Jay Hack with Fluke Reliability

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

ai, predictive maintenance, vibration, customer, fluke, industrial, reliability, assets, acquisition, non destructive testing, Azima, company, jay, data, condition monitoring, podcast, technology, partners, conference, scott

00:04

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 right

00:22

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, and you are brave. You dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems. That's why you're making the world a better place. We are broadcasting Xcelerate 2024 here in Orlando, Florida. It's a buzzing. You'll hear the buzz in the background. A lot of people walking around now they're in this session, but it got busy there for a moment. All right. Anyway, in the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of Jay hack. He's a big wig with bloop. How about that? He's got a lot going on. Let's get cracking. So there. How you doing?

01:05

I'm doing all right. Scott, how

01:07

about you here last year?

01:08

I was here last year, but in last year, I lost my voice, so I was a mute during the conference. Too much shouting in the pre conference, I guess,

01:18

give shot, there was a lot of shouting going on, you know, a

01:23

little bit too much celebrating, maybe. So I was here, but I couldn't do any podcast or interviews because I was bleeding off. I was I was main I have

01:32

all these questions in front of me, which I don't really care to use here. We just sort of do this questions before we get into that conversation, you've got a sort of level set for everybody out there on the Old World Wide Web. Give us a little background on who Jay is.

01:50

Sure. I'm the Vice President of Business Operations for Fluke reliability. I do a couple things for the organization. I lead our MNA and partnerships, so acquisition of new companies. I'm the general manager of our non destructive testing business, which is a small part of Fluke reliability based in Europe. And I also lead our FBS functions, which is the Florida business system, our continuous improvement program, which is sort of at the DNA of the company.

02:21

See, you're a natural at this man, just a natural.

02:25

So I don't know, I don't know, Scott, but we'll see. Yeah, you're

02:29

natural. Get out of here. Talk to us a little bit about the NDT. I don't, I don't understand what that means.

02:34

So NDT is non destructive testing. So as you know, Fluke reliability is the acquisition in our investment at Fluke into multiple, multiple companies to connect this, to build this connector reliability ecosystem. One of these acquisitions was proof technic. Proof technic has multiple segments, so we have alignment, a condition monitoring and a non destructive testing. Non destructive testing is basically eddy current inspection of steel rods, or metallic rods, and so we are. We're a global leader in this really, really niche market. That's nichey. It's so if you were making, if you were inspecting semi finished metallic rods, and you're a large company like Nucor, or a lot of the European companies, at the end of the coal finishing process, you'll need to inspect the bar for surface defects. We're one of two companies that's the market leader in in technology for this very, very niche application, small business, but very nichey, one customer, one vertical, one application, but fantastic technology and fantastic business,

03:44

is there a way of being able to sort of take that technology and sort of cross pollinate with other opportunities? Or that

03:50

is the question that I get asked a lot. So

03:54

stated, the picture of itchy and I'm going, it's got to be a way of being Yeah, so it's,

03:58

we're on 10 or 15 year product life cycle. So there are many people that use this similar type of technology for for other applications. Right now we're in a very, very small segment, but a very, very important customer, a very high willingness to pay customer. And right now we're just kind of focused on on this specific application.

04:22

How long has that business been apart? I mean, so this

04:26

business has been around for 50 years, sore so, so it was the original it was the original business within proof technique. It was their first product line that the founder started the company with. So, so it's a very mature market. I mean, it's steel production goes up, we go up. Steel production goes down, we go down.

04:47

I that is just, that's amazing. I'll just, I think that that's such an interesting let's, let's shift gears. Okay, AI. Everybody's talking about AI. I wish I had the term AI. I'd be rich, because everybody's talking about it. How do we apply AI? And in multiple applications, what are the what are the guardrails? What? What? How do you protect it? Just goes on and on. The reality is, is that AI's here? You know, you guys have an acquisition of Zima, correct, correct. Take us, take us through that.

05:21

So if you look at what we do today, is we, as we are building, building the tools for customers to go on their connected reliability journey. We have, we have world class CMS platform with email. We have absolutely industry leading vibration monitoring technologies. So we do a handhelds, we do online. We do. You have devices too. We have devices. What we're kind of missing is today, when you use those devices and you collect information, you try to try to try to be proactive and do predictive maintenance, it's you're still relying on subject matter expertise in your workforce. What a Zima does is two things. It drastically Xcelerates a customer's ability to do predictive maintenance, because you outsource part of this to us, and we you can do what you do best, and we can do what we do best. So what azema Today does is it uses AI technology to make a vibration analyst much more efficient. So Azima has two pretty cool things. One is business processes. One is, I'll call it underlying AI architecture that does that helps analysts be more efficient. So, so what a customer does is they have a business process. Let's say you have a plant with 1000 assets. Azima can come on site. They can show you how to censor up your assets and help you plan your routes and categorize the assets. And they can send you go through and collect vibration data, send it over a web portal. They'll receive it. But it's very, very expensive today to do remote condition monitoring. One of the things where Fluke is advantageous. We can do remote condition monitoring much more efficiently than any other company. Azima allows you to do five times the amount of assets, I think is what they said in the in the briefing this morning, where we have an AI tool that allows people to filter out, Okay, this one's good, this one's good, this one's good. This one I need to look at a little bit more closely. And this one, I really need to go deep in detail with the AI. Based off 30 years of trend of data, we got a lot of data trained where the system can can be more be more automated. So

07:31

that's how you train the AI, correct? You uploaded the data. What? How did you train it?

07:38

So, so or so the Azima trained it. So they start off in the Navy business. They started collecting, okay, okay. And they have basically trended history of okay. We did. We looked at this. We looked at this asset. These are the patterns in the asset that are likely to cause failure, and based off of doing this hundreds of 1000s of times, they basically have a data set where they can understand what's going to be, what's going to fail, and when it's going to fail, and why it's going to fail. It's not generative AI, should I should be I should be clear. It's an expert system, which is more of a legacy AI, but it's still under the same umbrella.

08:16

So that's pretty good. That's, that's a that's a plus, because typically, companies are coming in and they're saying, Okay, we need AI. Everybody's saying that, okay, we need AI in some way. And we need to apply AI into our managing of these assets and to figure out, you know, the tsunami of data, where, where are the nuggets of truth, and where is it? Just the data is just a mess, meaning, just, I don't need it. I could just push it aside. But you have, with a Zima, a trained model.

08:45

Yes, it's still it's not fully automated. I want to be clear, it's a human still interfacing looking at it. But if you think of like an Excel spreadsheet or like makes it makes someone who's doing financial modeling more efficient, this tool makes a vibration analyst, much orders of magnitude more efficient. So a customer, a customer today, let's say you have a food and beverage manufacturer, and they have 500 assets in their plant they're want to monitor. They can come to us. We can go within a period of three to six months, go do an on site survey. Show them what, what sensors they need in their facility. Show them the routes they need to do. And they can start very, very quickly sending us information and getting a monthly or bi weekly or quarterly report whatever, whatever they want and is appropriate for their assets. But that can happen very, very quickly. You don't have to go out and hire a bunch of vibration analysts. You don't have to build a whole program. Well, you can hire us to do that, and that's pretty cool. That

09:43

is interesting. I've never heard that approach. Where are you at with Azima? When did that acquisition occur?

09:51

So the acquisition occurred in August 2023 so it's still relatively new. And what's really it? Interesting is it's like, I mean, most acquisitions are very challenged, but this is center of the playing field. I mean, it's a it's an extension of our current offering, same customer base, same call point and very value added solution. So we've had a lot of interest already. The acquisition is already ahead of expectations of where we thought we'd be six months in.

10:22

So if I was a customer and and I'm already, I'm I'm already emailed up, and I've got my devices all pulling data, how difficult is it to pull in that? Azima,

10:37

so today, we're still, we're still, it's not fully it's not fully integrated. Yet, this process is probably a year away from being fully seamlessly integrated in a concise manner, but, but we can basically today, depending on what you have, we can go do in a three to six month program and get and get a Zima up and running in its traditional form, eventually is what becomes further, tightly coupled with our legacy solutions, you're going to see that continue to decrease and basically be an adder for our current pass.

11:14

Where do you see it going? Like, what's, what's, what's the future expectation? I see what you're, you're doing today, but there's always that, that strategic component about, you know, we got a Zima. It has this capability. Where do we see it going?

11:27

Sure. So if you think about the realm of connective reliability, you know, we have basically two anchor points in our workflows today. We have the CMMS platform, so we can manage your maintenance program in your work order program, we have predictive maintenance, which basically you're managing a program ahead of that. We can help you get ahead of the game and tell you where failure is in we're going to look at basically expanding that further and also deeping it so things that would be interesting to us, and we have a lot of partners here that we're going to continue to explore. So we're trying lots of things. We have four partners here at the conference, and we're meeting with customers. I'll give you a few of the categories. One of the things is, we do predictive maintenance. We do we do maintenance platform. What about spare parts and maintenance? Spare Parts? That's a natural extension. I mean, we know when something's gonna fail. We can tell you what parts gonna fail and we can manage the work order. Can we actually facilitate the delivery and stocking levels so we can continue to expand this further and further? And we may not do this ourselves, but we're always looking for partners to help us do that and help customers. So during this conference, we have, we have these partners. We're testing with customers. Another category we're looking at connected worker. You've heard this everywhere. You know augmented, augmented support for for workflows. So we have predictive maintenance. We have workers. Can we help the worker better do his job when he sent out to repair something that our predictive maintenance caught in that CMS is using to manage and prioritize that work order. Can we make that worker more efficient? And so that's something we're looking at. We got a partner here this week where we testing to see if it's the right partner and the right fit. And it's pretty cool. I think we're going to find we're going to have some success with a couple of these. Yeah.

13:20

So this thought came to mind. It's not just the device that Azima Can Can Can I upload data into the Zima just, let's say I'm a I'm a vibration tech, and I've got my handheld, whatever thing, and I'm taking vibration or a thermal imaging, or whatever it might be. Can Azima handle pretty much any type of or is it strictly

13:42

vibration? It's strictly a vibration engine. So it's not doing thermography. It's not tied to other things. If you look at the big five modalities that are used to condition monitor, vibration is the largest and most accepted. We're looking at that again when we talk about deep fitting our experience on condition monitoring, I would classify, I mean, you have ultrasound, motor circuit analysis, yeah, oil analysis, you know, thermography, we're looking at, can you, can you bundle vibration data with something else? These are things we've looked at do. It's hard, but, but we're looking at all possibilities, and they basically, why we have these conferences is, you know, we have dozens of meetings set up wherever our customers pull us for needs. That's where we're gonna

14:34

go. It's exciting times. It is what's so what's anything on the horizon that you could share with us, or is that just this is

14:44

what we're exploring right now? Yeah, I mean, the partnerships, we'll see what the, what the result is out of the end of this. But hopefully what we love, what we'd love to do, is to be able to have some some some partners. Is things build, and hopefully we have a cool ecosystem. I.

15:00

It's always nice to have these, these events. I got to tell you, I enjoy them because you get to hear from the individuals that are truly in the trenches. You know, delivering, delivering value to their their their organization. Jay, how did, how do they get a hold of you? If they want to contact you, you

15:20

can email me, jayhack, J, a, y, period, H, A, C, k@fluke.com,

15:24

what about LinkedIn?

15:27

LinkedIn. I'm there as well. Under J hack for fluke, I'm the only one, so it should be easy to

15:33

find really very good man, you were wonderful. All right.

15:37

Thank you, Scott. All right, Jay, thank

15:38

you very much for joining Industrial Talk. We're gonna have all the contact information for this. J information for this jet out on Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining. We will be right back.

15:48

You're listening to the Industrial Talk podcast network

15:56

that's Jay delivering the lumber Fluke reliability as a company Xcelerate was the event, and I'm looking at a stack card right there, stat card, LinkedIn, stack card, and it's chock full of great information. You need to connect with him. Put that on your to do list, connect with Jay, or just go out to Industrial Talk, because we're gonna have the link for Jay out there on that platform. Speaking of the platform, Industrial Talk is here for you. If you have a technology, if you have an existing podcast, or if you have a desire to have a podcast that really highlights industry, you need to put it out on Industrial Talk. How do you do that? You're saying to yourself, Scott, how do I do that? That sounds like a great opportunity. It is. You go out to Industrial Talk. Connect with me. We have a conversation, and we figure out how to get that information out on Industrial Talk. Easy, all right, people, be brave. They're greatly hang out with Jay. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly on Industrial Talk. So stay tuned. You.