Darrell Dowd with Access Technology Group

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Power Gen, industrial talk, Darrell Dowd, Access Technology Group, confined space, safety, digital technology, resource efficiency, emergency response, gas monitoring, wireless network, asset management, turnaround, maintenance, safety equipment.

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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

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right once again. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk, and as always, thank you for your continued support of this number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, brave, you dear, greatly. You innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems each and every day. That's why this podcast and that's why we celebrate you on it. So we're broadcasting, as you can tell, maybe some buzz, buzz in the back. Hey, there's your fan. We got a fan right here. All right, thank you. Got your finally got your card. We're at power Gen right now. Power Gen in Dallas, Texas, and it is a great group of individuals that are truly focused on delivering solutions and solving problems in the hot seat. He's a legend. Let's put it this way. I'm gonna make him a legend. Daryl is his name. Let's get cracking All right. There it is. I'm worn out. Okay, got a nice beard. All right, yeah. So how you doing good?

01:24

Very good. Yeah, it's great. Show you enjoying it. Very good. Lots of action. Have a

01:29

nice action. Well, I want people dancing around the

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01:45

got winded coming down this way, I'll tell

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you, I passed a few Beer Beer buckets there that I almost made me stop, because when

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I started walking down there, and I just, it's, just seems like it goes on forever.

01:59

Yeah, it does. It gets longer by the day,

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and then, of course, people are walking around. Well, it was three o'clock and I saw people walking around with beer.

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It's a beautiful thing.

02:15

Yeah, yes, it is, yes, it is. All right. Before we get into the conversation about what you do. Give us a little background on who Darrell is. Okay, well,

02:24

I My name is Daryl Dowd. I am Country Manager for company called Access Technology Group in the USA. We I've spent most of my life working primarily in the shutdown turn around, major maintenance. Outage stops. Yeah.

02:42

Shut down. Turn around. I forget what the O means. Outage, outage. Yeah. Then

02:48

basically, when never one of the major facilities needs to take things down and to repair and so they can increase the reliability. That's largely where I've spent most of my life. Is working in that space, both on a mechanical contractor side, a safety, health and safety side, and now much more on a technical side. All over the world, I've lived in almost every continent doing the same thing, working for shutdowns and turn arounds in Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe and all through North America.

03:25

You briefly mentioned reliability. Are you? You into the asset management side, more

03:31

so of the resource more resource efficiency, and then also, well, our system has been designed so when facilities take time to do major maintenance, a lot of most of the facilities, whether it be in power, Gen or refining or petrol count, they have vessels and pieces of equipment on site that are opened up.

04:00

By the way, just FYI, if you've never been to a refinery Turner, that's just me. I went to a refinery turn around the vessels are massive. Yes, massive. There's huge.

04:14

Yeah. Well, typically, what they have to do is they have to open the doors to these and eventually put people inside to inspect, repair, maintain, and then they come back out, close it up so that the facility can start up. So when they put people inside, traditionally, they have to have somebody on the on that entry point, making sure that that person going in is safe, is got the right equipment on to protect themselves. Get a confined space? Yes, hey, yeah. So it is high risk. Typically, in the most industries, the work that is taken on in a confined space is also critical path. So that's the work that can if it doesn't go on to schedule, it can delay. The startup of the class, and that's a meeting nobody wants to be turn around. Yeah, that's chunk of change. Yes, absolutely it is. You don't like that. So over the years, we've looked at that piece of how the that entry into those confined spaces is managed, and not to the fault of the people trying to do the work, but there's just was a we weren't getting everything we could get out of that. We're reliant upon a resource of people. And nowadays, especially nowadays, the workforce is getting thinner. It's harder to attract people to do that work. They're they're more expensive. It's not as desirable a job to for some people to do so. It brings its own risk to the project, because you're relying on them to be there. You have to train them. You have to have a place for them to stay, if they're not local, if you have to bring them in, all of these things happen. They may or may not come to work on any given day. They could be sick for any number of reasons, and all those things can delay the work that has to happen. The other part of it is, is that their job was always on the outside of the confined space, but the work is happening on the inside. So what we did was we took with digital technology, we're able to put cameras on the outside at the entry point so we would be what their eyes would be. We put a device that we can talk and listen to the workers, so like their ears and mouth would be if they were standing there. And then inside, we install cameras so that we can actually watch the workers do their work to make sure that they remain safe, that they're not having any problems, and if they are, we can communicate with them inside to understand what it is they need, what kind of help they need, and we can direct that help to them so it really enhances The health and safety and the ability to respond to anything that might happen in them. But it also by removing that outside person what would normally take one person per entry point, we can now centralize that on site and have one person look after 12 different entry points. So it's reducing the head count by 12 forever in a turnaround. And you can do that. You can do that because all of that camera feed we all we need when we go to site is power you. We plug it in, we build up a wireless network on site, yeah, that can handle the bandwidth of the video information the people badging in and out of that is real time, so you always know how many people are inside and who's out, who they work for, what their trade or craft might be. And then all that information is wirelessly transmitted back to a control center, command center, if you would, somewhere on that location, that person then can watch multiple areas and control what's going on each one of those,

08:10

yeah? Because every time when I had another company and when we do combined work, we would have an observer, right? You just had to, yeah, and, and I'm surprised that a innovative camera solution is, how do you deal with a an emergency? How do you? How do you, you know you're confined in it. Time is urgent. How do you? How do you? Well,

08:41

that's definitely one of the benefits of it, even more so traditionally, when you if you have somebody just on the outside, you have to rely on that person being aware that there's an emergency inside, that they can communicate with the people that are inside, which is very difficult. And then that person has to be able to communicate to a response team or outside body. With this system, we're able to see all the activity, hear all the activity that's inside of the confined space. So not only does it enhance the Actual work going on, but if there was an emergency, we know if there's any environmental issues, oxygen deficiency, hazardous gasses, anything like that. But we also know where the person is, what the case is. We can see if they they're inactive, if they've fallen down, where they are, and we can communicate all that information to an emergency response team, so they're very much more informed when they get there. A lot of the users that are doing it now, the system itself is run by the responders that would respond in the event of an emergency. They get all the information is first hand, and it really combines like a hybrid that combines both of these services to. Other right to enhance, not just all of those things we've talked about, but also, heaven forbid that you need to respond to an emergency.

10:09

Yeah, that time everything. Time is everything, oh, yeah,

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minutes you have literally only a few minutes to, yeah, that's why

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it's like that. Again, a little bit more old school, where we have that observer and and that individual. They might not be the top drawer, but they were there physically, yes, but then, then we always ran the risk of if something did happen, heaven forbid, fortunately, nothing, really. But then you put another person in a in a harmful situation, and not knowing what's going on, right? So it's a it's a problem,

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it's absolutely and it just the domino effects as you go through it, yeah, if you don't start to look at other ways to solve that problem.

10:51

Interesting Is this your vis kiss physics. Physics

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is the, is the name of the of the technology. It's like a platform, if you will. Yeah, so once on stall and we've you can imagine we can do anywhere from maybe six different, five different entry points to we've done 185 different entry points on one facility for 65 days long.

11:19

Are you getting any pushback from the people who are being monitored, like Big Brother, watching that type of thing?

11:26

Well, that's interesting. There are some places where, because it's new, yeah, and depending on what country we're in, there's a there is some pushback. I think once they we do a good job of leading up to that by training them with it and showing them. I think the pushback is dependent about how the information is used. If you use the information that you get, our operators are the technicians that are monitoring it. They're there to help you. If you forget, maybe you're in so you take your glasses off, you forget to put them back on. We can remind you before something happens, we're there to protect you. We're not there to get you in trouble. We're not policemen, we're not enforcers, right? We're there to to intervene when there's an issue, before it becomes an injury or a higher level of type of an incident. So I think initially they they're kind of uneasy, but like most things, they just forget us there after a while, and we see quite often, they start to use it to their benefit. Trades people and the people working in the industry, you know what they do? They're just like you and me. They want to go to work, get their work done. They don't like to be slowed down. They don't like to be interfered. They're workers. Yeah, they like to get their stuff done. We see them now using that system, because they can talk to us, and they could be a 25 minute walk from where a supervisor is or where help is. They'll come. They'll push a button, talk to us and ask us to get in touch with their foreman, their supervisor, he'll come to our our building. He can have a conversation with them. They can say, I need a tool. There's a problem with this. We're having issues with this. They can have a conversation, and it's a time saver. Nobody has to leave that space, nobody has to walk somewhere, and it's more efficient. And they start to see that benefit and appreciate it, plus it's also enhancing their say. They know that if something does happen to them, there's somebody watching, yeah, and they're going to get help. And I think that initial pushback or inhibition that goes away pretty fast, that's

13:39

very cool. Yeah, huh. How long does it take for you to set this up? I mean, it all depends.

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Is it up high? Is it cold in

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general? Does it have 75 cameras versus three? You know, I got it. But just it's not that difficult. A

14:00

rule of thumb would be, for every space that we set up, we would need, we look at it as six man hours. So two people, it's three hours, yeah, and then it really, that's a rough guess. You know, 12 would take you. You know, would take you 72 hours to do now, if you have four people, that's, that's, that's how you get it in days and yeah, and all that kind of stuff, yeah. So it's really quite easy to set up. Typically, when we do set it up, we the the facility owner or the who's using the equipment will install it prior to them needing it. So it's all ready to go. They typically then will have to start shutting down their facility, cooling things off, getting these this equipment ready to enter. Oh, yeah. So it does take some time. So our equipment just is way. For them. And then once they start opening the doors and it becomes safe for people to access, we will install the internals, and we're good to go. We're ready to

15:10

go. And the Eternals is more than just cameras. You're also monitoring the air and all of the other Yeah. So items that can be, yeah,

15:20

absolutely. In the inside, we have a camera. We also have what we call an alarm unit, which we can talk with them, but if there is an emergency, we can sound an alarm of a strobe light. We can light the way if it gets dark. But we also have continuous gas monitoring too, so you can make sure that the conditions inside aren't changing, and if they are, then we can alert them, warn them, or start to take precautions so it doesn't become more dangerous.

15:50

I like this conversation. It's a brave new world, because I'm sort of the way. I just it makes sense, yeah?

16:00

Well, it's, you know, the easy thing is saving money, but the added value is all the other information you can get from it.

16:09

How do they how do they access, I mean, access tech group. How do they access, you access tech group.

16:18

Well, you can, you can reach me at, at, at, Daryl, D, A, R, R, E, L, L, dot, Dow, D, O, W, D, at, access technology, dot, N, l, yeah, out on LinkedIn, I am on LinkedIn,

16:31

wow. There you go. I'd rather just do that. Yeah, okay, snack card. LinkedIn, all right, you were great. Oh, you were great.

16:39

Thank you so much. Easier, easy peasy. How do you know what I do? Yeah, which

16:43

is pretty doggone cool. I did a lot of confined spaces. Okay, I have in the past. All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for Daryl out on industrial talk. Reach out to him. You need to know about this. If you're in the shutdown, turnarounds and outages, what's a P I would say, Stop. I don't either know. Just stone, still, yeah, still.

17:10

You need to reach out

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to this particular company, because they have a great solution. So thank you very much. We are broadcasting from power Gen Dallas, Texas. Is the location 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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that was power Gen, that was a great show. You want to be in a business, you want to be in a market that's got a lot of action anything with power, Gen utilities, transmission, a lot of action. And you know what? The big part about that too, as well safety. You gotta reach out with Daryl. What's that? Access Technology Group right there? I got a stack card right in front of me. That's what I'm looking away for anyway. Great conversation, great event that was in Dallas, Texas. If you're in the world of power generation, utilities, transmissions and the equipment you need to be there, you get to meet great people like Daryl. All right, industrial talk is building a platform. You have a podcast, put it on industrial talk. You have a story to tell, reach out to me. Go out to industrialtalk.com. It's easy peasy. The real focus is to be able to sort of spread the information about what's happening in industry. Do it? Be bold. Be brave, dear greatly. Hang out with Darryl. Change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.