Cisco Sara with Accruent

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Cisco Sara, RedEye product, document management, collaboration platform, unlimited users, democratizing information, version control, QR codes, GPS integration, OCR technology, mobile solution, preventative maintenance, AI integration, user training

00:00

Scott, 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

00:21

again. Thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk, and thank you for your continued support of the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You're bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate. You are changing lives, and therefore you are changing the world. By the way, Cisco, the number one industrial related podcast is all backed up by data. Just FYI data. Good today, good to know. There it is. And we are broadcasting on site, accruing insights. Is the event we are in San Antonio, and it is. It's Boy, I'll tell you, there's just a lot of people just solving problems, having conversations. And it's, it's exciting. We have somebody Cisco, Sara is in the hot seat. RedEye is the product, and we're just going to dive deep into the RedEye product and see what that's all about. Okay, let's make that happen. All right. Cisco having a good conference. Yeah, absolutely, definitely. The first one, yeah,

01:19

it's my first accruing insights. It's been an amazing few days, absolutely jam packed, and we've had a really engaged, really engaged group of customers here, so it's been really interesting to talk to them and hear their pain points and see how these products are changing. There they will now tell you

01:36

the buzzy buzz is all about RedEye. I've had a number of conversations around but never really talked to somebody that was from RedEye,

01:43

right? So, yeah, you can hear from the accent. I'm from Australia, part of the RedEye team that was quiet,

01:49

and that was an Australian product, right?

01:51

It was over a decade old, started by two engineers who spotted a bit of a pain point in the company that they were working for. So they saw it was quite difficult to access the information they need to do their jobs safely and efficiently. And they turned to the market. They thought, we'll find something. We'll be able to recommend the solution to our to our bosses, and, you know, look great. And it just wasn't anything that did what they wanted to do, nothing that made it really easy to find information, really easy to access what you need to do your job, which is actually quite interesting, because I think it's something it's easy to take for granted. I mean, I know as a marketer, getting access to the information I need, it's not really hard. It's typically, there's people I can speak to, I can find it, but that's not true everywhere, and it wasn't true for them. So they set about building that solution themselves, and they were able to work with their employer and other companies that they had ties to to build that solution and develop it out over the years.

02:48

What makes it sort of unique, in a sense, I, I we know that that a crew and has meridian, which is a document management system. I won't go into the details, but what makes RedEye sort of unique and stand out. What was that pain point? Yeah,

03:03

05:02

you said, sort of like a Google search engine. Type like, right? I got a menu bar,

05:09

yeah, so can I just type in? So we have this thing in RedEye. We call it a bucket. And it's, it's actually, I mean, I'm not sure where the original term comes from, but I like to think of it, it's like, literally, like you're pouring all your information into this bucket. So whereas normally you'd have someone that's doing a really sophisticated filing structure, and they know how that system works, they know where all the projects are, where all the sub folders are, you don't need that in red are you just pouring it into the bucket? We have some pretty powerful metadata, just essentially like tags, and a lot of tags that you don't have to worry about but they're there. So when you want to find the particular drawing for some pump that you're about to start work on, you don't have to remember, we use this particular naming convention, or this was the drop the drawing number. You can just start writing the name of the facility that you're at, the pump that you're looking at, and the system would just be like, yeah, here's the document. And then we have some other interesting ways of bringing information to you. So we use QR codes. It could actually be a QR code on the asset you're looking at, and you can just scan that and get the document you need. Or you could use GPS, and they could just show you the documents that belong to the area that you're standing in. So there's a number of ways that we've made it really easy for you to find what you need to do your job, which is what it kind of both the outside.

06:22

06:38

You might even just remember that the drawing you're working on said something in it. And because, yeah, because RedEye uses OCR, which is optical character recognition, it can read the document. So it'll just pull it based on that. So there's a lot of different ways that the system will help you find that information. And I mean, we've seen that have a massive impact on customers who will say, you know, it's taking us up to a day to to get information to our users, and then they go through the process of digitizing and and cleaning up their documents in RedEye. And then, once the search is involved, that's taking minutes. Now it's just completely changing their workflow. So,

07:17

wow, that's that's a significant impact, right? If it's taken me that long to get the old way get the document that I need, I'm sure there's, there's a safety component. You know, getting the right document, right information, the current how do we deal with

07:35

revisions? Yeah, so version control is super important. I mean, we we have customers that use the system to communicate things like, is this power network that I'm about to touch? Is it? Is it live? Is it isolated? And they do that through the version control in RedEye, so having trust in the information you're looking at is vital. But so in RedEye, we have this element we call an artifact. And essentially, you can just think of it as the unique element of all the documents for this entity. So all the revisions, all the duplications, they all belong to this artifact. And redeye is intelligent enough to understand what the right version is. And we have some workflows and controls around how that process works. So when you're out in the field and you mark up a drawing for a change, that markup is flagged for a revision, and it goes through appropriate workflows, but it's not immediately served as the latest version. The latest version is the one that was last approved, and it will remain as the last approved until that has gone through the appropriate channels and has been approved to replace it. So the system is controlling the the accuracy of that. How do I

08:43

I'm out in the field, right? I get the document. I make some modifications to the the the built like I'm put in another pipe or run another wire, whatever might be at that site. And I need to update those, you know, the drawings to get that how does that workflow happen?

09:06

So there's a number of ways that can happen. As a marketer, I love our mobile solution, and I try to communicate that to a lot of our customers. So you can use a tablet with a pen and mark that up, submit it through the workflow. So customers have the opportunity to develop workflows that make sense for their organization. So that might be that the drawing has to go to these three people, they have to review it, and then one more person has to check it. Or maybe it's something completely different, but you can, you can define what that workflow is for it to go through review and approval. But you've also got a lot of people who the iPad, the phone, that's just not appropriate for for the field, they prefer paper, so RedEye has solutions for that as well. All of our drawings that you print out of RedEye feature QR codes so the team can mark up as they would have normally on a traditional document. They can scan their QR code to check it still the accurate version of the drawing before they mark. Up, and then there's an email address that they can just scan and submit that off and it goes to the same approval workflow, or they could just scan and upload it later on, if they wanted to see that. So there's a number of different ways you can get information in, but the end result is a drawing is marked up through myth, one of many methods, and then it's controlled through door approval. How do

10:18

you how do you prevent? Let's say what we term pencil whipping, like I'm out there. I pull the document, I make modifications, but then I don't update the doc, the drawing, the to reflect what is built modified. Is there a way of being to ensure that everything is properly updated.

10:44

Yeah, so there's, there's controls in ways that the document is done, but if it's not done to your standard, then the approval will typically reject it. So they've got the ability to, we were just showcasing this earlier today, but as part of the workflow, you can utilize our markup tool so the approver might circle the area that hasn't been done correctly, and then they can reject it back and say, now these are the reasons why the document hasn't been done right and needs to be done again. Yeah.

11:13

Where do you what do you see it going like? I mean, this is all great and wonderful, right? And now that you're part of the accruent family, where do you

11:24

see it going? So, I mean, the opportunity with the current is huge. Redite had a very successful 12 years growing, and, you know, we've reached global as a company. I say we, but of course, now part of a current, but the product has reached a global audience of its own, but it needed, really that support of a company like accruent. And I think what accruent brings to the redo product is multifaceted one. There's a number of sister products as part of the that Asset Management Suite. So we've recently integrated with maintenance connection, which is a CMMS solution offered by accruent, and that's immediately offering our customers the ability to introduce preventative maintenance into their workflows and have a system that talks to each other, rather than having these silos. And I see that a lot in this industry that everyone has a different system for a different part of the process, and all that data is broken. So a Coronavirus is offering the ability for customers to have one experience, one centralized workflow. And then there's, of course, the learnings and the power of an organization like this that's just going to help mature the solution. But in terms of where it could go in the future, there's a lot of interesting conversations right now, and AI is forming a strong part of that. One of the biggest challenges that customers typically have as part of as part of like digitizing their documents, is that that process of like, how do you find all the information you need? How do you get it into a format that's appropriate for any EDMS and not all solutions offer good data cleanup tools, and then how do you keep that data clean moving forward? So Reno currently has good solutions in terms of folding data into into unique records and cleaning things up and deep duplicating but how do we make that information more relevant, more useful in the future? And I think that's where things like AI can really step in in terms of understanding this document is usually related with these other related documents. So you should probably uploading the operation manuals for this particular solution if you've missed that step or back to your point about before, about making sure that things are done correctly, it could flag that the markup is missing something, or the markup has an error in it. So there's a lot of validation that we can do. There's a lot of recommendations that we can do as well, like telling customers, typically users that have this data set are also doing this with it, or interpreting the information you have. You've got a lot of records on this, and with that information, you could be doing that. So it's a very large space, and it's something we're exploring, particularly on that recommendation side. And I'm really interested to see where it's going

14:11

to go. I know we talk about here at accruent connected sort of the connected solution model. How difficult is it to take a company and say, Okay, here's RedEye. You got all these documents, let's, let's, let's tackle it and get it, you know, to the point where we can leverage, yeah? I

14:35

15:30

Do you provide the training?

15:33

Yes, we do provide training. But as a system, RedEye doesn't require a lot of training. That's cool. It's quite intuitive enough. I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that, like I said before, that, you before, that a lot of steps have been taken into making sure that the system is doing the work for you. It's surfacing the information for you, it's automating the workflow. So there's less thinking involved than maybe some other systems might require. But yes, of course, there's this training. We have a strong relationship with our customers that you know, at the end of the end of the day, we want to make sure that they succeed, so we're working with them throughout the entire process.

16:07

All right, let's just go. You dazzled me. How do people get a hold of you? Yeah,

16:13

I'm available on LinkedIn and happy to have a chat with

16:17

anyone LinkedIn. His contact information will be out on Industrial Talk. He wants to collaborate. He wants to talk to you. Make it happen, Captain, we're all about collaboration on Industrial Talk. All right. We're broadcasting here in San Antonio. It is the accruing insight event, and it's been wonderful, nothing short of wonderful. Great people, very have a very strong desire to collaborate and solve problems. Excellent. Stop. All right, stay tuned. We will be right back.

16:51