right? Now with digital reality capture, now you can go in to, you know, 23 year old building, and basically map out everything, all the assets, the the, I think, kind of like the last frontier there is for something like artificial intelligence to come in, and be able to look at an image and say, That's a chair, that's a chair, that's a table. Right, right now the state of the art is, for the most part, we still have to go into the reality that has been captured, you know, the digital format, and tell it, that thing right there. That's a chair, that thing right there. That's a table. But hexagon ended development teams, they're really hard at work to make it so that the system can recognize those kinds of things. And I

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hate to dive deep into it, but it's a fascinating solution. How do you say like, you take this room, and you want to capture it, you want to capture it in in a digital way? Is there is it? What's the what's the tool?

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Under D Laker brands? They have all kinds of contraptions, yeah, right, that will do the job for you from handheld, things that you can put on a drone, one of the dogs that they have there, or they put it on a tripod, right, I think captures everything. But the one thing that we've been looking at, and this is like, really looking ahead, is that we don't do these reality captures once, but rather consistently, almost every day, on the hour, every hour. So that now you should be able to tell something changed. That chair is there no longer now it's the other. So in

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the case of a runway, if you're if you're doing something similar to that, and you've got that digital representation of that runway, and you're taking sort of the digital snapshots over and over and over again, you'll you'll see the changes that are taking place,

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right? And take it to another industry, we have customers in oil and gas. And you're familiar with that industry, right? So how you close and operate your valves. It's a big deal, right? And there's like management of change to deal with now we're diverting the flow to Yes, or five, right? So imagine if you were doing reality capture, basically, constantly. And you'll notice that the boss position moved to a closed position. So now you can say, Oh, wait, the flow is going this other way. And no one told me about.

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Now that's a that's a safety. That's a big time safety. Right? Right, right. Big time aren't customers,

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they do a really good job at management of change, which is the formal process. Yeah, that will look after something like that, just to make sure that something doesn't blow up. But imagine if we could take it to the next level where you don't really need to go through a manager management of change, because you're capturing in real time what's going on.

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I've got the T, or time telling me time, we're not because of you because you're just absolutely super engaging.

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Oh my god. I mean, I mean to it. I mean, so

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All right. I'm sorry, Angel. How do people get a hold of you?

18:59

Go to Rachel kay.com. Or follow us on LinkedIn.

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You're awesome, man. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Thank you very much for joining. We are broadcasting from hexagon live here in Las Vegas. It is a event that you need to attend in a big doggone way. Thank you once again for joining. We're gonna wrap it up. Stay tuned.

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You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

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All right. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on this Industrial Talk. And thank you for your continued support. Angel Torres has his name visual K is the company. We were on site broadcasting on site, hexagon live. There's a lot happening at hexagon a lot happening with the partners and then being able to take what they do know what they're just absolutely skilled at it then begin to pull in some more innovation to for the for the ultimate goal of making companies, businesses, facilities, successful, resilient, safe, big time safe. For me personally when I was there, I'm excited about what is taking place at hexagon, and the partners and seeing how that technology is definitely going to impact in a positive way. All right, you need to put hexagon live on your calendar because you get to meet people like Angel Torres. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Angel change the world. We're going to have more from this event shortly.