Mark Kraeling with Wabtec

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

locomotive, customers, industrial, rail, freight, train, conversation, Mark, te ch, asset, industry, horsepower, utilities, maintenance, engine, supply chain, wheels, generated, transportation, battery

00:04

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 get

00:22

all right. Once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk, you are welcome. Because you're an industry professional. This is a platform that celebrates you. Because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly. The world is changing ever so rapidly, and you are leading the way. Thank you very much for what you do. And we just love celebrating industry professionals on this platform each and every day. We have a conversation with a gentleman from a Wabtec, that's Wabtec Mark Karela is the gentleman. And we are broadcasting from IoT solutions World Congress, and you need to put that on your calendar for next year 2024 is going to be bigger, better, stronger, faster, must attend great conversation on how they are using digital transformation for their engines. Let's get cracking. Yeah, this is this was a golden moment from the past, I'm still making it through a lot of the content that had been generated. And Mark and, and everybody else had been very, very patient in these great conversations. They are timeless paper and pencil for this one. And what's interested in it is in the transportation, world in transportation, and how they're using these devices to make the locomotives safer, more insightful, and be able to perform those maintenance at the right time, given the right data. And they're just constantly pushing that envelope. It's a great conversation. So that's what's coming up. Now we have out on industrial talk, we've got a couple of great webcasts. The first one is aligning the PF curve with your logistics, your supply chain strategy. We have to we have to align it. And if you understand the PF curve, you understand that there's a lot of planning a lot of lot of activities as you begin to work through that PF curve. Aligning your supply chain strategy is critical to that success. So anyway, that's one out there. And the other one out there is the utilities, electric utility specifically, and the digitization of these these businesses, these utility companies, what does that mean? Me being an old transmission lineman, journeyman, I was a journeyman, I climbed the towers ran the crews did all of that. What does that mean? But my view of utilities is pretty linear, right? When it comes to what utilities do all I care about now, and even back then was reliably delivering power at the right cycle, making a clean meaning meaning it's not fluctuating. And it is there, no matter what. And being able to do that safely is just top of mind top of mine priority. So things are changing. Things are changing dramatically within the utility area. And you just go out to industrial talk, it's on demand. All of these are on demand. I'm not going to sit there and try to schedule something that meets with your calendar. It is just something on demand. And it was great. I mean, I really can geek out on all of this stuff. It's it's really an exciting time and I'm glad you guys are joining industrial talk for this particular journey. All right, let's get cracking Marcus's name Whap tak wa WAP te CH is the company they're massive by the way. That's a massive company doing great things. Anyway, enjoy the conversation. All right Mark.

04:25

Appreciate you saying yes that's pretty good. It's got

04:29

no complaints fantastic event is

04:31

no no it is all the people around you certainly generated a lot of excitement being here as well. So a buzz a buzz I'm because I'm a kind of a big deal. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

04:40

right here. You know, it's funny about this whole thing is over the past few years, over two years, right, develop relationships, but they've been sort of virtual, sort of a weird way of developing relationships with so for many, they're here, and then I get to meet him for the first time in person.

04:58

Which is cool. Yeah, excellent experience. That's for sure. I think we've all been drained over the last two years a bit. And you're right i, there's people that I've met and worked with. And again, same thing meeting, either for the first time or I meet him again. And it's been three years and they look a little different than they did three years ago. That's

05:12

for sure it's older and everything. All right. For the listeners out there, give us a little background Mark on who you are. Hey,

05:18

Scott, appreciate it. My name is Mark Kraeling. I'm a Solutions Architect with Wabtec, Incorporated. Wabtec is a company, fortune 500 company based in the United States, we've got 27,000 employees in over 50 countries. So if it has to do with the transportation industry, whether it's freight or transit, we've probably got a product and our plan in that space playing in that space.

05:43

You're just blowing my mind. I It's so funny, because clearly I'm not in the transportation industry, because clearly I don't. I'm looking at Wabtec and Wabtec cheese. Oh, well, no, you got some major chops out there. You are speaking at this event? What is the topic you're speaking on?

06:00

Yes, Scott. We've picked up and we're developing a lot of new communications options for our customers. And one of the things that we're really taking a very hard look at in terms of the Safety and Security provides is 5g LTE. So we'd like to think that we're on the forefront, looking at how using 5g for the transportation industrial to prove our customers benefits, you know, make things safer, make things more secure.

06:26

So give us an example of sort of your your customers, truck, air, train what our

06:35

primary primarily trained, we write trains, yes, locomotives, primarily. Okay. We're also in the mining industry to buy especially in Australia. So we've got a fairly large division there. I primarily work in the freight division of Wabtec. However, we do have a very strong transit Market here in Europe, primarily. So most of my experience and everything I'm developing is primarily for the freight industry, though I do connect with our transit folks. And freight is is over the road. Freight is hauling goods. So you can think about hauling freight from the ports and taking it across the country. Cities. Yeah, intermodal is big, obviously, grain oil, some other you know, commodity type goods as well.

07:21

So let's talk about what now what what are we talking about wireless? What are we doing with this? How does it improve, improve impact, especially when we start talking about a lot of the cyber supply chain challenges? How is this helping us?

07:37

So you're absolutely correct. So one of the things that Wabtec is working on with our customers is helping solve some of these supply chain issues that were totally, please do that. So in our customers, customers are obviously very receptive for to work with us. So think about things about the information, right? We've gone through an information age, we're now as part of this conference, coming part on the IoT, kind of the IoT revolution, right? So we're, by the way, IoT is like a miscellaneous file, and it includes everything. Yeah, you ever notice that? It's not IoT anymore. It's, it's everything. Yeah. So on a couple of papers and presentations I've done I've gone and recorded it, called the Internet of trains can talk specifically about those types of sensors. Just think about all the things that can happen on a train. And if it's not instrumented, and you don't know what's going on, then obviously, you can have delays and delays or train braking, obviously, it's going to slow down the entire network, because the train is stuck on a track. There's no more trains going through that particular area. So if we can instrument a train, whether it's a locomotive, rail cars, etc, and understand their condition and do some active condition monitoring, to know whether or not that can actually make the trip. Now we're not getting stuck so we can prevent some prevent delays. So your your, your your real time assessing the health of that asset and that asset is the engine, the train, do you go? Of course, you've

09:05

got the engine? Fine. Got it? Do you do the same thing with with whatever is connected as well? And you're saying, Okay, we've got this going on this wheel, whatever it might be. Do you do

09:17

that? Yes, we do. So Wabtec has a suite of products where we actually look easiest for a customer to implement immediately would be to install something wayside, which means install something on the side of the track. But we actually have you know, whether it's high speed cameras or sensors and actually look at things like brake shoe temperature, bearing temperature, maybe the bearings on the wheels for the railcar starting to go bad? Well, if we can catch it, then we can make sure that car gets put into a service shop to address that issue before it just breaks in the middle of the road. So we're doing a lot of things in that area. That's brilliant. That is and and I think it's so funny when I when we when I speak to people right? I forget about the that whole rail into Street and that is an asset. These are these employee engines are sophisticated. Yes, there's serious, serious stuff. Yep. Locomotive in United States, usually six axles usually weighs around two or 240 tons to generates 4400 horsepower. And the easiest way to think of it is basically a power plant on wheels because the traction motors are all electric, right? So we have a diesel engine that that generates electricity. And then you can actually have it go the wheels. And of course Wabtec is also working on the next generation locomotive, which will be electric, right battery electric. So it's called FL X Drive. And we're working with customers United States to get that launched. Soon when you say soon give us sort of a set our expectations? Well, we do have, we did have a very successful trial in California where we evaluated performance. And we have, we're looking at partnership with battery companies to kind of make sure that the batteries can last in that type of environment. We're going so far as looking at how various cooling options may work. Because if you think about 4400 horsepower, that if you if you needed all 4400 horsepower, the batteries would last about 20 to 30 minutes. So obviously using a locomotive, not at 4400 horsepower, but something less, maybe it's augmenting, maybe you have a look, maybe you have a train that has two regular diesel locomotives, but then you have an electric that you can use at various times whether it's maybe going through a very populated area, maybe the diesels can can power down and not use as much as you can use the battery. What parts of your throat. What there's lots of

11:37

cool, yeah, so let's let's talk, again, about this monitoring capability. Let's say you're monitoring an engine and engine is communicating something that's a challenge in that algorithm and that ability to be able to analyze that data. Are you applying any, any algorithm saying, okay, the failure rate is escalating, and therefore we need to pull this engine now or, you know, run it off the side of the the, put it on a spare spur or whatever, get it over there so that we don't block up? Is it? Are you doing that? Yeah, we sure are.

12:14

Excellent. You become one of our product managers traveling and help us sell it right. So I think you're right. I mean, especially with IoT, you talked about a lot of data coming in, you know, the most important thing is not just having the data, but it's actually evaluating that data and learning from the data. So one of our products is able to collect information from the locomotive. And as you said, there's a ton of sensors and a ton of different things going on. And we have algorithms that run in the cloud that can take that locomotives data and assess it. Now the most important thing for us is to provide that information to our customers, because they're the ones making up the trains, we actually give our customers a health score some locomotive so I may have 10, I may have 10 freight locomotives sitting in the yard, and we're gonna, we're gonna give them a number like that's, that's a 99 That's a great, that's a great look, motivate as you both have any problems. Whereas then we have some gradient may go down. Well, great green, yellow, and red, red means it needs to go to the shop, there's a serious problem, you know, there's something needs to be addressed. Yellow is a green beans, we've we've gone through it, we've assessed it, we think it can make make the next successful truck.

13:20

So what I do like about that, I like the fact that I'm able as a business to deploy my capital, effectively, I'm not doing just a, I can, in essence, perform maintenance when the maintenance is needed, as opposed to just do the sort of preventative cycle maintenance, where I might not need to replace that brake. But because it says it on a paper, I replaced it, and it might have more life to it. So you're able with that, with that ability to be able to determine, you know, when and where and how and all that stuff for the maintenance and deploy those dollars.

14:00

Absolutely. Certainly would be something great to have for your car at home, right? Because it's usually just a list of everything, you have to do it, you know, 18,000 miles, that's pretty fast.

14:09

No. You just sort of drive it and then you just can't look at that. I'll change the oil. Check it out. It's got this slide on. I don't know what that means. But I'll get it reboot and I'll be fine. So where do you see it? You guys are definitely leading the way on this because this is honestly the first conversation I've had about rail and managing those assets and which is very cool. If it makes sense. Are you having any let's say an education or pushback from many of these rail companies and saying, Oh, come on. This is new stuff.

14:48

I do I really want it. Whatever. Yeah, the customers we work with are actually very, I would say very advanced technically. A lot of them are working on, of course some of their own projects. Whether it be you know, drone and asset inspection and things, so they have very advanced IT departments. And the other thing you have to think about too, is because we're dealing with freight, and we're hauling around chemicals and other things, they have very strong departments in terms of security, and really keeping track of that kind of thing, not only physical security and such, like the railroad police, but also for their it, so that, you know, their data is not being exposed, and you know, their network is secure. So there's that they spend a tremendous amount of money and Wabtec is glad to partner with

15:33

you, that's a whole other conversation, it's the cyber component to all of this, because as you begin to monitor that asset and putting devices out there, theoretically, those are penetration points that could be vulnerable, if not managed properly. And, and because rail is, it's critical, you know, you will go back to the Stone Age real fast without rail. So, like a week, I know, I'm already completed, and everybody's a supply chain expert. So but so we're gonna see it increasing more and more, you're seeing decent adoption from the people who are using it. So that's good, because I know there are many other businesses or industries that are just a little, I don't know, do I need to go down this whole digital transformation journey? But rail is? There's just too much too much at stake. Yeah, no, I

16:26

agree. I think, you know, Wabtec is well positioned to help our customers, whether it's the cybersecurity aspects, but ultimately, what we're trying to do is deliver products that offer safety, security, and help improve the efficiency of the railroad. So

16:41

give me a better experience. So when I get my stuff shipped to me, it's faster and they know it sounds good, Scott.

16:47

All right, how do people get a hold of your Mark, best way to reach out to me is probably through LinkedIn. Probably the best way if you want to decide to have a conversation. Also, you can contact a horse, anybody at Wabtec if you're noticing their products and services in your country,

17:01

maybe it is man. Last name spelling is the KraelingT first name Mark, LinkedIn, but fear not, we're gonna have all his contact information out on industrial talk, once again, we are out broadcasting live from IoT solutions World Congress, Barcelona is the town. It is an excellent event, you get people like Mark who knows what they're doing and, and is really driving the future and helping solve problems. So we are going to wrap it up on the other side. So do not go away, we will be right back.

17:31

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

17:40

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. Thank you for your continued support. We're really working diligently to expand this industrial ecosystem. If you have any interest whatsoever, to be on the podcast, you got to let me know go out to industrial talk, reach out, connect, you know the routine, just go on out there and you'll be able to click and do all that stuff. Easy. It just let me know. And we'll have a conversation over zoom. And we'll just sort of see how we want to proceed forward. All right, that was Mark Wabtec. Now I have to I have a correction. It's not te CH and it's not. Don't Don't do that. It's Wabtec my mistake at the intro. So please note, that was great conversation. It's exciting stuff. All right. Put 2024 IoT on your calendar. It is a great event. I just can't I can't express that enough. All right, be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Mark change the world. We'll have another great conversation.