Michael Mills with Fluke Reliability

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Fluke Reliability, Michael Mills, eMaint X5, connected reliability, cloud-based, asset management, inventory management, AI and machine learning, sustainability, skills gap, mobile app, vibration analysis, work orders, compliance.

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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

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Hey, it's the best time of year. I'm happy to be here in Austin at

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this Hey, have you taken there's a autonomous car. Waymo, have you taken it? Have you seen it? I saw it. We've taken

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it. Oh, really. How was it? It's a game changer. It went past me, and I definitely pointed out to the person next to me, like, there's no one in or no one in the front seat. No, that's what I

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saw. Yeah, it's a game changer. My son and my son's here, and we found time in the morning to go grab one. Okay, there's so much it's it's the future. Okay, it really is, man, it's exciting. I digress, all right, before we get going into the conversation about email and all of the wonderful things that are happening there, give us a little background on who Michael

02:02

is, sure Michael Mills, I'm the Technical Sales Manager here with the email team. I work with Fluke reliability. I've been around the organization about 10 years, originally, before the acquisition of fluke, but really just honed in on the software side of things, and now the different integrated systems. So as we grow, how can we tie in proof, Technica, Zima and so on into our systems to make them run a little better, right, and a little easier for the end user. That's my

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my background. I'm all I'm all giddy about the whole connected reliability effort that's taking place within Fluke reliability. I mean anything that makes it simple or or friendly, or whatever. I think you guys have got something really tell us or just just now, there's, there's eMaint, but we're in five, right? V5 x5 x5 I'm sorry, yep, doping B should have been prepared. I knew it was five. We've got that, right? Oh yeah, tell us a little bit

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about x5 Sure. X5 is currently actually the third version of the system that I've been working with the past couple years, released about three years,

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third version in the past couple of years, since I, since I started 10 years ago. Holy cow, buckle in.

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When I started that, we were in x3 we've moved x4 and now we're navigating to x5 Yeah, that was released about three years ago. It's modern technology. It's built to scale. It's taking what we have with the next four making all the improvements we always want, always wanted, around being able to deploy email across not just one site, but globally. So it has extra currencies, cultures, different time zones all built into it. So if you're trying to standardize, you can look at this system and say, Hey, we deployed this once. We can do it repeatably across the globe. So everybody's kind of benchmarking in the same way,

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if I were to, if I'm a US based company, and then I have a European based company, and then I have, I have an Asia base, and they're all we're all part of the same company. Does eMaint allow me to sort of roll that up into a sort of a an executive view?

04:12

That's exactly what the x5 system does, is it takes all of those different sites, and if you're in an individual location, you can see your data, right? So if I'm an end user, I'm probably only seeing from Florida, New Jersey, wherever I'm at, and then if you're across the globe, you'll only see your information, but there's a global view, right? So someone can go and report across the board, and you're not having to pick through all different, all different data and try to figure it out. You set up one dashboard one time, and you're off and running, so it does the hard work for you.

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Well, this, this this is sort of detailish, but does it also deal with the currency, and then makes it normal for me with with the conversion rate and all that stuff. And said, Okay, I got

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it. Yeah, it does. It pulls from different different databases, the different currencies at the time, the exchange rates. So whenever you have that loaded, it. It'll translate it for you. And it's, it's really been effective over the past couple years. As we've we've rolled it out, so we're excited to see how we can scale it again. Everyone brings in new ideas from different locations. So as we're implementing we we get that feedback of different applications, use cases and

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so on. You say, scale, isn't it? What do you mean by that?

05:18

We're constantly, you know, within Fluke reliability, adding in new technologies, Zima proof technic and so on. And so it's not just gonna be the software, it's what else can we feed into it to drive the better outcomes for the customers? And I think we've done a great job at so far. But you know how software and different systems evolve? Whatever the next acquisition is going to be, I'm sure,

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will be even more of a game changer. But the architectural, the overarching architectural vision, is to allow eMaint to be that hub and things being able to connect seamlessly. You know, where I don't have to go to different systems, right? That's, that's the vision.

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That's that, that's the vision. Then everything is going to be, basically, you main operates as an extension of these other systems. So as you're going through and building out, detecting certain failure modes and so on, this will be your historian, where you can, yes, all maintenance activities, and then report off of in a system of record exactly. And that's the general idea is, that's where the results sit, right. So that's where we've been for the past. So past while,

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yeah, now where's it going? What? What are some of the exciting things that are taking place?

06:26

Yeah, so that's it's always interesting to me, especially coming into this event, right? A couple years ago, it was all around, you know, what can we connect into EMA? What can we integrate? You know, including sensory technologies, tying the ERPs and so on. Last year was all around sustainability. This year's all around bridging that skills gap using digital options, AI, machine learning, all different types of learning technologies that are going to make me better at the point of contact with an asset. And that's really where we're heading, is being able to deploy the ability to go all the way top to bottom, supporting the end user who's at the point of contact with an asset all the way up to the top, where somebody can report globally and say, you know, here's where we're winning and here's what we need to improve. So supporting the senior reliability team members all the way down to again, new team member just came on board.

07:14

And this is cloud. It is cloud. Yeah, how do you are you transitioning your client base, from on prem to cloud, the different versions,

07:25

everything, we've been one of the first to come into the SaaS platform, all in the cloud. So we we typically get customers that are coming to us who want to go cloud based moving off of on premise. So it's really helped us to ramp things up. You know, we're not having to do reinstallations or anything like that, or maintain servers at a customer site, we have a very high powered server group that maintain them in the cloud, and then we can, we can deploy new versions and updates from there. So it's,

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yeah, I'm always, I'm always amazed that there are some companies that are still sort of reluctant to get into the

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cloud, right? It allows us to improve the system fast, you know, especially as

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we're offering updates. Yeah, see, you don't have to shut the business down and and bring out, you know, these discs and updated and shut it. It just happens magically,

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exactly. I mean, it's a little harder work than that, but, yeah, you know, I don't, I

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don't want to see how the sausage is. I just want results. I just want the machine, the system, to work, sure, and I

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think that's one of the reasons why our support team so great, is they can help from anywhere, right? That's the idea. You call in, they're able to access the system. They're able to to make changes, slight tweaks, as needed. And, you know, again, support you as you go. So it's it's made my life easy over the past 10 years. Working with the group is not having to go and remote in or go to someone's location, right?

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But, but he main has always been cloud. You've always been in the cloud.

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Always been, well, always, even

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version 3x

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three was in the cloud. X3 x3

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is sorry, sorry, I, I should know better. I didn't know that. Yeah, X Ray has been the cloud. Do you have, do you have clients that are on older legacy I

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in the cloud. Yeah, it makes sense. Tell me about Azima and the connected with connection with Zima. Where do we stand with that?

09:25

Sure. So that's actually one of the benefits of being here. I saw my colleague, Austin, the product owner of Azeema right now, was actually firing off work orders into EMaints through just a proof of concept integration. And so what we're doing is we're adding within Fluke reliability all these different groups, vibration being a key aspect of that, where Azima is bringing 40 plus years of vibration expertise and analysis, and then the results of that, the analysis saying, hey, there may be an issue here. We detected something. Go and replace the bearing, or whatever that needs to be. We'll have a work order to track materials to. Time spent, cost associated with that within emails. So we're really creating that, that extension that you're looking for, where sensory technology will say, hey, there's a problem that we think will be coming up in a certain amount of time. Let's get in front of that. And then you can use EMaint to plan schedule and make sure you have an effective

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outcome. But you want, you want it automated, yeah, yeah. You know, take away that, I hate to say it, that human intervention and allow the technology to to remove the mundane, sure, or do the mundane, not remove it from me, but do the mundane to be able to create the work order and and, and it fire out that work order with all of the the accurate information

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that's exactly it is. So what it's doing is taking away that one extra step that you have to remember, right? And so what it does is it fuses what it detected into your your extended workflow. So if you have a backlog that you're working through, or if you have a series of tasks that you need to get through, through the day, the week, the month, whatever that is, it just slides that in there so you can stick with your existing workflows and kind of like the strategy of navigating that backlog, and allow you to just not have somebody have to learn two different systems. That's the general idea. But if you want to go into Azim and see, you know, all of their analytics, if you have someone who's, you know, cat three or cat two, cat three, cat four, vibration analysts, they can see the data that they want, and again, your maintenance teams are going through and executing that work and creating a feedback. Look. It's like, here's what we did, here's what we saw. The analysis was accurate, and let's remember this for next time. So it's that knowledge that you're getting out of it. It's just such a benefit.

11:38

Does x5 have a warehouse component, like, like, inventory, real time, cannibalized pallets.

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It has spare parts. Inventory section, the system. It's an area that we've been really building on, yeah, so you have the ability to management different locations and everything like that. X5 is great. It allows you to replicate a lot of your purchasing processes that may exist in an ERP. So a lot of times, when you look at it, the next five, you have your spare parts, if your suppliers in different locations, it creates Part Three order lists. You can create a purchase order if requisitioning, right? I'm just naming different areas of the system. What it does is it allows you, if you're using a bigger system, right, if you're using an ERP or some type of resource planning software, we can integrate with that so you can either use email 100% for inventory, or we can operate as an extension of a bigger system. We'd be foolish to believe that we're the only enterprise level system that they're using within their different departments,

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yeah, but because you know it these, these jobs don't operate in a vacuum. There's always other pieces of equipment, tools that you need to get and and it would be great to be able to just say, there it is automated. Boom, here it is. Here the drawings. Here's everything that you need to be an effective technician, right? And it's all there, kitted, ready to go,

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right? And we can do all that right within the email. It's only as good as the data that gets in there. Obviously, we have an implementation team that will help to structure all this information. We make it easy for anyone to input that data right, that you have it going forward, and then obviously you want to use the tool, as opposed to, you know, have to make go back and revise. So overall, I think we've, we've really honed in on that user experience, around how e main can help with inventory, with tool tracking and those types of things, so your data is accurate. You know, you're not having to fight for records.

13:36

How do you this is I digress. How do you minimize pencil whipping.

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You well, you structure, structure your data the way you need to. And then on top of that, you there's a couple ways we go about this. I was gonna say when it comes to pencil whipping, when it comes to minimizing the you know, hey, I'm just gonna close out this work. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's all around the metrics. We do have team members that whenever you go into the audit trail and you look at the history of certain users and things like that, you can see, hey, you build in a hierarchy. You need to complete this and send it to me to review, right? Or, hey, you only have certain options that you can select from. You have to input this data right? That's how we do it required information to reinforce your business processes and not say, lose 20 work orders, because we can just close them out.

14:28

That's always the case. Where do you where do you see it going? What's that future hat look like for you?

14:33

There's there's been three, three common themes I always think about, especially when I'm dealing with our product management team that I work with heavily Naveen is one of our senior product managers, and he's been excellent along the way. There's always areas around standardization. So the ability to scale x5 like I mentioned, you can put hundreds of locations into an individual account and just have it grow, because then you're comparing everyone on the same scale different systems. Everyone rolls it up into one. Mobile is a big aspect. They've a lot of enhancements to our email mobile app over the past year or so that's really helped out with, you know, online offline capabilities, the ability to comment. There's an integration with some of our food tools, right? So, pencil whipping, right? Yeah. You can actually connect like an installation installation tester, and it will take the reading and put it right in your email mobile app. And then, other than that, again, it goes into AI, right and machine learning, I think that there's going to be a lot of inputs that come into the system and ways of querying the data to make sure that, again, the end user has the data that they need and the data that they definitely need, and not just extra information that won't help out with the final result. So I think that's kind of where we're building on, is those three, three pillars. Right now, it's

15:48

exciting. Yeah, without a doubt, I every time I come to an event here with you guys, yeah, I'm always fascinated by there's this desire to make it simple and and get greater compliance. Compliance sounds so authoritarian, however, compliance, of getting people to use the system in the way it needs to that truly adds value to their business, which is where what you what you really want. So how does somebody get a hold of you? Oh, get a hold

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of me. I'm on LinkedIn. We planned that, by the way, just FYI, yeah. Michael Mills on LinkedIn. The meantime, Are you active? I'm active now. Last time I was on here, I was not. Now I'm you gotta, you gotta, you

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