Israel Ortiz and Austin Hermle with Accruent

Israel and Austin - Accruent

Fri, Oct 13, 2023 12:28PM • 20:05

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

talk, assets, asset performance management, data, predictive, work, industrial, failure, maintenance, building, israel, austin, problem, product, fail, sensors, solve, equipment, units, clean

SPEAKERS

Scott MacKenzie

00:03

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.

00:21

Alright, once again, welcome to industrial talk, a platform that is dedicated, dedicated to industrial professionals all around the world, because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly you collaborate, you solve problems you make the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on the number one industrial related podcast in the universe. And it's backed up by data, so don't even begin to debate it. And we are broadcasting here, a crew and insights. It's a user community conference that is dedicated to identifying challenges and solving those challenges in a collaborative way. I'm trying to find more ways of being able to say what goes on out there because it's, it's a buzzy, Buzzy out there. We have two gents, Israel and Austin. They are with the crew and we're gonna be talking about asset performance management. Let's get corrected.

01:11

Are you guys doing great. Thanks for having us. Fantastic.

01:14

So he's good. You having a good conference? Yes. So

01:17

far, so good.

01:19

First time in four years? Yeah, of course. He was really. You've been? You've been with him for 10 years. But no, that's, I've just I've really enjoyed it. It's got to be good for you guys. Oh, yeah. I mean, people are so happy to be back. I think. Touching. Hey, look at that. You're, you're different in person. Yeah. You're taller, shorter. Yeah. I went for the positive. Well thought, but it's true. When I when we first started coming back. And it was always funny, because I only know that from a postage stamp zoom thing. Like, wow, look at you. Yeah, there

01:58

were people. So we like talking to you face to face? That's a lot better than than even the screen. So especially

02:03

when it's technology. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, I find that it's, it's still has its applications, but But meeting in person, really debating and talking about challenges, and solving them in a sort of a real time way, has an incredible value. Most definitely. All right, before we get into the conversation, Israel, give us a little background on who you are.

02:32

Okay, so I'm a Senior Director of Product Strategy and Innovation here at a current. But I've been, like you said with the current way too long part of the furniture maybe. And so I've always been in products, I have moved from one product to another. But for the last couple of years, I've been dedicating myself to the manufacturing product line that we have admittance connection,

02:51

like in Austin, your next All right? Well, I'm, I've been with the product for about 15 years, at least our CMMS, one of our CMMS offerings called maintenance connection. And my background is actually a little bit mixed in terms of abundance in like the technical side of things dealing with cloud operations, and also the development of the product. So I'm a product manager. So I work both with the customers as well as our engineers, we're just building the product from the ground up.

03:20

All right, let's talk. What are we? What are what are you seeing here at this particular event? What do you guys talk about? What? What is that, that nugget of value that you can bring to the listeners right now?

03:35

Yeah, I said, I think you had a good presentation on are you listening to your assets? So what was that about? Yeah, so

03:40

I did a presentation on are you listening to what your assets are telling you? What and, and it was all about this concept of, you know, climbing the pyramid, I showed a pyramid of, of asset management, you know, or you can say asset performance management, all of these techniques and, and, like methodologies for doing maintenance all the way from the very base, which is reactive, going into more advanced and proactive things, like, of course, things we know, PMS and things like that. But then escalating up the tree to predictive condition based repair centered maintenance. And how do people implement that inside of their organizations in a way that makes sense, right? And the the, the takeaway from it is, we don't throw technology at things just for the sake of it. Let's put together a strategy, identify the problem with your like, figure out what your assets are. Let's talk about how critical they are. Right? And the example I like to give in that scenario is like, what's more important your little compressor or the President's air conditioner in his office, right. So as a company, how do you prioritize that because once the air conditioner and has no no real bearing on And, you know, sure he can

05:01

still operate performance of the asset by any means. Absolutely.

05:06

Yeah. But still like they can have impacts on your organization differently. So how do you measure that as an organization, and then apply technology to that in a way that makes sense so that you're having reliability, you know, all the things that you want from your assets, availability, reliability, productivity, etc.

05:24

So for the listeners out there, you know, we talked about asset management, we talked about maintenance, we talked about all of these, these very important words, give us a sort of this is for you, Israel, give us a little sort of definition of asset performance management APM.

05:41

Yeah, it's just the way you oversee the whole health of your asset, right. So it's more than just Am I doing the maintenance work in the preventive maintenance work? Is it? Is it Do I understand how much what the longevity is that I can take my that asset and the length of that asset for? And I'm making the right decisions? Am I listening to it, I was gonna play off of something on Austin said we were at this conference, I think it was modex. Or I think that was the one. And someone said to me, you know, our assets have always been talking to us. We've always been, you know, going out there reliability teams can go out there and do measurements, they're looking by vibration or heat sensors. But we haven't been listening very well. And now, the technology is there, so that we can finally understand what they're saying what the assets are telling us. And so I think my the extension is going from just managing your assets, you know, and then trying to extend it through to scheduling or through work order management, it is now saying, Okay, let's be smarter and more thoughtful about the way we approach our assets. And I think it's gonna really help the reliability engineers out there, what, as they come up with their plans, to see how we can get and ensure that that performance is the is the max that we want it to be.

06:52

Yeah, yeah,

06:53

I was gonna say, it's always just to say that it starts, it also changes where we start. So, you know, historically, and, and, you know, for some people, they inherit equipment, or, you know, they're just given a series of assets. But also, I think, looking forward, we can start thinking about, Okay, well, how do we, when we're putting new equipment in, or, like thinking about the lifecycle of assets, where we say, okay, we're building a new building, we're putting in new equipment, let's really understand those before we put them in and put together really good strategies to extend the life of them, like however long they may be around, right. So it's kind of the full cycle from procurement all the way to, you know, engineering design to the maintenance, and then, you know, condition based monitoring or predictive to proclaim, prolong their life, etc.

07:46

Yeah. And, and a properly aligned, that motor would probably help with the re getting it off to a good start, right? Because a lot of people don't do that sometimes. Yeah. Which is not good. And they're wondering why fails. So let's talk a little bit about the healthcare industry. Israel, you were, you're, you've been focused in on that. And honestly, I get the I get the industrial side, I get it. It's, it's got whirly gigs and things spinning and everything. But but from a from the healthcare side, it's a little different, isn't it?

08:21

Oh, it's very different. So, you know, when we started looking into this, our customer started taking us there, right? So we really want to understand what were their journey is? And so we started asking, what is it that you like, also the same value the most. And so when we talk about health care, we looked at two different ways. There's hospitals, of course, and they have the need for air conditioning that needs to stay at a very good temperature and all those things, all that, you know, the age factor units need to be healthy. And so that is the area and the space that we're considering for hospitals, because we have a lot of that data, we have a product line called VX observe, and that taps into the BMS pipeline. And so from that we can do the predictive play there.

09:02

No, I just want to make you should be a mess of building management. That's good. Yeah, that's right. I just didn't, yeah, I didn't want the listener

09:10

to Oh, no, totally, thank you for letting me know, it's, again, all the data has been there. The building management systems capture all the right data. And now we can do something with it and say that that H back unit is gonna go down, you got to do something about it. And that's why hospitals care for us. And then, when we looked at the other side of healthcare, we actually were talking about I was meant to the pharmaceutical industry. And they have a very interesting problem. They produce in batches. And if their age back systems goes down, Austin can get into more because we were both involved in the same project. They have what is called the going down hard problem. They have 30 minutes to get that line back and running and ensure that their batches were not infected. And if in 30 minutes, they can't solve that problem. Then they have to throw away that whole batch which could be literally a million dollars for them. And so they really care to ensure that that prediction is there for them. Because of course, they try to solve it through redundancy. They have multiple equipments. But they even they're willing and willing to solve that problem with us. So that we can make sure their H back units don't go down. So it serves multiple industries, this predictive lives.

10:18

Can you add to that?

10:20

Yeah, sure. So you mentioned temperature. And as we've talked to people, we've learned, like, it's not only temperature, we're dealing with work, you know, there's a special segment of industries that really utilize like clean environments. And the number one asset in clean environments is, of course, the HVAC system on the right. And so temperature is, of course, important. But what is more important to them is actually the cleanliness of the air. And so they actually have sensors that measure particulates in the air. And they have to keep logs of those particulates. And throughout the process, like let's take, like pharmaceutical, like vaccine bottling, or packaging, right. So early in the process, it starts out, it's a big batch, right. And, of course, if you know, that has to be clean. And their standards for these is like, I was like ISO 5678, whatever their standards out there that can go look up. But it starts out, like, okay, it has to be clean. And what that means is a building inside of a building, right? They call them clean rooms. And so you have a building inside of a building that has highly filtered air. And they're measuring the particulates constantly. And they have to keep record of that. And if at any point, it goes above that, like Israel mentioned, they have to quickly be able to get that back online and get that particulates down. Otherwise, they have to throw out all the the material that was in processing at that time.

11:58

It's all great. And I hear what you're saying. It still requires some sort of a, an algorithm. I'm pulling data, it's all data. Yeah. So I'm looking at data, or something's looking at data, or I've created an algorithm that, you know, data falls into this area. But But there's more to that data is there. How, how is your solution dealing with that?

12:24

Yeah, that's a good, good question. Because this is we see this, again, as an extension of what we can offer. But also, we have the reason the right to kind of enter into this space, in our opinion. And the reason we have that is because we throughout the years, customers have been putting a lot of good data in us as far as what was the reason that failed? And what did you do to remedy it? So failure cause remedy is within our system, right? So I think our CTO mentioned this morning that we're going to do a lot to clean that data within our system. And once we clean that data, we can then go and work with our data scientists, and data scientists can kind of start seeing what those patterns are. And so every time something failed, this is what's the remedy? Okay, now we're going to partner that with there's a lot of good solutions out there that they build a lot of sensors. And so a lot of what Austin and I and a couple of others have been doing is we've been reaching out to that network. And we understand that they have been providing some good predictive analysis. But what they're missing is that failure cost revenue data that is needed to enrich the model. And they're missing the connection into creating a work order so that the teams can go out there. So I think that is a win win for everybody, especially for the manufacturers out there for us to come together that way.

13:39

See, I find that your organization equivalent is in a very unique position, because you do cross a lot of industries, yes. But then you you're also have that global full footprint, and they're able to sort of come up with dross solutions from other areas and bring it all together and be able to do that effectively. But that requires a lot of challenge on on your end. I mean, that's come on. That's that's a lot of work. But you got to do it. Yeah. So do you have? I mean,

14:14

yeah, I mean, the foundation of what Israel is talking about, and is also like something that we call, like a failure mode library. See, that's cool. Yeah. So kind of the foundation of of maintenance, kind of, like what I talked about is getting to a point where we can design defects out of our processes. And so these failure mode libraries help with the predictive aspect for equipment that we already have in play and I'll talk about what it is a little bit, but also so does but also to design, you know, design on defect. So an example is okay, I've got a pump for you know, maybe in a healthcare space, I've got a air conditioning system. that performs filtration for our surgical center, right, and to keep the particulates low in our surgical center. Okay, well, what are all the components of that air conditioner, right? You've got air handler units, you've got compressors for the coolant, you've got the filters themselves. And we have to break it down to those that component level and say, Well, how did those fail. And so these libraries are like stuff that we're thinking through and building are the building blocks for us to be able to say, hey, filtration system, this is how we know how much remaining life is left in your filters, right? Or, hey, compressors. This is the data that shows when something's about to failure and to fail. And because we have the data from all of the failures, we can kind of go back and reconstruct that from Okay, the past failures. But now, how do we build that in a way that we can look forward and identify them in the future?

16:00

But you brought up a good point about, you're trying to remove these failures, right, right. From that, just to be able to just minimize your, to a certain extent at the library, right? Yes. But that takes a lot. But that, but you have a user community that you work with, and they, they probably say, hey, here it is. And, but that's important. And

16:25

everything's like, the whole point of that is to understand how do we prioritize, right? Because, yeah, so everything can fail in 100 different ways, right. But what are the five most common? Right, and if you can tackle the five most problems is the 8020 rule. Right? So if you know what the what the most common things are that that represent the 80% of failures. Well, we can actively create programs to fight against that.

16:53

Yeah, tell you, man, it's what do you what gets you excited? It's all of the stuff that's happening. It's, it's, to me, it's, it's not overwhelming. It's from me. I just get excited over though, those shiny things going on out there. What gets you excited there, Israel,

17:13

I think what's getting me excited, especially in this conference, is seeing this opportunity of just being at the right place for a lot of these things to happen. But technology is starting to get there. We're starting to mature enough to be able to leverage that. And then the synergy of that possibility is is what today has me a little bit excited. Yeah, to be able to be able to do this that what we've just been describing, and knowing that it's coming. It's doing it's exciting. Yeah.

17:40

You agree with that?

17:41

Oh, yeah. 100%. And just like, what, what makes me excited is hearing people we've talked to for, you know, several years now coming to a point where they're like, oh, yeah, we're running this IoT pilot or whatever. And like, that's fantastic. Let's, let's integrate that. And let's do

18:00

it. Oh, my God. So go into pilot purgatory, the PP. Come on out, make sure it gets into production. Now, but that's you guys. I mean, this is an exciting time. I'm an old codger right now, but man, I wish I was younger, because it's exciting. Yeah. All right. It's very exciting. Awesome. How did they get a hold of you?

18:17

Well, you can email me at I've, I have the non standard email address or current. So I'm a firmly HBr mlb.com, where you can find me on LinkedIn or I think that's the most of the way

18:31

and you i or T's at a current.com and I'm on LinkedIn as well. Please reach out.

18:37

There you have it, man. Thank you guys. You guys were absolutely spectacular. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side, we're gonna have all the contact information for these two gents out on industrial talk. So stay tuned. We will be right back.

18:50

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

18:59

How about that? Another absolutely wonderful conversation by two gents. Austin and Israel. Accrued as a company, we were on site insights. So for 124 You need to put that on your calendar. You get great conversations, you get to meet up with great professionals, like those two gents, can have real conversations around asset management. I can about what you need to do, how to prioritize it. Excellent conversation. All right, we're building the platform. As you know, you need to tell your story better. Industrial talk is here for you. Because your story needs to be told you need to recognize the necessity to inspire the next generation of leaders. Right here. Right now go out to industrial talk.com Say, Scott, I want to I want to be a part of this ever expanding ecosystem. Be bold, be brave. You're greatly We're gonna have another great conversation shortly so stay tuned