Kevin Price with Hexagon ALI

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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

Hi there, and welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining. And thank you for your continued support of a platform that celebrates you, industry professionals all around the world. Now, this is a unique conversation is because I had the honor of being able to broadcast from an event called Hexagon Live in Las Vegas. Now we're going to be featuring Kevin price you might have heard him before in the past, he's with Hexagon, where we're going to just sort of lay out the update of what really took place. And I'll tell you one thing, there's a comment, here's a comment. People are passionate. People were passionate at the event. Now two words that really resonated one innovation, mad focus on innovation and a to sustainability using that innovation using that technology to achieve those sustainability goals. Let's get cracking with the conversation. Yeah, outside of the fact that it was about a five mile long venue, it was absolutely exciting to be there, to see what is happening to to realize all of the innovation that is taking place within industry within Hexagon and how that innovation is transforming businesses and and the world as we speak. And you know what the most exciting part about it? Is that it we're still at the tip of the iceberg. This this energy is just permeating all aspects of industry from just every every every part. And it was just an exciting time. And, and the people were absolutely on fire and excited. So with that said, let's get on with the review. Let's get on with the update. Kevin price. Enjoy the conversation. All right, Kevin, welcome back to Industrial Talk. How are you doing?

02:23

I'm doing great, man. It's good to see you again.

02:26

It's good to be seen. It's good to see you. When we were at Hexagon Live was great to see you. You're much taller in person than you are on video. Just

02:33

you're supposed to say you know, taller, better looking than or a lot more developed. Come on, and don't

02:39

stop. Yeah. chiseled.

02:40

Chisel. Haven't been called chiseled a long time.

02:44

Well, yeah, take up, there you go take it chiseled, you're chiseled he was you were worn out from Hexagon life.

02:51

Oh, my goodness, was I ever I mean, those those types of events. For me, being an over the top extrovert, especially are exciting. But they're also challenging, because you see so many people, you know, you're surrounded by five to 6000 of your closest friends. And you're trying to meet with every law and you're trying to get with all the partners, the customers, individual folks that you haven't seen them in the years. And it's just difficult to pack it all through. Because there's only so much time in the day.

03:18

This was the second second Hexagon Live after COVID. Correct? That's right. What was it? What was different this year versus last year?

03:29

Oh, wow. Um, so I think I don't know officially what the numbers were. But it did feel like there was a lot more people. Yeah, at this particular event, when I looked at the sessions that I spoke in, and the ones that I participated in, you know, there were some that ended up having people fall out of the room and down the hall, simply because there will well crowd even when we had larger rooms. So it seemed like there was a lot more people. It also was the expo floor I was really impressed with because the expo floor is always exciting for me with Hexagon because there's so many different technologies and the different divisions, you can go see some of the great tools that are visualization data collection tools from Geo systems. So you'll see playability you'll see the drones, you see all the dogs running around. But there's also some really cool augmented reality and virtual reality. And the ideas that one has and how you connect those dots with the distance solutions, especially as it applies to assets is always exciting to me. And when we go visit with customers or prospects or partners that goes to that export floor to they also have their own ideas. So it's just a whole world of creativity to see.

04:38

Yeah, I gotta tell you when I was there, outside of the fact that it was it was five miles worth of rooms five and I'm not exaggerating. I I put in my steps Most definitely. And and it seemed like there was a tremendous amount of engagement, specifically from the user community. What was your feedback from the user community? From this event, I loved what you called the expert. It was I think it was called the zone. Correction, Mr. Chisel. Yeah. And it was it was and you got to see the the the innovation in action based off of the user community, what what was the feedback?

05:21

Well, what I saw the most in the user groups that I was in, like the strategic steering boards, user advisory boards, individual customer sessions, even some of the social events that we had going through, there was a lot more vertical feathering, if that's a word, a lot more of those folks that are like in nature talking to each other, and helping each other. When you look at the longevity that I've had at least 26 years of doing this, you have a lot of people that know each other, and I've been around for a couple of decades, and they're still using the system. Look at CERN, for example. They've been around since 1987. And you but if you look at CERN to they have more than just the aim right there. They're a large organization, they do a lot of different types of things. And they're going in to try and understand how other people have used the tools and how other people have identified value from those tools and outcomes from those tools. So I saw a lot of connections that were being made. And a lot of discussions of Okay, tell me what you did. It's not necessarily just a tips and tricks, conversation. But what did you think, what were you trying to go after? How did you build it through, there was a lot of folks that are really starting to connect better, because that's one opportunity where you get to make contact, you get to make networking, connections, and you get to be able to experience and when you have like folks in the room, it's kind of hard not to go deep and talking shop.

06:44

I was at the keynote event, I would have to say, the evening of day one, I think it was or whatever. Outside of the cool. I don't know what it is. But it's cool presentation stuff. A lot of movement, a lot of Dazzle, I gotta tell you, but one thing that did sort of stand out was, it seems like there's a an effort to try to take all these, this wonderful innovation and start to bring it together in a very cogent platform. Is that Is that what you're saying?

07:15

Yeah, I am seeing the different levels. So if you look at the asset lifecycle Intelligence Division, as an example, we're focusing now more in portfolios, the digital assets to digital port, folio there, and then you have things like emJ, five, accelerator kms, you have a grouping of solutions. And then you also have that on the digital project side. And those are putting together to form more of a smart digital reality. Then, I also started seeing more in terms of inter divisional connection. So the exalt solutions that are some sensor software, some integration software, some of that advanced tools, those connecting back and forth, then I saw some of the partnerships that of course, our new CEO, Apollo was talking about and working with Nvidia. As an example, there's a new world of opportunity there, those guys have a tremendous amount of of tools and capability that can really expedite what we do. And vice versa, we can be able to support them in a big way too. So the connection touchpoints, they're happening at many different levels, as you start to get through,

08:19

it seemed to me that it was still very much tip of the iceberg from a nation perspective. And it's, it's like you can you can dream about it. And but it's becoming more and more real, but you're still at the tip of the iceberg here.

08:34

Well, that and in our world, what we typically love to see is we find out what people have done. Because they do have these tools, they have ownership and they have skills, so they can actually take them and build their own configurations. They can take them and do their own connectivity options, they can build for a certain strategy for it. I mean, we always build for flexible, flexible platforms and for scalable platforms. And we do we build them for a certain reason for a certain vertical. But when we see that someone's taking it a different direction, and it's been super positive. It's great to see. So we always get surprised. We like to have our own connectivity and our own synergy. But it's always interesting, especially these kinds of events to find out what other people have done.

09:17

The one of the themes that was quite obvious, was this, this commitment to sustainability, can you sort of expand upon that?

09:26

Sure. So um, one of the projects I've been involved with is our evolution, that was a bit about the solar farm group that we had. So, Hexagon owns a solar farm in Barcelona and the entire operations all operated by Hexagon technology, and the digital assets portfolio, they ally, we have of course, the Hexagon am installed into that and building it through and, and the entire intention there is to try and develop a highly optimized, highly scalable, and highly reproducible file aren't for renewable energy. Another component there is looking at what they've done in that group around trying to understand the fields of seagrass, the effects of mapping that out and the effects of what water temperatures do, and trying to use the hex and the technology to map that out to be able to predict that to be able to fill it through. Another thing that I kept hearing to NC was customers that are now more routinely involved in their ESG reporting. And their ESG reporting has become so crucial, because the environmental impacts that one has as an organization now is coming back up again. And that's good. It was there, when we spoke started doing work in this back in 2004. And went away just a little bit now it's coming back again. And the resurgence of that really has to go into again, an asset management principle of understanding what kind of footprint your asset represents in terms of things like scope, fugitive emissions, 123, typically some other ones too, but water usage and things like that. So we're definitely very conscious of it. Because, you know, we're conscious of what happens to our world, for our future generations to come. And we think we have technology that can be able to help with that.

11:16

I think it's a good Yeah, I think you're touching on it. But a really a good segue into your enterprise asset management solution. How does that? How does that connect with all of the great innovation that is taking place within Hexagon? Can you explain it?

11:32

Sure, there's a couple different ways. There's some visualization components. Because we do have, of course, the asset registry for a customer, and the interconnectivity that those make with the design side of the house and what we have with an asset lifecycle Intelligence Group, calling the smart digital reality we can, we can view P and Id diagrams, 2d 3d images, things like that, that are brought into it. But being able to do data collection of that, with the tools that come from Geo systems, from Leica and other ones is something that we had done, when we were first acquired was actually pretty easy for us to do at the beginning. But it's starting to build it out even further. Now what we can do once we visualize that, and we have interconnectivity to it with EM based capabilities of things like the fugitive emissions or water, air, gas, electric and steam consumption, identification, we can put a visibility and so that we can make that information available for other solutions to be able to consume, View Report on and predict. So as we start to look at rejuvenating what we do, and yeah, sustainability as it applies to asset management, that then becomes commoditized, or democratized to the other organizations so they can be able to use that data to sew in time, it allows us to be able to do things like ESG reporting, in a more automated fashion, in a more real time, data element fashion, and really have it specific to what is going on in the equipment that's out there.

12:59

How does Hexagon and how does your team deal with the changes that are happening so rapidly within Hexagon and being able to say, let's say, I'm a manufacturer? I'm out here? I've got I use your platform. But then there's this whole, you know, plethora of other options that could make How do you deal with that? Or how does that communication go out? Because it just seems like if I'm out here it I don't know it? Right?

13:29

Right. It's tough. And that's part of the role that I have, as a technical product evangelist is to help evangelize some of that. We do some roadshows to help educate the field. We also work with partner events, to help educate the field, we do some marketing elements to help push it through. And some of our solutions out there also have a release cadence that we do release updates too, because they're SAS in nature. So as we add new feature functions, or we add new connectivities, or connectors to other technology, as part of the release process that we have put in, so we have a few mechanisms that are out there. But of course, you know, everyone's got their day job that they're working on, they can always take time off. So that's when we rely at some of our Salesforce to do that connection outreach or customer success managers and project managers, consultants and partners to be able to help push that out.

14:17

Speaking to partners, I was very fortunate to be able to have a number of conversations with your partners. Can you explain to the listener out there? similar sort of the feedback that was going on with the partners? Are they excited about the Hexagon? Solutions? What What's the feedback?

14:37

So I guess, um, for me, at least what I saw the most was excitement with an undertone of anxiety. And let me explain that a little excitements always good because it gets you all riled up, right? But when you have a little bit of anxiety behind it is because perhaps it gets them into an area of the business so the knowledge familiar with. And just to give you an example, as we look at Synergy, and different combining different solutions together, let's take em as an example. We have an integration of enterprise asset management tool, they're called ECOSYS. And that echoes, this tool is an enterprise project performance tool. Now, the reason why we have a synergy built in is because em can always produce a budget report called an asset investment plan. So all things being equal, here's how much money you spent the past three or four years, let's take an average of that, here's probably what's going to be, but you have to deal with, you know, the unknowns, what happens if your supplier costs go up, or labor costs go up and need to model for those different problems? Yeah, it wasn't a great tool for that. So we did integration over there with ECOSYS. And we got an out of the box touch point to them, and, and were able to be able to do that prediction, both in short term, 1224 months and even gone out longer. What this means is it gets partners into a new relationship point with their customers, with our customers. And even with projects now, does that mean that they have to bring out and take on that discipline? And it's trying to get their folks educated start to get the folks going through? answer's no, they can continue to work as they are and then supplement as they go along. Either our people or others to be able to bring it through. The question now becomes, however, is because of the the architecture because of the platform, because of the scale, you can add a lot of these capabilities at your own speed, and not affect the upgrade process. So there's a ton that's out there that the partner may or may not know of, so they get excited. But they also know that there's a lot of education, that's why we have our partner university and different types of tools to be able to get brought up to speed. So they can start to understand what kind of offerings do they want to consider. Maybe in the short, medium and long term.

16:55

The feedback that I received from your partners was excitement. And it was because the Okay, I've got the ECM platform, it's great love it note, like the back of my hands. And many of these partners have been around for a number of years. So, you know, thumbs up with that. But now, now they can approach their client base again and say, Hey, check this out. And what they can do is, is sort of pick and choose the solutions. They don't have to say, oh, my gosh, here's the big bang, and I got to know all of this stuff. No, they can just say, I know, my customer base, this is a new solution that would benefit them. And to be able to have that conversation. No, the feedback has always been very exciting. And

17:37

there were some some partners that were in the zone now that I got that name, right, that talked about reliability, centered maintenance, and different types of predictive modeling and things like that. And the idea is to be able to touch those back and the tools that we have new like the optimizer tool we call constraint optimizer. And then other tools that we have to load into the back into the system through a web service tier. I mean, there's a lot of just ideas, just simply because those vendors, those partners, our people, our pre sales people, our services, people were all together, and they were talking to each other for a while. I mean, after you know, after a while sitting there stared at each other, you want to go find out what they talk about what they do. And they definitely out of curiosity, it's just again, pointing to creativity. The Zone really does that in a big way. It gets people together.

18:24

Yeah, it was a it was a dazzling sight. You know, it was it was exciting for the eyes, because yeah, it just like, man, we're, we're here. We're Yeah, things are here.

18:38

For me, it put me into ADHD overdrive, everything that was going on, but I can do like I can see I was like, Oh, that's cool. Let me know that they could do that. Or look over there. Wow, did you see that it was we can be able to do that. Now. It's this kind of excitement, but at the same time, you can do that. I'm not familiar with that yet. I gotta get up to speed on that before I present that to my customer.

18:59

It's so difficult. You could get distracted by that shiny object, you know, easily you're absolutely right, you can

19:05

but I mean there's it opens up the portfolio and it opens up the opportunity that a partner would have or even a customer would have what they could consider. I mean what's what's interesting I keep finding out is we go out to these customers we go out to these even prospects and because of the sheer breadth of what Hexagon does I've never once gone into a customer site to see no Hexagon technology at all. There's usually something there that they have it's just do they know it how do they use it? Have they connected it they've been thinking about it so it's a lot of you bring into an education process. When you see that then they start connecting the dots and around

19:43

see I think that that's just so exciting. I I really enjoyed Hexagon Live now, with that said outside of the fact that we were walking, you know, one one day we walked no kidding on our stepper step tracker, whatever you want to call. Yeah. 13 Miles

20:02

Wow, wow. Yeah, that was it was it was a bit tough getting in between sessions though, you got to only have so much time to make it literally out of the park or conference, whatever to the other side. And then when you did that, of course, you're gonna stop by people may want to get a coffee, you may actually want to use the bathroom in between, but you don't have a lot of time to do that. So you have to go really quick and

20:24

over, get all winded. When you're

20:28

ready, by the time you get over there a little bit, give me a second.

20:31

So with that said, What do you see it going like, like, put on your future hat just because I thought this was dazzling. But I know that we are at a point where it's sort of tip of the iceberg. What do you hear on out there from a future perspective? And why is it important for people to look into Hexagon as a way of solving some of their problems?

20:50

Well, the connections, my history of doing this for 26 years, we we usually look at technology that we want to combine synergistically is a crawl Walk Run. And what we look at that as is, you know, typically you have a solution that looks like it's an applicable opportunity. So you do a point integration, or you do a point, side by side or you something and that's usually you know, you install it and you have services come out, you implement it. The second step is building it further as a connector. So a lot of that is out of the box, there's a framework, there's a starting point, maybe you have seed data, or just you have some basic structure for it more out of the box. And then of course, the Ron sage is really when he started to see it all connected, it's already part looks part of the product, because it is the platforms in terms of their technology structures are the same, you can start to build through there's drag and drop connection points, I mean, a lot of its built in, as we start to look to all the technology that's there, there's gonna be a lot more normalization like that. There's already connection points that customers have done on their own on that walk, quote, unquote, stage, and they've even developed out their own connector touch points on their own, but in time, will start to be able to learn from that will build from it. And then with the ongoing investment that Hexagon puts into platforms, such as what they're doing with the smart digital reality. Over time, it'll be even easier to be able to bring those on board quickly. So that's really promising for the technology that they had today. But as they go forward, even more technology can be brought on faster.

22:26

What I like and what I hear you saying is that there's a there's a commitment to usability simplicity, being able to connect, but then there's this major horsepower of benefits associated with the solution. So I'm bullish, they're

22:43

usability is no joke, man. I mean, if you find if you can find what I mean. And for we call it the hook and loop, so the velcro would hook and loop back together, and you would have technology with elegance that are connected together. Yeah. And they're they've done a lot of that here as well. And you're thinking about the end user are the personas, the flows that they go through. Because at the end of the day, customers want benefit, they want a quick, and with a rate of technology going as it is, they should expect it, and they will. But it's a matter of you know, getting to what those business needs are and getting to them fast. And a lot of them are some of the same old stuff, equipment, overall efficiency ratings, different types of RCM principles on the am side the connector worker experience, and some of the things that we do and J five, the build that we have out of different types of work procedures and accelerator kms, the security that we have built in to what we do with PA is global and plant state integrity tools, and on and on and on. But they all they all can start to talk more seamlessly, and they all can start to be have the same usability to them. It's it's pushing it pushing in the right direction at the same time. It's a lot more difficult than you think. But when it's done, when it gets done, it's awesome.

23:54

See, I like that. How do people get a hold of you, Kevin?

23:58

So this is my email. kevin.price@Hexagon.com

24:04

There you go, man. And has there been a date for Hexagon Live for next year? Do we know?

24:10

Not that I'm aware of yet. So keep on Well, I'm gonna definitely you know, bring the Fitbit or the step tracker next time we're going to something that you know I got more exercise. I wasn't just in a conference room all day and

24:26

then we can compare data like hey, what do you got this Fitbit Hey, check it out.

24:32

The thing is in Vegas, you never know if it's day or night or is it? Is it light? Is it raining? Yeah. You're inside all the time. And then you go into these these hotels where they have skies painted on the ceiling and you don't really know what it is

24:44

no, but no, it's a great

24:47

time. I actually enjoy these. I'm an extrovert of the heart so I enjoy it. But it's always it's always a pleasure to get to see folks like you and catch up. So get them to

24:58

one last question. If I just if I'm just dipping my toes into looking for solutions, Hexagon Live is a way of being able to learn what's available. Correct?

25:11

You bet. It's a good starting point. It's a good introduction. But being ranked bring a large glass because you'll be drinking from the firehose for a little bit. And understand some of these. There's a lot of information to take. But there's also a ton of people that are here ready, willing and able to follow up with you.

25:29

I like that. I like the collaboration. Again, always a pleasure having you on the podcast. All right, man. All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for Kevin out on Industrial Talk, reach out, put Hexagon Live on your calendar for next year. You have plenty time to plan for that event. And you will not be disappointed. I'm telling you right now you will not be disappointed. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

25:53

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

26:03

Kevin never disappoints, he always brings the information lumber and just dumps it off. And it just says, Look at this. That's Kevin price. Hexagon is the company, Hexagon Live was a can't advocate this enough. If you're interested, you don't even have to have any of the Hexagon products. But if you're interested in learning, in understanding what is happening out there, this event is for you. Innovation is happening, whether you like it or not. How do you fit into that is all up to you to learn and to collaborate, so that you can innovate to create those big business that is resilient. And I don't, I don't know of a better way of doing it than Hexagon Live. I know you have to wait a year ish, whatever it is, but it is well worth it. And you are you're going to be drinking from a firehose to quote, Kevin price. You're going to have more. Be bold, be brave dare Gately, we're going to have more coming from this conversation shortly so stay tuned.