David McKee with Digital Twin Consortium

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

twin, digital, talk, data, capabilities, build, business, consortium, sustainable, bringing, david, leeds, case, company, vendors, member, years, working, accelerator programs, industrial

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

00:22

right 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, yes, you are brave, you dare greatly you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems. And that's why we celebrate you on this podcast. We are broadcasting on site. It is Reston, Virginia. If you haven't been here, well, it looks like Reston, Virginia. And it is the OMG Q one meeting. And it's a collection of problem solvers. It's it's, they definitely talk about my capability by I just sit and I listen to sort of like a fireside chat. And this is this brings up a good point and a good segue into David McKee. He's He's exactly that I'm going to sit by the fire and he's going to teach me something.

01:11

Not not too bad. I wonder if I'll see rest in this time. I still don't know what it looks like. And I've been here multiple times, you know, airport to hotel back to the airport. Yeah.

01:20

What do you do for dinner?

01:23

I have made it out of the hotel this morning. for coffee. Did you? Yeah. Where'd you go? Was this Starbucks just down the corner?

01:29

Yeah, but there's a there's this place. Uh, we went for lunch. It is spectacular, quite frankly. Yeah. Don't ask me what the name is. Don't, don't you? Again, that's you're asking way too much. But the reality is, is that it was spectacular. It's just right over in the corner. Just go out. Yeah, my wife knows. And I'm telling you, it's good. We'll give it a go. You need to just it's just a hop, skip and jump. Right there. All right, let's level set. Let's make sure that we know who David is, again, give us a little background on who you are. Yeah,

01:59

thanks. Good. Because things change.

02:04

He's he embodies David embodies industry. Industry goes through a lot of change. David goes through a lot of change right there. Yeah,

02:13

well, salutely. I mean, the first, I think the first time we spoke, we were on the other side of the planet. We're in Barcelona, and I was the founder, CEO and CTO at slingshot simulations. Obviously, I'm still the founder that never changes.

02:32

Here, here's my founders car.

02:37

But after going through multiple rounds of venture capital funding and all that, all that fun stuff, you know, sleepless nights and all that. Yeah, no. It's nice not to be doing that right now. Yeah. I started the process of exiting from there about this time last year, I'm fully fully out by 11th of August 2023. Get my year right.

03:01

To high Hi, there. Don't Don't Don't ask me about the math.

03:05

And then, you know, in the process of what we're all here about, you're trying to slow down and take it easy. lasted about two hours, and decided to accidentally set up another company? Because that's what you do. Because that's because that's clearly what me and my wife, that's what the

03:23

internet says. Yeah.

03:26

Absolutely. So you know, me and my wife is out there, you know, both slowing down, you're having both being at slingshot and slowing down. You know, we've got a toddler at home. So it's not like we're not busy. Yeah. And I think she must have gone down for a nap. And but my daughter woke up would set up another company, check us out. So but actually, you know, on on that we set up a company called counterpoint technologies and counter counter counterpoint. And really, what was the motivation for them and was a bit of a branding genius around this was we kept people say, Well, what character point to this with the character? And we're like, oh, that's a really good idea. Without that word, we'll take that. Thank you very much. Yeah. But what's really interesting is we're trying to disrupt the way we do business change the business playbook. Which, obviously, within a technology focus, but actually how do we do things in a more sustainable way? And I'm not talking just about the green agenda. Yeah. But actually sustainability from society perspective, from a small company to a large company, how do we make things that actually can survive and grow and make a genuine impact for everyone around us?

04:33

Give us just everybody, it's natural. When somebody says sustainability, we're talking about trees or something like that something green. Give us just a little example of what you mean by something a little bit more than that. So

04:47

I think one example so we work with quite a lot of startups now. And I'll talk a bit more about what we do counterpoint in a second. But actually, how do we help them and founders may Do we not have to raise that extra round of investment? By helping them grow in a more sustainable way? Because actually, that's part of it. You know, it's actually that's part of building sustainable businesses. Yeah. You know, of course, we want them to do things and more Greenway and all that as well. But actually, they can't do that if they're not around anymore.

05:20

It's true. No, that's, that's.

05:23

So that's so we're looking at how do we help them grow? In that more consistent fashion? Sometimes that means slowing down than it was like doing that? The Hello, I'm not very good at it. But slowing down and stopping breathing and say, Hang on a minute, what do we need to do? How do we make sure that we don't miss payroll? How do we assess what the customer genuinely wants? You know, we're here to at a tech, you know, tech competition where we're here at the cutting edge of stuff. And actually, I'm one of the one of the businesses that we work with, and I'll talk more about it is a business called Crysp

06:01

that on the on your stat card or on LinkedIn. Check that name out. That's pretty cool.

06:07

Yeah, it's good. Yeah.

06:08

I gravitate to the names. It's like, that's how I buy it's a

06:11

good it's a good name. But it's what's fascinating about them is they embody digital transformation. And they're a member here of the Digital Consortium as well. And do they have all the bells and whistles that most of the people here in this building have? No. But they are inherently about helping businesses get from paper based filing cabinets, the digital is quick, and easy to fashion as possible. And then we can do all the cool funky stuff. Yeah. But actually, that's where that's where people are at. You know, we can talk about all this fun stuff. But if we can't do the basics, right, and get away from filing cabinets, then we can talk about AI. We can talk about machine learning, we can talk about computer vision, VR headsets, HoloLens, and you name it. Yeah, doesn't matter. So filing cabinet and my

07:01

basis, you're just talking about blocking and tackling just the basic business blocking and tackling but, but in general, it's the Yeah, yeah. And and the, the grab with a strategic mindset to go and digital, you have to get the basics down.

07:17

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then I'll come back to some of the Digital Trends stuff in a second. You're there you've come at it from the sectors that nobody else wants to touch. highly regulated. Yep. Typically not very much money. So schools, yes, healthcare, and construction sites, remote utilities. So interestingly, with that one is their big the biggest customer is EDF. Oh, yeah. So you know, one of the world's largest energy providers, and they are currently providing health and safety, compliance. So you know, someone trips, the fire, escape safe, etcetera, all that fun stuff. It's kind of important to have the biggest nuclear sites in the UK. Because it's simple. The no fancy sensors is a dashboard and repository. But what's fascinating about it is because they've managed to get to this point where the data is consistent. Now we can do cool stuff. We can now put it on map, we can now look at 3d, we can look at all this fun stuff. But two years ago, we couldn't because the data was in filing cabinets.

08:32

See, this is this is so interesting, when we start talking about that, and it is always inevitably I have conversations around data. And then I always go to the point is like, yeah, that data, I guarantee, how do you clean and scrub? And that's that? Yeah. Because it's always who's going to do that? How far back do you go?

08:54

And then who's gonna maintain it? Because it has to kind of maintain it. You're like, you know, if you've got a teacher, so we've got, we've helped this platforms now in schools. It's in dozens, I think must be 70 plus schools, your children's safety people are the trip to hurt themselves. Schools have to keep that data for 25 years. That's a long time. I'm sorry, but teachers already overworked. Are they going to sit there cleaning data? Yeah, well, I hope not. Because, you know, I don't want to pay for them to clean the data. No, I want to teach my kids, nobody wants

09:26

to even clean data. That's a whole other conversation.

09:29

You know, by providing that that environment where it is just just is by making it easy to put it in right in the first place. And not doing any fancy stuff. We've now got this foundation and base layer to build digital twins to do all these other cool things on top of it. And inherently that means we're in the process where we can now look at sustainable systems that are inherent and when we first spoke a couple years ago, I think it must have been was it may 2020 2020? Yes, it was there abouts. There by 2020 that was locked down. So it was the first one after that

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22. One

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year? Yes, it was yes. But we first we first talked about this concept called a sustainable digital twin. Yes. And we talked about it as being two orthogonal layers around how do you build digital twin sustainably in terms of responsible compute, you know, energy, power and storage and all that fun stuff? And but also, how do you build digital twins for sustainable systems and how you do it more from an organizational? How do you do it for ecology, all that. So there's different angles to that. And someone like Chris booth, I find really interesting because it creates this sustainable, you know, very light touch, but regulated, assured platform that we can build upon. And then here at the Digital Consortium, where I'm chairing the capabilities and technologies working group, were cut across all the different working groups within the consortium, every working with nearly every single member, working, in some ways, nearly with every single use case, learning from every single one, learning what they're doing in aerospace and defense, and applying it to farming, learning what they're doing in supply chain, and applying it to the pharmaceutical and vice versa. And using that to build best practices. So to know, in the last probably 18 months or so, there's two really exciting outputs that came out from the consortium that are worth mentioning. So a colleague of mine, Peter Van schalkwyk, from XM pro led a piece of work around the capabilities periodic table. And this looks, I

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just saw it out on LinkedIn. It's really cool. It's like right then and there. And I just like, oh, yeah, let me give it a thumbs up. Exactly,

11:46

exactly. But that's one of the things that came from us working together to see what is the common capabilities that we have across all of these use cases. So you can use almost as your shopping list to say, actually, rather than talking about how we build it, what database do we need? Or what cloud all that, let's talk about capability as a business, what do we need to be able to do when you store data? Great, let's just leave it at that for now, we need to be able to have some alerts, we need that. We'd like some, you know, fancy UI, okay, well have that piece. And we find that an average use case has between 15. And about 2527 of these capabilities out of a total set of 62. And I did a workshop in Chicago, six months ago now, where we went through a set of 12 different use cases. And we filled them all down in the space of two hours, to a single set of capable of capabilities. And we looked at the common patterns. And turns out, it's really easy to do with stakeholders of everything from CEO, CEO to your end user, they can all get on board with it, because it's common language and a simple language. And that was one of the really great outcome from Peter, because it creates this foundation to accelerate through that initial stage of requirements. The next piece that we did, which I was fortunate enough to lead and we published last July, was a platform stack Architecture Framework. And it's a bit of a mouthful. But in essence, it is a blueprint for what are the key building blocks, you need to build the architecture of a digital twin. You need an IT system. And you need some computing, some networking, some storage, you need this what's called a virtual representation where there's some models or some simulation in the mechanism, synchronize these, and it's all the kind of template building blocks. So you can look at it and say, right, I need this and I need to have x y Zed, I need to fill that whole stack. But the reality is, there's hardly a single vendor out there who could provide you the whole thing. And that, because the reality is, yeah, every company slide different digital twins are typically answering really hard questions. And therefore you typically need more than one solution. And by combining the capabilities periodic table with the architectural framework, what we've been able to provide is a really quick way for you to go from your concept of I need this. Okay, what do you need capabilities? Let's put these where do they sit on a stack diagram, which any any systems architect, any CTO can immediately look at it, they can immediately put it on the wall, and they will merely understand that we deliberately kept it to 18 pages only, rather than 100 Plus, so it was a light read of diagrams of this is what you need. And we've seen, well, I think we're into the 10s of 1000s of companies we've seen adopt that as a guiding principle as a checklist of are we actually do we have the building blocks do we have what we need have we got this bit? It's quite easy to forget that you need something Yeah,

14:36

but see, this is what's interesting. And I like where you're going with this because every time I have conversations here at OMG you with plenty of the big thinkers. I always I want to gravitate to something that's approachable, something that I can do that something that I don't feel stupid, you know, but, but being able to make it simple, make it approachable. I think that that then you get compliant As you get people saying, Yeah, this is this is the right thing to do.

15:03

No, you're absolutely. And that was the biggest challenge. Yeah. And that was the biggest challenge in terms of both of them, bringing it down to the masses, and making it we can make it really accessible. But what it turns out is that, that provides a method for rapid adoption. Yes. And, you know, is there a single line of code there? No, it doesn't matter. It's a picture. And in reality, we're talking about just two pictures there. One periodic table and one architecture. That's it. Actually, the fact that I think that, for me, personally, is quite a big achievement that we've got it down to those two, two pictures. And you're and there's not too many arrows on the mind. So they just don't read them.

15:39

Yeah. See, this was it's interesting, because I always, every time I have these conversations, it's like herding cats. There's just here, we can do this. Here's another use case, another one. This is and it's so exciting. And everything, this energy that exists around that, eventually, somebody had to come in and say, okay, hey, oh, let's just sort of bring it down to something that's a little bit more tangible. And again, a little bit more approachable. No,

16:03

absolutely. And there's definitely, I think Peter, and I have the privilege of chairing those into individual pieces can definitely relate to that the herding cats piece. That kind of brings me to where we are not far. And we've got a particular initiative that I'm really excited about, which is our cross functional use case. So this is looking at bring together as many of the I think it's 12 verticals as we can. Now, you know, I think we've got seven, we've managed to pull into one use case, you can't catch, catch everything. And there's an also bringing in as many vendors into a single use case as well to showcase the challenges. And actually really quickly with end users present, actually iterate on those and build something practical. So what we've what we've managed to do, and we only started this in December, and we're going to be demonstrating it. And at transform in June. Yes. So it's a pretty quick turnaround. That's huge. We started with 17 vendors, who expressed interest, we're not down to 11, just in terms of the ability to move at pace, and will filter out some of the requirements we've got, and the use case focused on resilience. Good to see. So again, looking at sustainability, but from a very particular angle. So there's again, which is kind of where I really like to focus on sustainable digital twin. So looking at operational resilience, this could be natural disasters, could be road traffic incident could be health incident, you name it. Could it be COVID to be COVID? It could be COVID. Absolutely. I'm not sure if anyone's any of us want to touch that one. No, that's a separate. That's

17:51

a classic example. I'm not resilient. Yeah,

17:54

that might require more than 11 vendors like Yeah. So what speak was really exciting about this piece in particular is we're in the across the members are involved three continents. We've got here in the US, we've got a end user in California. We've got an end user in Singapore. We've got two end users in the UK. So these are members of the consortium. But they all own or manage property. So physical buildings, and this is real estate. Yeah, we have a kind of public sector government body in the US. And I think it's currently level from memory. We have University of Leeds, helps them my

18:38

background was just gonna say your stat card is just full of leads.

18:41

It is I wonder why it helps when I live five miles away. It does, it does help. So we have University of Leeds with one of their buildings, which is actually an incubator with 80 companies in it. So it's actually quite a lot of movement, a lot of different complexities with that. And then we have also in Leeds, we have white rose Park, which is a major bus shopping center. And a business park with has over 5000 people work there every day. And this, you know, HSBC is based there, there's some high security site, there's also High School on site. So it's an there's a train station that's being built, we're open this summer. So it's interesting because it's actually some mini Smart City, all in one sort of couple square mile radius, which is quite fascinating. We then have a major hospital over in the Far East is also involved. So all different pieces of that puzzle representing different things. Now to certain extent we're playing with the people who volunteered and see sort of why we got the hospital over there actually not exactly gonna put someone in an ambulance from Leeds, Singapore, but it's alright, but it's showcasing Absolutely. And then we've got some really and then we've got the different vendors whose customers those already out and that's how they came in. So, for example, we have X amount which is based between Singapore and Melbourne. They are very much looking at extended reality. So all your headsets and 3d, so they're the ones working with hospitals. So they're looking at how do you create really user friendly ways for looking in real time at what's going on, including viral dispersion. So there is a slight relationship to COVID. So they're looking at that. And then the question is, can they tie that into the data fabric that we put across all of the use cases, and be able to show in a rag model so red, amber green, right, right. And of literally, well, which rooms which buildings are red, amber or green? Right? Very easy for we all familiar with, you know, that hopefully, from traffic lights, whether

20:41

it's a classic dashboard approach is bad yellow watch, and green good.

20:47

It works. It's everyone knows. If it's not broken, don't change it. So doing that, but doing that on the office site and replicating that immediately. So we we've got them, we have another member According to Reuters, which is adding a cybersecurity framework. Oh, good good as well. But that that's also really interesting, because they're going to be out there demonstrating how actually, you can have a digital twin of the, of the digital twin itself. So they're looking at the network and the cyber and how we can use a digital twin to monitor that. This multifaceted, come together, there's there's another member, and there's edX there as who do some zoom and some really clever geospatial stuff. We have Chris, again, who provide in the underlying foundational fabric of data in that assured peace, because that's what they do. It's all about that assurance that we're talking about a minute ago. And they're saying, actually, if you want to show that something is compliant, and you know that there is an incident here, well, actually, we need to show we can trust the data. And we need to migrate Holliday from paper. So they're, they're already doing that. So we're bringing them in. And then there's a couple other members there as well. So the really interesting thing, and exciting to think about this is actually we're bringing people together of different sizes of companies, you know, some of these are, you know, one or two people teams to obviously kind of multinationals in there, as well. And there's people waiting on the sidelines to get involved. So there's a fate it's gonna be phase two and phase three as this thing will grow. And we're looking forward to bringing like some pro and others into the into the conversation at the appropriate as the data becomes available. And you kind of go through the lifecycle of this. But the nice thing about this is that this is one of the first times we're able to so quickly bring together this number of vendors to build a full digital twin system. And we're doing it following the path of the capability parallel table, going through the platform stack Architecture Framework, and going through to deployment and be able to track and show went wrong as well show the challenges that we all had to face. And we will come with different perspectives. Some of us software engineers, some of us not. So we're literally in space, about six to nine months, we're going to we're doing that that whole thing, including a cloud deployment, and this thing will be up and running live with white rose park and a couple of the others actually using it. So this isn't, you know, a talk, this isn't a toy example. At the end, this is in use

23:09

your for the listeners out there, what's make it as simple as possible. Why is a digital twin or that approach? Important for business?

23:19

I mean, I think, fundamentally, it comes down to two things. First of all, it brings your data to life. Because we've all got data, every business has data.

23:33

But we're not doing what you did in the beginning. You said, let's get that data, accurate, clean, scrubbed, whatever.

23:40

Yeah, there's all that stuff, your annual on actually, those are some of the challenges we're looking at as we go through this piece, as well as we've got different use cases, different vendors different providing data, and it was all in different formats. Why would it be? But actually, if we can bring it to life, make it actionable? Yeah. Because actually, you know, when we looking at health and safety incident, or even environmental incident, whichever. If you record the date, and you put it on a piece of paper, and you put it in the drawer, so it doesn't do anything. Yeah, it only matters when you suddenly have your audit. Yeah. And they say I'd like to see all your paperwork and they go through. I said, What did you do about this? And then you're thinking we didn't do anything? Yeah. And then you then you're then you're in trouble. Yeah. Then you get sued. Yeah. And you're taking core, whatever is. So actually a digital twin is at the most basic level is bringing that together into some people might say, Well, isn't that just a dashboard? Actually dashboards are important element. Because otherwise, you can have all the headsets and you can have all the other things but you probably need a dashboard. But the key word and the definition that we published about a digital twin couple years ago now we would describe the digital twin as being a virtual representation of a real world. entity or process. So it's not just your buildings, it's your processes as well. We need both synchronized at a specified frequency or fidelity. And the word synchronized is key. Because otherwise, so load the data. Fine. Yesterday, we're all good. Yeah, I have no idea about today. Yeah. So the key thing is actually that constant synchronization, that constant thing, actually, we are constantly in the loop. And then as you get more advanced with these digital twins, you're then adding that forecasting that prediction. See,

25:32

that's, that's where everything is, and simulations and simulations.

25:35

Simulations, absolutely. But actually, one of the things that I'm really keen about and at current a point we're really looking at is, don't start with that. Start with getting your data landscape. Just because actually, one of the and this is one of the things that we really focus on. You know, we, myself and others in the team we were working with, I think, must be about dozen startups at this point. We're also working with accelerator programs helping run accelerator programs in the Northeast UK. And we're looking at putting 400 Researchers through an accelerator program in the next 18 months. So you know, we're not hanging around, you guys are bald man. We are, we are bald. And they're going across every like every sector, you can think of some really cool stuff from social scientists, that arts humanities through to deep, deep tech. But the really fundamental thing is we're doing it is doing it differently. I think about how do we return value as soon as possible? If you know, we talk about this mega mega digit from Project, and you're like, okay, so so we're gonna be reading two or three years.

26:42

18 months?

26:44

Okay, that sounds like every IT projects. But actually, that's not what excites me. And that's why I like working with, with, with some of the companies, I'm bringing different people together. So a lot of the people I'm working with and bringing people you know, I like crisp as a really good example of this, is they don't have that, read all the funky stuff. That might be why you're gonna spend $2 million. Yeah, but actually, the first $100,000 You spend with them? will then return value in two weeks.

27:19

No way.

27:20

Because you know, what we'll do is we'll send an auditor, walk around your site, check all the paperwork, scanner paperwork, we'll put it in tidy all up.

27:29

Does a good rule of thumb, how far back? Do you go with the data?

27:33

Depends on the sector. Yeah. So if it's schools, you come back right away. You know, some of that can take time.

27:43

It's always I've had that conversation a number of times, like how far do you want to go back? Because nobody wants to clean the data. So I mean, less time, just less data to scrub and all that stuff.

27:55

But by keeping it simple, yeah. You kind of go through that. But the key thing is we say right, well, what we're going to do, is everything moving forward from this point. Yeah. Isn't the new format. Yeah, everything just stop. So then we can take our time cleaning, you know, but actually, we're not creating more joke. Good point. And significantly, what we've done was in a couple of weeks, we've got this environment where we've now got this man, it's data fabric, this foundational layer, that ordered returned value is saving your money. It's showing you that live that actionable insight that now we can go to the maximum six Emperor's we can do we can add all those things on top and start adding that extra value. But you've got value on your 2 million quid within two weeks.

28:42

I love it. You never disappoint. Oh, he's okay. I was I was excited to see your name on my calendar. I said. Yes. All right. How are you my friend?

28:54

Reach out on LinkedIn. Yeah, that's where I go.

28:59

Right answer right answer. All right. We're gonna have all the contact information for David out on Industrial Talk. If you haven't listened to his past podcast, it's a must listen to our he never. He never stands still he he embodies industry as a change as he changes. He's amazing. Yeah. I've got the I've got the trading card to prove it. Alright, listeners, once again, we're broadcasting from wrestling. Its own Gs q1 meeting. And again, you're gonna get a bunch of people like David, coming on the podcast, sharing their insights. They're doing a lot here at this particular event. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right

29:35

back. You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

29:46

Here's a call to action, clean that data. That'd be good on a shirt, clean that data. Then you can do all the cool stuff that that comes from. Great, clean, scrub. Validate Get Data to help your business become more resilient. Efficient, make better decisions. David never disappoints. Every time I talk to David. I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of what he knows. And I mean, there's a we've I've spoken to him a number of times, it's all out on Industrial Talk. I'm telling you, that is one guy you need to connect with. He, he definitely. Just a little glimmer of his insights. digital twin consortium omg the event q1. That was great. All right. Again, go out to Industrial Talk. Reach out. It's all about education, collaboration, and innovation. David, people will be brave. They're greatly hanging out with David changed the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.