Brian Brzinski with AMMS Consulting

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

industrial innovations, connected solutions, Brian Brzinski, advanced management, facility maintenance, AI optimization, IoT journey, data classification, training staffing, cyber security, cloud-based systems, maintenance processes, technical resources, digital transformation, pragmatic approach

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Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go all right once again. Thank

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you very much for joining Industrial Talk, and thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates industry professionals such as yourself, that you because you are bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you can collaborate, you solve problems each and every day, you're making the world a better place. I say it all the time. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. We are broadcasting on site, a crew at insight is the event San Antonio, Texas is the location. And well, everybody's in the general session now. So there's no buzz, buzz in the background, but normally There's Buzz, buzz in the background. There's a lot of people here and really focused in on a connected solution. That's what everybody's talking about. And we have a gentleman by the name of Brian Brzinski in the hot seat, and we're going to be talking all about that stuff because he knows he's with a company called advanced management systems and services. Let's get cracking. Yeah.

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How you doing? Oh, good Scott, how are you? Can't complain. Did you have breakfast? I did,

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didn't run out, right? We were talking about it running out. They ran out of coffee. The

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Cardinals sitting there. That's a

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DEFCON five, most definitely. All right, for the listeners out there, give us a little background on who Brian is. So

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and now you're the CEO and head honcho at this wonderful company. Absolutely.

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How long have you been around? So we've been around 14 years. Yeah, and we've serviced clients like Blue Apron and GE appliances and quite a few others that have been around bigger, big and small, OEM equipment manufacturers, stationary equipment creators. The we've had a lot of different things that we've done for different companies, because we find that people want to get better, they don't understand what they need to do to get better. So they kind of throw, it's like shotgun approach, right? See what sticks on the wall, and we'll try to grab to those things. So we try to bring theory to a pragmatic approach and make it real and kind of tailor made to the to the situation that you're in.

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I have to ask the question, if it's been around for 14 years, what was that aha moment that you wanted to start this business. I

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had been thinking about it for a few years prior, and I was a director in a $5 billion company, and I had owned a lot of the continuous improvement, project management, maintenance and reliability sort of functions. And what I noticed was, as I could help group small groups of people, the overarching company culture, dependent on what kind of company it was, was a little harder to shift. And I see a lot of people kind of banging their heads. I don't know how to communicate with upper management. So having been at that technical level, at that individual contributor level, I worked my way through into that corporate strategic level. And I can communicate from up, down and down, up and sideways, to say, Hey, this is what they're looking for. Here's what we need to give them, and here's how we need to do it so we understand what, how this impacts everybody's day and how this impacts the bottom line, and I can help close that gap.

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I know that everybody is talking about being connected, digitally, transforming their business, getting that or achieving that, insights that are necessary to be a better, more efficient organization. I know that that's a conversation that's having. I don't have bandwidth. Let's just put it that way. You know, if I was a manufacturer, and I know that I need to do this, and I know it's important, I don't have the bandwidth, because I have my business to operate. Is it your company's focus to sort of help me in that journey?

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And because your organization has the street cred, you could definitely help me along with that conversation, absolutely, yeah, see that's important. Talk to us. You briefly mentioned it in your your conversation. How is AI helping you, helping clients?

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So the thing that it does is, instead of me having to troubleshoot and sending people out that a I don't have enough resources anyway to do all the PMS. I don't have especially qualified technical resources. They're getting to be like unicorns, right? They're hard to find. They're very expensive, and it's hard to keep them trained. Well, the machines now are smart enough to be able to tell me what's wrong if I know the right questions to ask. So that's kind of the point, right? I want to make sure that if I put a sensor somewhere, I'm getting data that really makes it something actionable. And I'm seeing a trend now with a lot of softwares that are out there that will come up with, they'll use AI for for the actual solutions, like the corrective actions I should take, so not just identifying the problem and raising up in a work order and getting somebody out there to take care of it, but literally saying, Hey, these are the things we should be looking at to shorten that troubleshooting time, corrective actions. I should do this, this, this and this to lead me to that solution faster. You know, robots themselves can, can sometimes fix their own problems, but other machinery, even though it's automated, can't they can help you diagnose what's wrong, but then the AI will tell you exactly what to do to correct that problem.

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As I have in my hand, I have definitely a slick hand out here with a number of functions at the top, spanning from maintenance organization to staffing and everything in between. From your perspective, what is probably the has the greatest focus in industry right now, as you look, as I look at liability optimization, TPM implementation, so on and so forth, training and staffing. What do you find having greater attention?

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I think the overall goal is to optimize. You know, your your your production processes, right? So does that mean you need training? That's a big one. Everybody would like to have training, especially when they do it. They want to do it they want to do it themselves. Yeah, the next biggest one I find is going to be the staffing, because they can't find the people. Yeah. And when they do, you know a lot of these, lot of these recruiting firms, they'll give you 90 days to figure it out. Well, in my experience, no, in the last 30 years, anybody can hold it together for 90 days. It's usually at 120 days, you start to see the cracks in the in the armor, right? Little chinks. So with

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90 days to figure it out, the individual to figure it out, yeah,

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you got to write, find the right people, and you, you mentioned it briefly in calling them unicorns, because they are and that's why everybody from what I can what I sense and see and in my conversations, are always talking about what, what innovation can I deploy today that helps me with the pain point of of my labor challenges and that skills gap that that I have when we start talking about training, take us through what your Do you have online training do you have? Take us through the training component. So

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the training that we offer, we offer several different ones we can do on site for your plant specifically, right? And it could be in like, pm optimizations or maintenance management, or just, you know, maintenance processes in general. And we can it could be for the technician through the maintenance manager, and this is how it applies to you. It could be reliability awareness to your senior, a mid level leadership team directors, Vice President, so they get an idea of, why do they need this, and what this language that this maintenance manager is speaking to me. I'm not a maintenance guy, so I don't understand. We can take that and say, Well, this is what they need. This is what they mean, and this is how it impacts what you do. From a strategic standpoint, I can tie those together. The the other piece that we offer is online, right? Like webinars and web based classes that you can you can kind of subscribe to or get online with, and then we offer, usually on LinkedIn, couple times a week, we'll put out little two minute snippets of, hey, this is the problem. This is kind of how we address it. This is the philosophy and say, you know, if you get something out of that, we'll also send some newsletters out talking about certain topics. So we offer it in many different formats. Just depends on what you need.

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Everything's connected. Do you ever have the conversation around cyber security?

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We do, and a lot of times what we'll look at is the biggest question is, oh, I want it on prem because they think that's going to keep them from been being exposed, yeah. And I'm like, Well, it does, but let's look at the maintenance of that.

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It does. Ish, right?

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Well, it depends. It depends, right? It Do you have it at any point? Is it connected to the internet? I was

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just gonna say, if I'm connected, I'm connected, correct? So we

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look at, you know, what kind of encryption they have. What kind of point to point things is it all VPN tunnels? You know, Cloud is not dangerous. Cloud is not unsafe, but it just like everything else, it requires a lot of upfront work, and security then becomes the maintenance of the system, because it's cloud based. So no longer am I maintaining the system. It's functionality because it's cloud. Is, I'll call it a SaaS, but it's cloud based. It's as it's a service, but the thing you have to maintain is the security, right? It's ever changing, and everybody's after it, and you have to make sure that the platform you're picking has that that protocol. And one of the things that I like to do is, I like to say, Look, your IT group absolutely has to be involved in this to be able to understand what that security need is for your company. And if you don't know that, we need to get an IT security person here to do an assessment to say, here are your vulnerabilities, here's your weak points. And things like accruent, they've done a lot of work to make sure that point to point cloud based stuff, all their data, it's safe and secure. And I'm not going to say hack proof, but it's, it's pretty difficult to be able to steal that information well,

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because they're associated with Ford if, right then they have a lot of horsepower in that particular area, and and, but again, if I'm, if I'm putting devices out on on assets, so that I can track the data, right? Those and they're connected in some way, shape or form, those devices have to be protected as well.

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They do, yes, but most of those are internal networks. So those, they don't actually connect to the network. As far as like the internet, it'll connect to an internal sort of Wan right? So it'll go from point to point to a hub and into your CMMS, so the data is housed there, so when it goes back and forth, it's actually directly connected to that so that that interface is not as vulnerable. And a lot of that information that you. Sending out. Even if somebody were to take that, it would be more the gateway than it would be to actually steal that information, because it's, it's kind of useless,

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right, right, right? And that's the point. It's, it is, it can be a penetration point, potentially, correct?

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So it would be difficult to get into that, right? Because those networks are not broadcast, they're not available publicly, and you couldn't just find those by walking by with a scanner, yeah, and grab it and grabbing them. So they're, they're very limited range, right? They're very limited use, and they're very specific back and forth. And even if you got the information, I don't think, I don't think you could, you would know what you had. No, no,

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no, no. I agree with you 100% where do you see the future going? I mean, there's so much happening. There's so so much change taking place. What do you put on your future hat? Where do you see it going? So

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I see this, well, I see the eye. The AI piece getting more and more robust, right? It learns better and better. The next part of this is going to be reporting, right? I've got all the data now. What am I going to do with it? And how do I make that actionable? And how do I automate the responses? How do I automate the ability to take that stuff and get things done, right? So how do I like the back office piece, like the planner, schedulers in the plant, some of the maintenance supervision. How do I, how do I unburden those people from that kind of mundane decision making, and help automate that? So it's more of an overview and an audit, as opposed to I've got to go out there and troubleshoot it with somebody, right? It makes it a little bit easier, so it alleviates the burden on the lack of the technical resources that are out there, and it makes your the labor that you do have much more effective and efficient. So you get both of those when you do that

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interesting. Do you have season tickets with Green Bay?

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Well, I would love to have season tickets with Green Bay, but I would have had to have two generations of people that had season tickets before me, or I get on a 25 year waiting list. Really? Yeah, it's, it's worse than the Bozo show. It's the Bozo show. You don't remember Bozo the Clown? Oh, yes. So from Chicago, my mom put in for those tickets when I was born and I was 13 before I got on the show. No Packer tickets are even worse.

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Wow. Didn't know that. That's pretty wild. How do people get a hold of

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you? So you can get hold of me looking at our website, which is AMS consulting.com or you can email me directly at B dot Brzinski at AMSs on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn. Check me out. There's a lot of videos coming out twice a week. Love us. Give us a call. You're great. Love it. Appreciate it, man. Thanks so much. Scott, all right. His name

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is Brian. You gotta reach out to we're gonna have all the contact information for him out on Industrial Talk. His LinkedIn profile will be there. So click, connect. You want to collaborate? Right? Absolutely. See, we

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do, we do round tables once a month, where we get industry experts there talking about a topic, just to hear how each one of those are managing what they're doing. See,

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make it happen. Don't, don't come whining to me that you can't get a hold of them, because you can get a little bit All right. Once again, we are broadcasting on site. We are at a crew at insights here in San Antonio, Texas. It is quiet right now because everybody's in the general session, but it's going to get busy and buzzy, Buzzy as we there's a fan right there. There's just, she's a fan. I have a fan. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network,

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Sherpas. You need Sherpas. You need digital transformation Sherpas. You need those individuals to help you succeed. Yes, you're a manufacturer. You've got a lot on your plate. You're making things happen, you're snapping your fingers, and things are going forward, and you need to digitally transform that's why team am SS advanced management systems and services is out there. Brian, he's got a contact information all out on Industrial Talk. You want, you want to connect with Brian. You you want to succeed. You want to be able to begin collecting that data in a way that makes sense to you. A M, S, S is for you. All right, we're building the platform Industrial Talk. You need to tell your story, you need to share your technology. You need to put your podcast out on Industrial Talk. It's all here for you. You need to succeed. That's why we're here for your success. All right, be bold, be brave, or greatly hang out with Brian. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.