Danny Petrecca with Locusview

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

utilities, built, work, digital, field, construction, transformer, map, easy, data, years, gis, design, crews, locus, paper, danny, construction crews, workflow, adoption

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

00:21

our I once again, welcome to Industrial Talk, the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly you innovate, you solve problems. You are making this world an absolutely wonderful place to live. How about that? Man? That's Oh, and our guest has unmuted his cell phone so that everybody got that. But that's okay. I'm a professional. He is the story right there. He is the hero in this story. All right, we're broadcasting as you can tell from the sound in the background, DistribuTech here in Orlando, Florida. And it is a collection of utility energy problem solvers. Innovation. It is all happening here in the hot seat. We call them cell phone, but we're gonna go by the name of Danny Petrecca. He is the Vice President Business Development at Locusview. Let's get cracking.

01:21

Awesome, Scott, thanks for having us.

01:25

Definitely, my pleasure.

01:28

Ya know,

01:28

you having a good conference?

01:30

Yeah, it started pretty hot and heavy today. It's, you know, huge as usual. I heard 17 17,000. Wow. Yeah, that's last year was probably 12 or 14. Yeah,

01:43

you're back. Pre what a COVID levels from recover

01:47

levels. But you know, especially considering a lot of utility budgets are getting cut a little bit at the end of

01:52

last year. If you'll come on to see here. How do you cut budgets in in the world that they're trying to demand utilities to achieve certain levels of performance, and and net zero and all of that stuff? And you can't do that without? Well, the almighty dollar?

02:09

Well, I think that's the key is when interest rates go up, utilities borrow money to fund their capital projects. So the rate case that said, let me spend $100 million to do this now that 100 million dollars doesn't go as far as it used to. So yeah, that's

02:24

a good point. I think I'm always harping on not in a bad way. harping on the regulatory component, because utilities have a real challenging type of business structure, because, well, quite frankly, they make decisions. But they also have to do it in in the purview of regulators. So yeah, it's, it's a bit different than

02:48

making only making as much revenue as they're allowed to make. Which strange thing, but rate

02:53

of return. All right, now we just wrap that up, we solved all those problems. Danny, for the listeners out there. Give us a little roadmap on who Danny is a little background.

03:08

Let me think here. So I've been in utilities, probably since I got out of grad school. My first job out of college, I was environmental consulting, and I was actually working on the other side of utilities, helping them clean up their contaminated properties. Yeah, I was always interested in GIS and software at the time. So after about three years of that I got into the geospatial side of software for for utility. So GIS, design, engineering, mobile mapping, outage management, ATMs, all the all the that side of what utilities do to become more efficient. So I went from, you know, helping utilities spend less money to get out of contaminated sites to helping utilities spend money to be more efficient with the processes by digitizing and that's really what everybody here just to be talks about. So after I did an environmental I worked with a company which is now Schneider Electric for about eight years. You know, they're big behemoth, but we were a small portion of that was really the the arc FM business, the GIS business that was about geospatial connectivity models for for utilities. I did that for a while. And then about four and a half years ago, I came to Locusview where we're taking a very focused look at, I think, the last bastion of analog and paper within a utility workflow, which is that digital as building side of what utilities do when they they put new poles in the ground and lay new wire or put gas pipes in the ground. So been there about four and a half years, really focusing on helping grow the business into additional verticals. We're very strong and gas but we're emerging and electric and doing really well there hence the presence here at DistribuTech. But also helping with our national business and partnerships like with ESRI and our other partners throughout

04:59

our new way. History. Yeah, quite

05:01

a word everybody does.

05:04

We're going to be talking about digital construction management. What does that mean?

05:09

So where do you see, DCM? There you go. So digital construction management is, it's not really a thing, it just is a space in a utility, that that begs a lot more attention than it's gotten over the years. It's an acronym that talks about a workflow in the space. So, DCM is similar to a general system like GIS, or ERP, or WMS. These, you know, this alphabet soup that creates the digital enterprise for utilities. So digital construction management to us is about digitizing all the personas and all the data collection that has to go into a capital construction project for utilities, from the planning and engineering side, to the construction execution side, all the way to the project close outside.

05:56

To give us an example of that just

06:00

an electric utility, they get a plan from the developer, they got a new subdivision that's going in 200, lots need new electric service cool, they start a work order in their digital work management system at the utility, they send a work order to their designers to plan that design out in a very fancy graphic work design system. It gives them a construction map, a list of compatible units, construction estimate for the cost, all very digital, excellent. It's based off of their GIS system, which is the digital enterprise system. Awesome, good stuff. But then when that thing is scheduled, and funded, they send it out to the field and the big thick packet of paper. So the digital train stops right there. So they send it out to the field, the construction crew builds it basically 80% of how it was designed, sometimes you get the red lines back, sometimes they just press the easy button and go, Yeah, we built it as designed that design 369 months later, makes it back to the utility, big thick packet of paper, maybe out stuff in somebody's truck and got lost behind. Then eventually, the digital people on the Enterprise have to tear off those pieces of paper and say, Alright, here's your part of the packet. Here's the GIS part, here's the work management part, here's the financial part. And a year later, they've realized what was actually built in the field. And things were done differently. And they have this really bad process manual paper driven process for managing construction athletes. So DCM is about threading that digital divide between what I call those digital book ends, the planning and design book end. And then the close out just ATMs broken with a digital application to give the field the ability to capture all the data they need in the field during construction and close out everything through a streamlined digital process. So

07:53

you deal with the situation where there's a lot of as built out there. And I would imagine there's questionable accuracy with those particular has built. And they're just they've been that way forever. Yeah.

08:05

So first of all, when you that that that design in the first part of the process, it's built off of their system of record, which has been basically posted with as builds that are fairly inaccurate. Well, that is that you know,

08:19

the road accurate. Oh, I've done that. I know exactly what they look like we've been

08:23

on unfilled demos with crews, and we're like, Hey, we're gonna go out and check out this poll run here. And we'll do a mock demo over here. We go out there. They're working off their maps. What does that poll this map says there's a poll supposed to be here. Well, wait, here's a switchgear on the other side of the street. Oh, no, those guys went underground instead. And we asked build never got updated. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's the design process starts from that poor GIS data quality. But the and that's, that's the problem in the field is the linemen in the field of construction crews, half of which are contractors, their incentive to build things in budget, and, and to standard, not to the way you designed it, and not to make it you know, a pretty map or help the financial bean counters collect the money. So they've always rejected technology in the field, because it was I don't want to use a computer and this big too much time. But I think it has been a convergence, a lot of technological improvements over the past 10 years that have made it very easy for crews in the field to do very high fidelity data capture very accurate data captured during construction. It adds a couple minutes per job. And then you have that digital workflow way down in the backend to feed things like a DMS that need really good data to work.

09:40

What do you even begin? I get it. I mean, that's, that's, that's some heavy lifting. Sometimes

09:49

it is. And I'll tell you where we began. Cuz for 20 years I've I've spent a lot of time trying to shove technology into people in the field and Bucha Watch your tablet or your Toughbook become a very high priced paperweight for the anti D sheet that they're putting on the on the hood of the truck. They reject it. So we started with, if we can't solve the problem of getting construction crews to use this, the adoption, the usability, everything else is moot. But we had to have people adopted in the field. And we really partnered with utilities and the industry to say, we want to build a solution for this problem of initially started with gas tracking and traceability. They needed a way to capture high accuracy GPS and spatial work data for pipes. They're burying because FEMSA and the mega rule requires that so so for us to some extent. And we built and threw away probably four different versions of the mobile application before we got adoption said, Okay, that's working, because it matches the way they work in the field and matches a workflow of construction, rather than being a mapping app that's trying to match your workflow or having the workers change their workflow to match the software. adoption was number one, and that if you can't solve that, forget it. It's just it's technology.

11:17

I mean, but I'll just give you an example. Every time when I went out on a crew, we we had our maps, yep. On the hood, we would look at what's physically out there, we look at the map, if there's any disconnect between the map and what's physically out there. Yeah, you know, I'd scribble on it, and hopefully get back to the, you know, the planners or whoever designed the maps to try to update the maps, which never happened, right. But so there's this at least a, a, some representation of what exists out there in the physical world on a map. But, but everybody felt comfortable with like, alright,

11:56

let's just take a look at this map on the hood, and it's spread out. That's

12:00

how did you solve that? Well,

12:03

and that's, it is impossible to solve the comfort of huge cartographic whitespace. Yes, while while you're planning your work, and and honestly, still, a lot of crews do that a lot of our customers, but we will, we've enabled them with is a mobile application, that only requires them to capture the few pieces of data, when it's the time to capture that data in the aspect. So first of all the forms are, are responsive. So if you're putting in a three phase transformer, it's not going to ask you the phase of the transformer. If it knows that the work orders a 12 for you know kV line, it's not going to ask you for the voltage. If you Barse barcode scan that transformer during as building, it's going to fill out the serial number and the rating and the impedance and all that nameplate information, instead of having to fill out that form that's been at utility X for since 1950, where you got to fill out four sheets of data about a transformer. So the ease of filling out the data had to be achieved, then it was about the location, the spatial location. And the GNSS technology today or GPS technology today is so easy that now it's low cost GNSS receivers can be attached to our locus you application, and you can get survey grade accuracy, as long as you can tell there between green and red. If it's green, you've got good accuracy. If it's red, you gotta wait for satellites. That's it. So you get the spatial, very easy. Instead of measuring things with with wheels and tape measure and stuff from corners and buildings and transformer corner and light poles and stuff like that. You got your location in the form, you're going to fill out those three pieces of information that you need to everything else is carried over from design or read from the book. We had to make it really easy with that technological leap.

14:06

I can just imagine some of the conversations you had about Yeah, no, no, you don't need you all you need is this and all you need to be is over here. And all you need to do is push this button and and lo and behold your your life is easier and better. And I would imagine I would imagine there's a segment of that society that group that just said not not me now, and then they have to retire until you can really sort of move that ball forward.

14:35

Well there's two aspects to that one is thankfully as my phone so really was was ringing before everybody these days has one or multiple mobile devices on their pocket every day. So the excuse of I don't know how to use computer that's not gone out the door. Everybody's got to make a restaurant reservation or get to the Costco and they need a man And they use their phone. So we've made it that easy. And the other aspect is, you know, just making the adoption so easy for them and and bringing the people in to say, Okay, show us how you do this in the field, we'll show you how this matches your workflow. And they still, they, they still make us prove it in the field. So a lot of times we're doing, we're doing field POCs proof of concept, let a full implementation, but it's like, I like what you're saying. I understand it, I believe you. But show me how easy it is to work. So we'll go out with a couple construction crews. Go Okay, show us how you do this as built today. Boom, boom, boom, they do it. They fill out their forms. Here's how you do it with us. We give them the the application, there's a simple ranging rod, they have the GPS and they go, Oh, that was easy. Wait, can we go over here and do this one too. And they start to like, you start to like, and we have some customers who they've said, Alright, we're only going to do this for let's take a gas example. We're only going to use locus you for our gas mains, because there are too many services. And we don't want to map our services anyway. And they'll go out there. They'll map the mains and the crews and be like, hey, foreman, boss, while I'm out here. This is going real fast. But we just map the services to it only takes like a minute. So they're starting to improve their map

16:26

site stuck in a proof of concept purgatory? Well,

16:33

that's always the danger. There's always the danger of the never ending pilot or nine pilots that eventually turns into something real. But yeah, I think once we love to go to the field, because it's where we shine. Yeah, it's where we can prove it out. And people go, okay, integrations and other things that's easy to do. Once you've solved the problem, the hard problem of the field and option,

16:53

what do you see it going? Like what's, what's it sort of that future? Future hat look like?

17:01

Well, we're growing pretty well. You know, last year was we saw some headwinds of the economy. But we're seeing at this conference, things picking up, what I see is that there's a lot of fuel being put on the fire of construction, electric utilities. First of all, construction, electric utilities has always been a constant has always been a lot. And then you pour on top of that. All the state federal stimulus, which is about infrastructure, more infrastructure, underground, hardening, Evie, charging, smart grid, all that stuff, requires more construction, which requires more capital requires more resources. And that's where you're starting to hit the limits is, utilities have more money, and more need to do more construction than ever before. And their operational systems like ATMs, these smart brains and derms distributed energy resource management systems, advanced distribution management systems, these things need data. The second, its operational, so there are pressures from both ends. But what you have is a lack of resources. There's a scarcity of, of contractors to lay cable to put up holes to string wire to fuse pipe. And then there's a human resource restriction. So they need to do more with less than utilities. Then there's transformers, I can't, there's a three to I'm hearing two to three year waitlist for transformers. So they need to be much more efficient with what they have today. And the way to do that is to digitize a very pressured paper lead and process. And that's so I see that that pressure alleviating over time, I think supply chain is going to have to catch up with with the transformer backlog. But I see adoption on the electric space for digital as building kicking up, we just, we just had a big tier one customer go live in December. They operate through eight states. They have a consolidated electric as well to know Logan's view. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think there's a lot of a lot of need for really good data going into these ot systems that utilities need help getting, getting rid of their paper.

19:19

Sounds like a plan. Yeah. So somebody's listening out there. And they need to get a hold of you. What's the best way?

19:27

Well, you can go to www dot Locusview.com. You can check out things there. There's forums you can fill out and just hit me up on LinkedIn as well.

19:37

So you're active on

19:38

I'm active on LinkedIn. Yep.

19:40

Okay, so not all it will have your stack card out there. You were absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much. Thanks

19:46

a lot, Scott.

19:46

All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. We're gonna have all the contact information for our friend, Danny out on Industrial Talk. So reach out to him make it because we're all about education, collaboration, and of course innovation. And out on Industrial Talk be a part of the ever expanding community. So be a part of that. All right, we're gonna wrap it up. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

20:08

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network

20:18

daddy's his name. We're gonna have a stack card out on Industrial Talk. So reach out to you. I enjoyed that conversation, Locusview. Great company. Looks to I enjoyed any conversation that is around power Gen utilities and the challenges that they have to sort of address today. If we're just going to, if we're going to continue to sort of demand more from our grid, we're going to have to do a lot more and Lucasfilm leading the way. There's always inefficiencies, and they're, they're addressing the finish. I just, I can relate to that. When I was a transmission lineman, I could relate to that big ol stack of paper. This is how you're going to supposed to build it, put the poll here, that type of stuff. He gets somewhat close, but a lot of times anyway, reach out to Danny, big time. All right, building the platform, as I always say, you have a podcast, put it on Industrial Talk. You have a desire to amplify your voice. Come on. Let's talk let's have a conversation. All right, be bold, be brave dare greatly hang out with Danny change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.