Gilles Mepossi Noutcha with Accruent

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, problem solvers, real estate management, telco management, lease administration, project management, document management, customer centric, global compliance, AI integration, asset optimization, retail portfolio, tower assets, financial statements, regulatory standards

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 hello there, and welcome

00:21

to Industrial Talk. Thank you for your continued support of a platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. I say it all the time. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems, you you in the camera, making the world a better place. We are broadcasting a crew at Insights on site right here right now. Everybody's eating everybody's drinking coffee, because it is in the morning right now, and it is a wonderful event. A lot of problem solvers here. That's what they are. They're a lot of problem solvers. And speaking of problem solvers, Mepossi is in the house. He's in the hot seat. He's going to give his full name. I'm just going to call him Mepossi. So let's get cracking.

01:03

All right. Good morning. Yeah, good morning. How you doing?

01:07

See, look at you just go right into it. I I'm doing. Well, alright, I screwed up the intro the last one, but they didn't get to hear it. So I just, I got to hear it. Yeah? You got to hear it. You know that I'm not, I'm human. Yeah? We are, yeah, oh, thank goodness, yes. You

01:23

having a good conference? Yes, sir, yes. Get to meet a lot of customers for first time. So very exciting, really. Yes, sir.

01:33

What do you call home?

01:34

Houston? You do yes.

01:37

How come you were talking about the UK all the time? Well,

01:40

because we were talking business, but yeah, home is Houston. Oh, very

01:44

good. Yeah. Speaking of which, give us a background on who you are.

01:47

Yes. Full name is Gilles. Mepossi Noutcha, and most people call me Mepossi, if this guy will too. All right, all right, so I am the general manager for the sites portfolio at a current sites so sites is a portfolio of two products. First one is Lucernex, which is a real estate management software that was born out of the retail industry, but now we serve diverse clientele, and what we call retail like businesses, so things like dialysis centers, corporate clients and so on. And then the other product in my site portfolio is called Siterra. And Siterra is doing something similar to Lucernex and managing the real estate for tower telco, tower management company. So if you have a cell phone, you are a client of those companies, and they're really maintaining the network that allows communications. So Siterra helps them manage the end to end real estate of those telco companies.

03:17

Okay, so here, here's, here's the truth, yeah, so I've had all these conversations with a lot of Accruent individuals. I am dazzled, yes, I can say dazzled by the amount of solutions that are being offered by Accruent Yeah, yours is going to be the first conversation I have about what we were going to talk about, but I didn't know that they had solutions for that. But when you start talking about telco, you start talking about retail, yeah, it makes sense, yeah, I need to have some sort of solution to help optimize my

03:52

real estate portfolio. Yeah? You know.

03:55

So with that said, give us just a little background on those two solutions that you mentioned, the first one about retail, and then the tell, how does it sort of work, sort of a use case. Yeah.

04:09

06:15

do you how do you with that? Lucernex, did I say that correctly? Lucerne, yes. How do you populate that with information and data to be able to take it? I've got, I've got a solution, yeah. Let's say I have a greenfield location, yeah, and I'm ready to plant an asset there. How do I populate that with data and then then shift into a brownfield location where I have existing assets, and now I want to optimize, take the Greenfield. How do you how do you populate that with data?

06:45

Yeah, so the Greenfield is pretty straightforward, right? So you really starting from scratch, and you are uploading the information for your site. If you are doing project management, you're uploading the documents, pictures and your workflows is really configurable in terms of what you can do with the system. As a matter of fact, that's a really sticky feature for customers. I've been having a lot of conversations throughout the event here, and I keep hearing, Oh, we love your product because of the ways we can use it. It really customizes to our unique use cases in business. And so really, when it comes to Greenfield, is really, Hey, what are you trying to accomplish? Whether is a workflow, set up, data collection, lease administration. We allow you to do those things. And then when it comes to Brownfield, typically, with these major retailers, you would see that they have something existing already, whether it's an in house, built solution or some outdated system. So we have a way to allow you to transition or to migrate the data from whatever existing system you have to Lucernex, to continue to to optimize your operations and really rip the benefits of the system.

08:17

A lot of people are chirping about red eye document management and all that is, are we? Are we bringing that on in too, as well? Because I if a greenfield location right, I want to just directly go into some sort of document. I don't want to have any Wow.

08:33

Look at you. You've been learning a lot already over the last few days, huh?

08:38

Thank you very much.

08:41

But you you're very much right. Red Eye is a recent acquisition at Accruent, and we are very much on a journey here to really bring in the benefits of such an amazing solution. So that's something that we are thinking about. You heard at the intro here from our leadership yesterday, we are very much on a journey to integrate all these different workflows that really add value to our customer journey. In this particular case, the retail real estate lifecycle journey, and a lot of it has to do with documents, and we're always looking at ways to do things better, and then red eye is certainly going to help in that journey.

09:31

It just seems like a natural fit if I have existing assets, or if I'm looking to build one, it would make sense that I try to get the documents into a system, yeah? That integrates with my, you know, with the surnax, take us through the second solution that mentioned about where you're talking Telecom, yeah, telcos, yeah,

09:55

telecom, yeah. It's the same thing, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Okay. Well, telecom, telco, it's. Teleco is an abbreviation that works because telecom company, yeah, so on the telecom it's a little bit different, right? Because we're not that, I guess, consumer facing, if you will, the cell phone and everything is the piece that, you know, everybody interacts with, but the infrastructure is what kind of is behind the scene, and that's where we come into play, because we help these telecom companies really make sure that they take advantage of the telco tower assets so similar to Lucernex, Siterra helps the telco tower operators really manage those assets from a similar workflow standpoint, thinking about, hey, here are my network of telco towers, if I think about renovation, expansion, where do I need to build the next tower? And sometimes you have the same dynamics happening, where they're leasing the sites where the towers are. So there's a need for lease management as well. And then some of the assets on the sites, there's a need to have visibility to those. And then the system allows you to do those things.

11:23

Do you have any functionality with the joint usage like so you have this tower, you got a joint it's it's Acme Company, it's not whatever the telco, yeah, you also manage those.

11:36

So what we have, typically with the towers in the past, the telco companies like the T Mobile of the world and others, they used to own the tower assets, and the industry has shifted recently where they really offloaded those assets to other telco operators that really focus on optimizing those assets and making the full use out of those assets so that the actual telco companies can focus on the end consumers, which is you and me and everybody else, so the telco operators actually can host multiple telco companies from these towers, and that's where the system is very critical, because you It allows them to market their assets essentially, to these different end customers, which are the telco companies. Yeah, because it's optimal for you to do that versus owning the assets and having to worry about the maintenance and all the other costs that come with operating Yeah, the assets. Yeah. Okay.

12:52

I'll go with that. I know. Talk to me and talk to the listeners a little about some of the changes that are taking place in the UK on how the treatment of leases yeah, yeah, just sort of Yeah. It's no, it is what

13:08

14:36

How does an organization like accrued in your your organization stay current, because it's a global platform, because it it crosses multiple countries around the world. Right the treatment of of assets differ from country to country. How does, how does Accruent And your solutions adapt to all of that change.

14:59

Huge, yeah, it starts with making sure that you really think about an offer which is beyond a product, right? So you have to think about how you are going to market globally, having a sales force that's knowledgeable about the local market and the local conditions once you make the sale, having obviously a strong product that can be taken to different markets, and that is compliant from a regulatory standpoint all the way from the post sale, where you know, as enterprise customers that use a lot of the acro and products, you need support that you know when you have an issue, you can, you know, accrue and can provide the support needed all the way to having a good, healthy relationship post sale with customer success organization that really helps you take full advantage of the solution that you've purchased. So we really think about that full spectrum when we're trying to support our customer so it's not really about the product. Is really about the full customer experience. And that's something that we're continuously working on, continuously improving. And as a matter of fact, we talked about the UK, that's something that, given this opportunity, will all will work really hard to support customers there, because that's what we do.

16:49

I really like the fact that and there's a common theme outside of these wonderful solutions, but a common theme that resonates well is that you're very customer centric. You focus on that customer. You talk to that customer, right? You're you're not just waiting in the background and just hopefully customer contacts you. You're very, very aggressive in in a good way, yeah, of being able to solve problems that they are currently dealing with. And I kind of like that. That's what I get from what you were talking about. Again, that theme of customer centric focus. I really like it. I have to have to shift gears just a tad bit back to Lucerne x. If we are looking at a property, how does Lucerne X help me optimize the the asset itself? Like, okay, I have, I have this square footage here, this square footage here, I want to generate, or be able to optimize the property. How does that? How does that sort of work without diving too deep into it? Okay,

17:55

so typically, you know you have a lot of decisions that you have to make when, when you manage a property, and typically, you know, it's tied to your lease, do you renew? Do you exit, or do you do something in between where you have to optimize or renovate? So what we really do is to take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation and give you a lot of the required data to allow you to make that decision. So I don't know if you ever read a lease document, but those are pretty long and pretty complex. So the system really takes a lot of that groundwork out of the equation. It allows you to quickly get to, okay, you know, how do I think about my cost per square footage? And, you know, from my lease obligations, you know, how does that translate into what I need to spend? And how do I take that into account in terms of, well, given the location and other data inputs, what's really the best decision to make when it comes to this particular location? So the system allows you to really get to the data that you need to be able to make that decision efficiently.

19:24

I hate to throw one ball another fastball, edge, yeah. How are we incorporating because if you're living under a rock,

19:34

what's coming Yeah,

19:35

yeah, that that'll help with those decisions. Yeah. Even, more,

19:40

yeah, that's something that we are actually really excited about. And we touched on that we had our roadmap session yesterday, and it's something that we are really looking into. So if you think about what we do really as we help our customers really manage and optimize the real estate portfolio. So through Project Management, lease administration, lease accounting, there's a lot of steps in those workflows, in that life cycle, and then with AI, the primary application there is to really get more efficient in terms of how you move through the workflows, how you make decision get quickly to what you need to know so that you can make more efficient decisions. So we are thinking about we working with our customers, right because at the end of the day, it has to make sense for them, yeah. So we really engaging our customers right now to figure out, what are those specific use cases to help you make those decisions? And we are very excited about what we're hearing and some of the use cases that we're coming up with no

20:53

policy. How do people get a hold of you? They're saying, Hey, he's great, he's wonderful, he's insightful. He's probably the best thing since sliced bread. I want to contact him.

21:02

Well, you can look me up on LinkedIn, Gilles, Mepossi Noutcha, and then send me a message and we can continue the conversation. His

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name is Mepossi. All the others part, you'll have all the contact information out on Industrial Talk. So fear not. You'll be able to connect with him on LinkedIn. That is a must make it happen, Captain. All right, we're broadcasting once again from Accruent Insights. It is in San Antonio, Texas, and it is a collection of problem solvers, and, of course, Accruent, the portfolio of incredible solutions that solve problems. All right, yeah, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back. Okay, you're

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listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network, an

21:50

absolutely wonderful conversation. Love the conversation. Accruent Insight was the event. Napoci was the individual, the absolute stellar professional, delivering some Insights into the management of assets, specifically around telco, the towers. You know, I drive down the interstate, I look at all the assets and just think that there's so much opportunity to be able to manage them better, more efficiently, gain more value out of them. It just never ends Accruent, leading the way, absolutely, leading the way. All right, I say it all the time. You have a podcast, put it out on Industrial Talk. I can't say it enough. Let's get some traction on that. If you have technology that you want to elevate and and get people to take notice of it. Put it out on Industrial Talk. We're here for you absolutely and your success. Be bold. Be brave, Dale or greatly. Hang out with Mepossi. You're going to change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly.