Jonathan Candel with Siemens BuildingX

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

building, jonathan, platform, customer, employ, data, ai, deploy, cases, insights, world, solve, talk, technology, dashboard, podcast, absolutely, work, industrial, assets

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. All right, what's

00:22

good, thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk and your continued support about this platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, brave, daring greatly. You are innovators. That's what you do. You solve problems. That's why you make the world a better place. That's why we truly appreciate what you do. That's why we love you on Industrial Talk. Yes, it is love. It is lovely. We are broadcasting here on site IoT solutions World Congress, it is in Barcelona. And it is a great ecosystem of individuals, such as our esteemed guests, Jonathan, they just want to help you. They just want to help you solve the challenges of today. And they're passionate about it. And they know more than me, which is not saying much, but they do know more than me. All right, Jonathan. By the way, bread bread brought tears. Is he's he was definitely the guy.

01:17

Oh, let's see if I can speak shoes. I

01:20

don't know, man. I don't know. No. Are you having a good conference?

01:24

I'd have a good conference. And thanks for having me on. Scott's

01:26

My pleasure. Absolutely. My pleasure. Of course. What was your name?

01:33

Right. So my name is John. If

01:34

no, not you, not you? Well know. The one that I've interviewed before she was what's her name? At least I don't care. Lisa. That's right. Yeah, we're gonna make sure that her name is in this particular podcast, so that you can reference it. And that because she didn't come and see me. I'm hurt. Now.

01:53

I blame.

01:55

Jonathan said. So she hurt my feelings deeply. There you go. Good luck. She your boss.

02:03

By extension, I would say so. So I need to be careful what I say.

02:08

Very good. No, she's absolutely wonderful. Absolutely. You guys always deliver Same as always delivers. All right. Before we get into this conversation, Jonathan, give us a little background on who you are.

02:17

Right. So my name is Jonathan Candel. I also work at Siemens in the Building X team. I am a solutions architect, meaning I work with our clients and customers to see what are their use cases? What do we have been Building X? And how can we make this technically happen?

02:36

By the way, just you want to know something that is something that I one of my interviews was with a gentleman who coined the term use case. He was the genesis of use case. There you go, right. You're welcome. That's what I know him. He's a close friend. But so Building X, we had a great conversation with Brian. And it really sort of dove deep into the really the robust capabilities of, of Building X. Does the architect Chair of the platform, lend itself to flexibility? Because you you work with individuals, you work with companies, you work with people who will always define new use cases, right? Yeah, they just do. And that's great. So is it sort of with that in mind, just able to sort of accommodate new use cases? Yeah,

03:35

absolutely. So I think that hits the nail on the head, because the platform that we build up, is meant to be flexible. And it's meant to solve the problems that the customer has not our own. So yes, we are built on AWS. So we have some scalability and flexibility in mind. But what we really need to do is we need to check with the customer like what are the pain points are what are we trying to solve? And how can we make this happen? Whether this can be done with our own applications that we have natively on the platform, or by extension, something that the client already has, by API's, or some other means we really just need to look at what is the situation and how can we best solve this?

04:14

Yeah, that's interesting. And, and this, this platform has been around for a couple of years.

04:19

Yeah. So we really build up in the last few years. And we are now really at a point where I mean, all the functionality is there. We just need to make all our customers aware of it.

04:30

The the and I have to dive deep into this just because the reality is one AI is just sort of hit the how is the system able to adapt to the realities of today's technology and how do you how do you see that working?

04:49

Right? That is a good question. Because I think a lot of people when they have AI in mind, they think about the new buzzwords that fly around like to GPT generate generate of AI. Yeah, and I mean, those are really impressive technologies. And I mean, I'm a fan myself, and I use it myself as well. But when we talk about the building context, if I have smart buildings, how can they benefit from this technology? And I would say that the issues we need to solve for smart buildings are a bit different than the problems that we can solve with examples like generative AI. So when we talk about AI with customers, we need to know exactly what do they want to solve? And do we even need AI or machine learning to get there.

05:40

But everybody's talking about it.

05:42

Everybody is talking about it. And don't get me wrong. It's buzzy buzz out there. Absolutely. And we also employ this right, we understand the power of this technology. But we again need to think about the use case for it. Because the analogy that I can make is if I need to make myself a sandwich, can this be done by a robot that has, I don't know a camera feed and some AI in place to do it? Most likely? Yes. But I can also do it in a more simpler way. And it doesn't cost me that much, either. So we need to, we need to think about the cost benefit of each technology that we employ, and what do we get out of it? And if if that means we need to employ something very sophisticated, like an AI model, then we can do so if you can do it simpler, then by all means.

06:31

Okay, you sort of touched on a point there's a there, and I didn't think through this, but there's a size consideration. Your I would imagine your platforms got a lot of robust capabilities. Is it? Is it appropriate for that particular platform to be deployed at a mom and pop store in the corner of you know, Maine and 30th? Or whatever? Is that big enough? Or is it really there's a there's a point where you deploy the system in a way that that is, is meaningful there too, as well.

07:13

What I like about that question is the work what is meaningful? Yeah, right. So absolutely, from small to big, there's definitely use cases that we can think of where I would say, Hey, you can totally use our technology to serve a purpose here. It doesn't need to be a 10 story building to say, we can actually extract some value out of the data that we gather from your building. I mean, even if I have a smaller shop that wants to keep track of say, the energy consumption, and know where is this coming from, then absolutely, by all means, our platform will allow that. It's really about how much data can we get out of the building? And what do you want to do with the data that is more important to say, Hey, is it meaningful to employ our technology here?

08:01

So what are some of the new in? I mean, I can come up with some use cases, but they probably mean nothing, because I'm not really in the business. But what are some of the the use cases that are coming out? Now that you are focused on?

08:20

Right? So in my team, I would say we focus on basically all of the functionalities that we have, because we need to have the full picture, when we talk to a client of us to say, hey, we have this, that would actually be really good for your situation. But one of the things I'm actually quite excited about that's coming out would be we call it FTD. So fault detection and diagnostics. And the cool thing about this is that you're not just in a reactive state anymore, because it's quite easy to say, hey, look, something broke in your machine. And I can see it in the measurements is like, great. But I mean, I have the cost already because I have to buy a new machine. But with FTD. All we can do is we keep track of the machine over its lifetime. And the moment that we see a trend that would indicate Hey, something is going wrong. We can actually intervene without having all those costs, like hey, now everything broke down. Yeah, catastrophic. Exactly. And especially if you have like a cascade of machines, where if one component would die, the rest would also break down. This can be, I would say almost a life saving functionality to him. So it's

09:27

a predictive component. Yeah, absolutely. So and you can deploy it across all assets and get a sort of overall health of your building. Exactly. It's

09:37

this detection pod where we say, Hey, what are we see this coming up? We have to check this because we don't want this to go any further. That's a really powerful tool. And I can't wait to have it on the platform and it's coming real soon. And we're already talking with customers for their use cases. So be it pharma, be it an industry be a normal office building. I mean, we can find cases everywhere where they could be very well employed.

10:02

Because because everybody likes dashboards, does that dashboard capability of just saying, green is good yellows. Red is bad, don't do that. And so it can give you that sort of overall picture, not just from one asset, but from multiple assets, multiple buildings, roll up, be able to do all of that, so that I can see if I'm a property manager, I can see all my properties and be able to budget appropriately. Yeah,

10:34

absolutely. So we have those nice boats, especially with the colors as well. So I

10:38

was just gonna say don't don't venture away from the colors. Everybody knows that it's universal. And not even

10:44

that also the size of the bubbles mean something. On first sight, absolutely, we have those dashboards. But obviously, sometimes we want a bit more insight as well. So I would say for every use case, again, the use cases, we have a dashboard, that makes sense. And whether I'm an engineer, and energy manager, or just a Facility Manager, the dashboard makes sense to someone.

11:09

It's always going to be the question, how quickly can I deploy it? Let's say? Of course I have, it varies. But let's say I have a big building. And I'm interested in getting greater insights, because the internet says I need to get greater insights. So I got to do it. So how quickly is that system can be deployed? How much effort in time? And in agonies, you know, going to be required of me? Right?

11:33

So that's a good question. Because it it basically highlights the situation that we need to understand the customer. And we need to understand what is this building? What is this building sport? And as in? What kind of infrastructure Do you have? How many meters Do you have? What kind of sensors are scattered around the building? And the moment that we have a visibility on the situation, we can say, Okay, let's go into the data onboarding. So we make a solution design where we say, we can interface with your existing infrastructure, in say, this manner. And the important thing is that we are quite open in this regard. So vendor agnostic, so whatever sensors or BMS you have in place, we have a solution, but we need to understand what it looks like. And then we go into, okay, let's make sense of the data. So this is the data onboarding step. So it's hard to put this on a timeline. But the moment that we have clear visibility on the underlying infrastructure, we can say, Great, let's let's install, for example, a necessary gateway. And then the moment that we see the data, let's make sense of this together. So I can see exactly which data points do I have? Were in the building? And what does it mean? Yeah. And we basically go from there, because then we have the data, right, we can do whatever we want.

12:51

Once you have the data, once you have sort of a clear understanding of the the building, or the property, or whatever you want to call it, is there a way of me being able to determine hard dollar value as a result of deploying the system, you'll get savings, you'll you'll achieve this you will accomplish that the property be more efficient, whatever it might be? Will I be able to begin to see some real quantifiable value?

13:23

I would say yes, but it also depends on the customer, how we implement the raffle, right? Because what we can do is we can make the data that's available from the building available in any dashboard that we have. So the insight the analysis, we can perform. But then the customer or the building owner, or the facility manager needs to say okay, what can I What can I extract from this data? Right? Do I now need to start with an initiative to say, hey, wait, I'm really noticing we you're using a lot of energy in this floor of the building, that doesn't really make sense in comparison to the other floors. And the moment that we have this insight, we can act on it, and for example, save on our electricity bill. Some other examples would be when we go more into sustainability. So you can say, hey, I now have visibility on the emissions that I create, with my building, perhaps here. I want to be more efficient in how I employ my lighting schedule. And this is, of course, directly measurable. But it really depends also on the customer in the sense how do we employ the platform and extract insights from the data that we get?

14:36

Yeah, I just, I just don't see any other option. I mean, I think that if I'm, if I'm managing multiple assets, buildings, you just have to NA and I want to venture into the world of, of being able to pull data, see the data, make tactical decisions off the data. There's no other way I'm going to have to at least Have some sort of system to be able to help support that strategic objective. But it makes sense. It just does.

15:09

It's all about empowering the customer. By making decisions that make sense. Yeah. And this needs to be data driven. Yeah. And with the insights that we can create from the data, you can even put the customer on a path that they never thought about before. Because you have so many new insights into the data that will otherwise just simply impossible.

15:30

Yeah, no, you're you're, you're hitting on all cylinders. This just makes complete sense. To me. There's an excitement about the future, and make and it just, there's what it also tells me that there's a lot of inefficiencies that just exist in the world today that if, if you start driving those out, what impact will be made? It's just an amazing how do people get a hold of you there, Jonathan?

15:53

And I'm active on LinkedIn. So please find me on LinkedIn. And then we can take it from there. Very good. All

15:58

right. His name is Jonathan. We're going to have all the contact information for him out on Industrial Talk. So if you're not we're going to have that out there and reach out to him. Great experience. All right. We're broadcasting from IoT solutions, World Congress, IoT solutions. That's what it is. All right. Anyway, thanks so much. It is a collection of people like Jonathan. So we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right back. You're

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listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

16:36

Your call to action is to reach out to Jonathan. Stephen says the company the solution is Building X. And yes, there is a lot of opportunity to make those building assets more efficient. And here's a platform Building X, that really provides that flexibility, that scalability that you're looking for, to get an extract the greatest efficiency out of your, your assets, your building assets. It's a must. It's about you could tell he's very engaged. And many of the people at Siemens are very engaged. They they want, they want you to succeed, because it's all about education, collaboration, and innovation. They embody that. All right. Speaking of which, you have a podcast. Let's say you're doing a podcast, put it out on Industrial Talk, you have technology that you want to try to gain greater attention, but it out on Industrial Talk. We're here to help you succeed. We're here to help you get that attention you need. And if you want to be on the podcast, just let me know. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Jonathan. You're going to change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation short