Mr. Kenneth Forlemu with InforEAM talks about Powerful Insights into Asset Transactional Data
In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Kenneth Forlemu, Solutions Architect at Infor and Infor EAM about “Using the power of Transactional Data for Insights into your Asset Health”. Get the answers to your EAM questions along with Kenneth's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!
You can find out more about Kenneth and the wonderful team at Infor by the links below. Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2020. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!
KENNETH FORLEMU'S CONTACT INFORMATION:
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-forlemu-6ba5808/
Infor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infor/
Infor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/infor/
Infor Twitter: https://twitter.com/infor
Infor Website: https://www.infor.com/
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Infor, InforEAM, kenneth, asset, incrementally, industry, industrial, platform, transactional data, business, data, Industry 4.0, conversation, users, podcast, customer, existing, health, talk
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. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast. absolute honor absolutely an honor that you've joined the industrial talk podcast where we celebrate industrial heroes, the women and men of industry, the women and men of manufacturing, and everything in between. You are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly you innovate. When you innovate, I love the innovation side. And you're changing lives and you're changing the world. That's why we celebrate you on the industrial talk podcast, in the hot seat in the industrial talk, hotseat Kenneth Forlemu. Forlemu. Nope, I got that right. InforEAM is the topic. Let's get rockin, you know, what's a great town.
We had a little family matter to address, not just a friend.
And we had to go up to Nashville. And we spent some time up there. You know what's so great about Nashville? They've got seasons, they've got great food. They've got great music, they've got great people. It's a great place. So anyway, we had a good time up there. And
highly recommend if you've put that on your bucket list if you've never been there. Great, great. town. All right. We've been talking a lot about asset management and
this IoT world that we live in, how do you enable all that? What do you do? You need a platform, you need a platform like InforEAM. And that's the sort of the Industry4.0 enabler you need, you know, you're collecting all this data, and you need a system. But this conversations just a tad bit different. And what makes it so interesting is that many of the individuals that I have spoken to, and we have talked a lot about IoT IoT Industry4.0 edge, everything cloud, you name it, we've talked about it in that space. And it's all great conversation. But what if I want to approach it incrementally? What if I want to take this digital journey incrementally, you will need a system you will need a platform to be able to proceed forward into the future creating that business of resiliency, you're going to have to do that you're going to have to have an enterprise Asset Management System. You know, just put that down? Why not start there? So you say okay, I'm going to start there.
I understand all about the devices, I understand all about the great innovation that is taking place within this industry4.0, but if I want to just do it incrementally, can I do it with a system
and and just be able to capture transactional data to get really clear indication on the health of my assets? And the answer is absolutely, positively Yes. And that's what this is about. So let's say you want to go down this journey, you're gonna have to have a system, right? You're gonna have to have a system?
And can I leverage that system to be able to generate insights into my right into my, the health of my assets and my business on a real time basis? And the answer is yes, you can take existing transactional data and be able to draw from that clear indication of the health of your assets. That's what we're going to be talking about with Kenneth. He is a Solution Architect, I go out to his stat card out on LinkedIn. Yep. Here is the cool thing about it. He's been with Infor right? He is a I want to say a senior architect. Yeah. He's been with Infor for 21 years. Well, so he knows his stuff. He understands what business needs. He understands how to leverage technology to its fullest. Mark my words, you're gonna love this particular interview because we're just, we're just helping listeners and individuals. Take this journey forward this industrial 4.0 journey and how do I do it? There's just a lot of moving parts. But I'll tell you right at the center of that is an enterprise system that you need to put in place and can add system right can add system be able to analyze the health of your overall assets and condition of your
Business and the answer is absolutely. All right. Let's get a go in with the interview candidate Forlemu, that's fo r l e m EU senior architect. Not many of those guys out there so you'll be able to find him reach out to him on his card. We'll have all the other contact Information at industrialtalk.com. So enjoy the interview with transactional data's on the hotseat. Let's not mess around with that. Enjoy. Alright, Kenneth, welcome to the industrialtalk Podcast. I am so glad that you made time in your schedule to be able to be on this particular podcast and share your sage advice with acid management's. There you go. That's my that's my introduction. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Thanks for for inviting me to join your podcast. It's definitely the the honors on all on this side. Which is because I got your stat card up there, I've got your, your LinkedIn stack card, I've got your form that you filled out. And I'm telling you, you've got mad, mad street cred out there when it comes to maintenance asset management and and that the InforEAM platform. And I always think that that Infor aim platform is a facilitator of the industry4.0, because it's one thing and we're going to go into this and you're going to tell the story, but I have to get this off my chest listeners, bear with me. So okay.
All this talk and all this excitement that's wrapped around industry 4.0. And it's like, I've got to go out, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. But they have no place to put the data. Like, you got to have it. And then when you get the data, you got to be able to sort of do something with it. Not you have to stick in some fashion Yes, site collection of data for the sake of collecting data. Well, it's like digging a ditch, just because I mean, yeah, did I mean did it cosmic transformation is quite quite a quite a big deal these days. Because, as you know, they call it big database is all about it, basically AI
diligence is days that we can actually manage such unstructured data. Before we get into that. So let's give us a little background on who Kenneth is. And then we're gonna dive into transactional asset health.
Yes, so my name is cannot follow me I hail from originally from Cameroon. That's in the west part of Africa. I'm came to the States to study
in 1994 and went get an MBA and join in for 1999. And here I am. Today it so 21 plus years. You're one of the old ones. That dinosaurs Yeah, but boy, do you? You know, that system? You know that? If Have you always been with the sort of the EM platform? Yes. Yeah. So.
So I started with MPT, which is the right, the brainchild of eating four of em, then progress to, to info E, which I've been using for, for the last, I'll say last 1819 years. So, as you've seen a lot, I've seen a lot. And I've, I've gone through the ranks tools from consulting to project manager to architect which I am today. So it's the full breadth of the implementation. There's no question I could ask you that you don't know. I hope so.
Because I can imagine you just sort of sometimes sit back and you say, Hey, I was with Mt. Two, we, we had this system, we were pretty proud of it and all this good stuff. And it did a lot of fun stuff to where you are today. And you're looking at what, you know, the cloud suite that in for all of those solutions, how they talk to each other and link and collect data, great insights. I've just, I can't imagine how far that is. But the good news, the good news about InforEAM is that is growing very rapidly, which means that I have never bought to learn new things. So every single release has a lot of stuff that that I have to learn. So it's a it's it's probably I mean, it's progressing very, very fast. So that's interesting you make and we were talking briefly prior to the podcast, innovation never stops, and that he nodes with the Infor em platform. And that's like, that's a pretty doggone robust platform. And it's all evolved point C growing, adding new features every every, every half a year, I have to ask one question I have to where are you getting? Is that internal? Or do you listen to users and user saying, Hey, we really would like this thing to do XYZ, would you? And then of course, create the the you know, yeah. But there's really three areas. We have to have user conferences. Yeah, that we stay users actually share his experiences. We have what we call the product product improvement requests that users customers can also actually submit requests for improvements.
And then of course, we are on the road implementing em. And we meet new challenges every day, which we need to meet customer demands and customer need. So we all project that back to our development team, reviews them, contacts, industry experts, and then put them in the roadmap was for what is necessary. See,
once again, as just industry wide, we just never stop innovating. Oh, and that innovation always constantly impacts the enterprise. So it's a beautiful thing, honestly. So it's a beautiful thing. And I bet, I bet you still get to the point where it's like, Wow, that's cool. I That's all it is. Yeah, this in fact, just two days ago, I saw something in E in E info E and which I have not seen before. And I said, Well, that was really cool.
This is just slightly some new features that nobody talks about, which are very neat. See, you know, and cool is a technical term. Yeah, I might have. Yeah. Cool.
All right. Before we can really get into the conversation, I want to sort of frame this discussion because this is interesting. I've, I've had the fortunate opportunity to interview a lot of people and this whole industry 4.0, IoT, IoT, edge cloud, you name it all under the industry 4.0 sort of banner, digital journey five, it never stops. Yes. The interesting part about that, if I put my business hat on, is it sir? I mean, do I have to really go down that road? One or two? I have existing data that I just don't even access? I would see. And that's where we start talking about transactional data? Can you sort of outline that a little bit?
Yes, transactional data for us means that
this is data which is being created from using InforEAM. So when you capture all your inputs, all your attributes on work orders, whether it is work management, procure to pay, plan to inventory, when you have all that data in the system living in structured data at this point, you cannot use it because you have all the attributes you use it for, to actually use some algorithms, some logic. So business use cases, to actually capture exactly how you want what you want to capture out of the system. So we use our current transactional data to, to develop algorithms to to measure whatever want to measure, in this case, perhaps asset health. And you say that's not even you haven't even deployed an IoT device yet? Not yet. Just looking at transactions with Yes, within the business. And that's great in a work order. That's correct. Can I have my asset registry, Ticket Ticket Ticket Ticket, and I've got data behind it now. But but there's a lot of work that has to be done to get to that point, right? Well, yes. And that's part of the implementation. Because when we go to implement em, we need to do to find out what are the overarching requirements for the customer? What What's your goal? Right? He has, I mean, you're gonna achieve a lot from em, want to make sure that as part of implementation, we're capturing all the inputs that may be used to actually calculate as a health? See, that's interesting, because you can sit there, have that conversation, have that design conversation saying what's important? Yes. Where are the gaps? This is how it how the system sort of deals with it. And to be able to really say, I got a good picture. Let's take this transactional data and create this dashboard, this insight, this ability, and it's really just from the system itself from from a system itself. Normally, I mean, the only edit
I guess energy would be to, to to come up with the algorithm on watch the finance asset health in your industry, what do you consider asset health
care differs from industries, but you're glossing over, you've got to put the time, energy and effort in the beginning to be able to do that. Right. A lot. Yeah. And and my, my history and recommendation to the leaders or listeners is the fact that that has to be done. And don't cut, don't cut corners. It can be arduous, painful, but don't don't cut corners on that. It makes I agree. Yeah, I agree. It makes probably the implementation
far more accessible. And that I think that what you said is very, very interesting because they are different. When we go to customer sites, they are on different levels on their maintenance operations. We are very mature companies. We have companies that just getting into maturity. Those companies are very mature in their operations, the company, the companies that want to make sure that they have all the inputs to capture that asset health are the companies that may not be at that step, same level.
Just go incrementally.
Just phase it in, right? We don't have to do everything at one. And phase one, we can go to phase two, phase three or phase four. She can just progressively go into into the implementation to make sure that by phase five, that's where you're gonna end. You have all the inputs actually capital asset health, she doesn't have to anyone. That's good. So you can you can deploy the Infor em platform incrementally. Yes. Wow.
That's good. And that's what we advise, in fact, because what we've discussed, we've discovered is that many customers who want to get get everything, all the bells and whistles before they actually go live.
They may never go live. Yeah, they may never go live. You're right about that. That's true. Nobody's gonna know. I'm ready. Let's turn it on. I mean, I and I always tell it with with a very simple example, that's good. If you have a new app in the App Store. You notice they have updates, perhaps every couple of months, and within five years, you have a full fledged update from day one, he was not didn't have all the features. I thought you could have an example. Because you have incrementally added features to mature, make changes along the way, once you get it. Right. See, I like that that's a great analogy. That's a great example. The other thing that
that exists out in a mature business, you've got legacy stuff, you got legacy systems and legacy data collecting, you know, transmitting devices. Correct. That's all a part of that. Right. You you sort of optimize what they have. Right now. You could do it incrementally. We've already established that. But that would be an ideal situation, like, optimize that existing, you know, portfolio of of, you know, systems. I agree. Agree. Agree. And in fact, that's, I know, we're not we may not talk about that today. But that's the reason we have the info is because we want to be the center of it. transformation that's waiting for wants to be. And that's our goal. And that's in four oh s right. That's info West, and that helps facilitate or connect legacy systems, right? Yeah. Nice. Yeah. See? Yes. So we want to be the center of the enterprise ecosystem, right for all their digital transformation needs. And then once again, you get the transactional data from these legacy systems. And it's able to create greater
insights and vision into the health of your asset in general as and your organization. Yes, I'm because info is maybe the center of the ecosystem, we can just grab all that data, and putting the data warehouse what we call the data lake, the lake, the lake, and then we can now transform it, and analytic tools to get exactly what you want. I'm always fascinated by the fact that, and many of these mature, you know, manufacturing businesses have all this data, it exists. And it will already Yeah. And then with this solution, this in for Iam solution and the power it possesses, you you fundamentally change that particular business with that platform, I see things that I've never seen before. That's correct. That's correct. In fact, that's why we have I'm sure you've heard of we have the person to write it, the AI the coal mine in for coal mine, yeah, mixed our AI tool.
So those are the tools that can be used to actually farm this data warehouse to, to get to get exactly what we need to make sense out of the data. I've got to ask the question, let's say and I mean, I've been very fortunate I've had, I've experienced a lot of different types of platform. Sure. Now, you have you mentioned briefly about how you've sort of changed as he gone along and you kept on growing and made him more powerful, more intuitive, whatever, it might be correct. Where's it going? It can it? Can it ever get? Are you 95% there and you know, now you're, you're fighting for the last 5% the incremental improvement, Oh, where are you at?
I'm not sure that everybody knows where we are. Right? It's one of those things just cost planning improvement, right? I mean, the world is changing, processes change, requirements change, and we just go with the flow.
You know, so it's,
what I will say is that it em is very info is very mature.
product is very mature.
But otherwise, since things are changing around the world, in terms of processes and manufacturing requirements, we have to pursue that to regulations are coming up, we have to make sure that we build in
autoregulation tools in there. Yeah.
Because your platform is that robust and flexible. And the way it's designed is pretty spectacular.
We talked, we spoke of manufacturers never stop innovating. Manufacturers never stop, and everything that goes into manufacturing all the inputs, they never stop. Right? No. And therefore, you, you have you can't be the system that says, I'm sorry, we can't accommodate that new innovation right there. You can't, yes. Good. Yes. And we also have to be too deadly technology to technology is changing, right?
I mean, not a few years ago, you know, we had a full revamp of em with what we call html5. Because we had to make e info E. Cloud from agnostic, browser agnostic. So if you already have
Firefox, we have Chrome, we have Chrome. So yeah, before it was just IE, Explorer. And that was a limiting factor for us. We now if you have any browser, you can use em is a browser agnostic today, because it's a cloud based solution. Jump on that. And I'm just I'm always, I mean, there's just so much
great things that exist with it in 4am. And not just that in for in general, the thinking that is going on the conversations that are taking place, not just internally, but also externally, the the users and the communities out there, they're just saying, and it's just making your system. Just
amazing, I love it. I love it. I can tell you've been there for 21 years, and you look like you're 13.
The good news, the actual good news for my part is that I also had the opportunity to, to work in what we call the service industries with time with info. And what I meant is that I was had been I mean, I was open to, to seeing all that info applications. Right? Click cloud suites, cloud suite, financials, cloud suite industrial? Yes. Our our products are pretty, pretty good. I see that. I have to ask the question. Yeah, I got in for I am, there's a look, there's a field, there's a user experience with it, right. And, and that's all a part of it. Because you don't want it to look like garbage, nobody will use it. And it better navigate well, because nobody will use it. And it's all about, you know, getting people to use it, if they don't use it, and then enter in good Information. And it just sort of, once again, it's a people and culture. And in fact, in fact, that's one of the teams reach out or say that info has done which was critical that after acquiring all these many companies with applications, yeah, they had to make sure that they all have the same look and feel that's exactly. So that's it mainly because otherwise you go to a company, they're using InforEAM and the other person's using this system or application, they wouldn't even tell if they're from the same company. Yeah, right. So we have an in house
department where the actual job is to unify the platforms. See, I love that heavy because oh, if I had the if I was king of Infor, I'd probably screw it up and it'll be orange over here. Then the other lapper probably green and it would look. I it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work, then. And there's a there's a a look that. Yes. Is
it's not threatening? And I've been a part of other systems long ago, by the way. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Long ago. Yeah. And they were awful. Yeah, it's made it quite, quite easy for the eyes.
And you know, what's interesting, because you have Infor OS. And I remember long ago, taking off my history hat here is
the biggest challenge was always like, you walk into a client and say, so what about your legacy systems? What's important? What's not what, what do you do if you have that conversation? And there's always the time when somebody says, that's the most important legacy system? I'm never getting rid of it. And it might have been a dog on Excel spreadsheet, who knows right? There, you got to try to figure out an interface between the Excel spreadsheet and your enterprise system by system a mess. No, no, yeah, you sit there and in pain. All right, we're gonna have to wrap this up. I like it. transactional asset help. That is a powerful conversation you're looking at in for em, just through the transactional activity of your business. And let's say the legacy systems that exist today, you're able to pull out some really decent gold nuggets of Information and insights.
definitely get back to your leadership. I will nuggets of Information and
assets and insights. Good ever put it on a bumper sticker? Hey, are you on LinkedIn?
Yes, I am LinkedIn. Yes. Okay. Got a good stack card out there. And I'm gonna spell this out for you. Is Kenneth K and E th. For Lemieux? Did I say the right? That's correct. That's FLR l e m EU yet? And I'm sure there's not many out there that no, I'm the only one that you're the only one on it.
Yeah, check it out, man. I guarantee it. That's pretty
good kazillion users of LinkedIn. So
he's the only one. Is that rare?
All right. Kevin, thank you very much for joining the industrial talk podcast. Absolutely enjoyed the conversation. Now listeners.
Do not go away. Stay tuned. We're gonna wrap it up all on the other side of the break. Remember, Kenneth we're gonna wrap that up on for him. All the contact Information will be industrial talk comm Of course. Thank you, Kenneth again. Thank you very much. All right, listeners. Stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.
All right, can afford me Forlemu Oh, sorry about that. KENNETH, I'm trying very. Alright, you can tell he has some mad skills out there, reach out to him on his LinkedIn,
he would be absolutely happy to connect. Now we talked a lot about it. 4am on this particular podcast, now you have a suite of other cloud solutions within the EU and in for family. They've got the OS. That means in four OS, you can connect to all those legacy systems which I know you have, right. And then you've got also in for Coleman. That's their AI product.
tell you it's exciting times. All right. Reach out to him, you're gonna have all the Information that you need about Canada at industrial talk comm as always, I'm telling you to be bold, brave, Daring Greatly, and not just you. But I want you to find individuals that are bold, brave and daring greatly. And then you'll change the world. And you're gonna have a great time.
Everything out on industrialtalk com, have a wonderful day, be safe, and we're gonna have another interview shortly.
About the author, Scott
I am Scott MacKenzie, husband, father, and passionate industry educator. From humble beginnings as a lathing contractor and certified journeyman/lineman to an Undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Business Administration, I have applied every aspect of my education and training to lead and influence. I believe in serving and adding value wherever I am called.
