Paraic O’Lochlainn with Fluke Reliability

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

customers, deployed, solution, reliability, work, talk, O’Lochlainn, built, industry, fluke, sites, great, Xcelerate, solving, technology, year, industrial, email, kpi, conversation

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 get

00:21

her I once again, thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk and thank you for your continued support of a platform that is dedicated to industrial professionals all around the world. Yes, you are bold, brave, you dare greatly you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems each and every day. That is why you make this world a better place. You unsung hero of industry. That's you. Thank you for what you do. We are here, Fluke Reliability, Xcelerate 2024 user conference in Orlando right now. And again, it's a collection of problem solvers. They're talking about solutions each just I'm looking down the hallway and I just see people engage and have any great conversations on anything that's associated with Fluke Reliability. And I'll tell you right now, just FYI. If you're in the world of asset management, maintenance and reliability and you want to go to a good event come to Xcelerate in 2025 You will not be disappointed in the hot seat. It's in script but don't don't. The poor track. Well, what's the last name?, O’Lochlainn, O’Lochlainn. Yeah, there you go. He's in the hot seat. Sounds great. Let's get cracking. Yeah. That's why I always want business cards. And it doesn't guarantee that I'm gonna pronounce your name properly. Yes, freaking awesome. Is it a good meeting for you?

01:45

It is incredible conference. Yeah, it's been really good. I think it's a combination of, it's always great to get to see people at different stages on their journey, whether it be an individual journey of solving a specific reliability challenge within their organization, or they're deploying the whole portfolio that we offer. It's really interesting seeing customers meet other customers at different stage. That's true, and also how they can just the organic conversations are incredible. We had Yeah, you know. And the way the team have set up the communications, the the app here, we just had a customer come over to us there, who's got a list of seven other customers they identified in the app, who believe operate in an adjacent industry, but likely have experienced challenges that they've challenged that they've had themselves. And they're asking for intros, which is the reason this exists, right? It's, our customers are very passionate about our solutions. And it's this kind of Lightning in a Bottle effect that we get every single year.

02:58

It's a good event. I'm not gonna lie, it is a good event. It's all wrapped around good food, good conversation, and, and the venue is not that bad either.

03:09

And if you're from Ireland, like I am, the weather is also a significant change from what we're used to as hot. It is hot well, with our Iris complexion, we get sunburned inside. So it's nice to come over for a few days.

03:23

Scottish complexion, and cancer is in my family. That's all about it. Yeah. All right. Before we get into that conversation, or at least give us a Paraic

03:43

yeah, there you go. Just correct me if I'm wrong. And give us a little background on who you are, where you come from?

03:51

Yeah. I, the Vice President for international sales, for Fluke Reliability, mainly responsible for our software solutions outside of the Americas, as well as our total connected reliability portfolio for Northern Europe. So my background is in enterprise software. And I joined a tiny little startup called Ebates. In 2014, yeah, been around for a while this space, these wrinkles aren't there for nothing. Yeah. And but I, I started off in this small little startup in Dublin. And it was mainly, you know, to facilitate some international customers from our from our US entity. And then, over the last six or seven years, we experienced significant growth, we were acquired by fluke, we created this end to end solution that email is kind of like the heartbeat of our Connected reliability solution. And it's been a really interesting evolution of the customer problems that we solve. When I when I started I remember my first ever email sale was is a and it's still a customer today was a tiny little theater who purchased e made in in Edinburgh and Scotland. And when I look at, you know, we have customers today who are deploying email as an enterprise solution across at sites. And so seeing that journey, especially since we launched our x five solution is inspiring. And so I think we've seen the main to evolve from, and it's probably more of a an industry trend, the CMMS slash ein slash CFM. Why whatever terminologies? Yes, it's evolved from being a plant level solution to a group wide deployed solution. And we it's incredible to see some of the stakeholders here who are not just solving plant level problems with the maintenance management software, but they're there they're solving organizational issues, by deploying the standard work management process helps them get better margins, see what's going on on a daily basis across all of their sites?

06:07

Is it user friendly? Yeah, yeah, I

06:09

think it's because with any piece of software today, we have amazing technology on our smartphones, yeah, we can get the information that we need in two clicks. So we have to demand the same standards of ourselves. We have technicians who are performing mission critical work on a site level, they need to be able to do it safely, effectively, and quickly. And we have executives who need to be able to see critical KPIs that determine the success of their business. And in order for that to be effective, and to make sure that each person who's part of the the EM flow, it has to be easy to use, they have to get the data that they need in to click Service. And that's a testament to a lot of our development team, who built an amazing product. And our customers who've helped guide us along the way.

07:05

Yeah, any more. I always, there was a time when even one click would be, you know, just too much. Yeah. Like, that's, that's how we've evolved. And I think you're right, it's, it's because it's a factor of our smartphones. And how

07:22

user like fits is grown up, top it with my thumb. That's

07:25

exactly correct. There it is. Yeah, yeah. That's so take us through the there's there's scuttlebutt, there's talk about x four go into x five, and all of the things that are taking place with that transition. Why is it important for somebody that's on the export going to an x five?

07:45

I think, you know, it's it's a large question. I think it probably depends on what part of the journey the customer is on. Both the x four and the x five solutions are highly effective pieces of technology, have very high net promoter scores with our customers. x four is obviously for a lot of our customers, it's what they fell in love with. And I think, as software's normally have a natural progression, it allows us to deploy more modern technology to delight our customers even more, which is where we've landed with the x five solution, we've set up a migration path that allows customers to follow the speed that they want to go. And so we have some customers who see some capability with an x five that they love, we can provide an Xcelerated migration path for those customers, for customers who maybe have to go through a change management process, we can support them through that process, but maybe their migration path will be a little bit longer. I think, based on the sentiment that I've seen at the event here, it's highly likely we're going to have a lot of customers ringing up their customer success manager on Monday, and maybe ask about, you know, what's my migration path to x five look like? I think x five is a really powerful solution, especially if you are in multislice, multi language, multi currency organization, and you want to be able to have a standardized, standardized process deployed globally, but then have a single pane of glass for that global reporting on one of our customers had a great race today. His as he called them his desert island KPIs. Yeah, yeah. So what are my five core KPIs that are relevant for me at a global level, but I want my plant information. So my users who are operating on the site level, they can focus on what's critical to them, but every piece of work that they do will filter up to a global reporting dashboard, so I can get my desert island KPIs. And so for our customers who are really looking at deploying that standard process x five is an amazing solution. And it's can configurability is unmatched by any other solution in the industry. And I think we've designed it to be configurable, scalable, but also relatively simple to deploy, which decreases the time to value for our customers.

10:15

It's not 18 months, no, no,

10:17

and it's this big timeline, I think a lot of our customers would have maybe deployed an ERP, or they will have deployed a solution with a third party operating on behalf of, you know, one of the more traditional big box software providers, we can provide an agility with our direct to customer market. And you may have spoken to Bill Green or some of our implementation, not yet, but that was last year, who built an amazing onboarding program for our customers. So we can see customers guess, you know, a direct impact on deploying the solution. And one of our Xcelerated project management supported deployment plans, in a matter of months, which is relatively unheard of it is. But the speed of the project is the is based on the speed of the team, some projects take a little bit longer. For us, it's really about getting a golden master. Right? So what's the template for success, and then scaling it out over a number of sites, we have, you know, some of our customers, we have a an FF FMCG, slash chemicals solution provider globally, who went who in their first 12 months, they deployed one size, and then in the next 18 months, they deployed 69 sites. So getting the right ones, then you're building your template and then copying the golden master.

11:41

How long is the x five been sort of in the works, because all of a sudden, it's like, it had to be strategically thought of, not a year, multiple years,

11:52

I think we were developing as for I think our team in in Dublin, as well as some of our international software development team have been building the solution that is x five, for a few years and and our Xcelerate customers will have heard us talking about it. But I think we evolve the solution based on the customer needs that we saw. So our time to market maybe was a little bit longer. I think we had our first customers, beta testing the x five software in 2019. Oh, wow. And but those early adopters of customers are now rolled out across 7080 90 sites. And so we had some great partners earlier on. And some of them were x for customers who took a jump and moved up to the more expanded solution. It's, and it's great when you know, some of these customers are here today, we get to meet them every year, you get to see them on the next stage of their journey. And, and obviously, they're happy with the solution because they deploy it to more sites, some of the move companies, and then bring him into their new companies as well, which is the best rubber stamp that you can see, what

13:09

is the what's the major difference between an X 5x Four just in generally speaking, just the major difference,

13:20

I think x five the functionality at a base level is work order management, inventory management, right, the beating heart of your your work execution in a plant. I think x five is designed to fulfill a more international multi site, multi an enterprise solution. And I think there is just you've also got the benefit of technology. Like we all know, Moore's law about technology getting faster, smaller, quicker, every couple of years. So the infrastructure, which we're able to build expired on means that the technology available today versus the technology available will be built x four allows us to make a more responsive, more scalable solution. And then there's, you know, quality of life stuff. You can do really cool stuff with a drag and drop scheduler, you've got amazing workflow, a workflow Manager, you can see the really rich reports and dashboards that can customers could get because we have access to build on that technology.

14:25

How do you take AAzima? How do you How are you integrating that into your platform, your email platform?

14:35

So you have the luxury of speaking to the stupidest person at the conference in myself today? With regards to have more

14:43

more knowledge than you? Oh,

14:45

there is there is there is no I have good knowledge of Azima. But in terms of technical integrations, but what I will I work very closely with the Azima team. Yeah, we have a lot of our E main customers who are going to be deploying their Azima pilots in the coming week. So I think where Azima is really exciting is for event customers is, we know, there is a skills gap. Yeah, we know the criticality of getting ahead of failures on our critical equipment. Our Azima solution allows us to deliver work to technicians, I'm speaking from an event. Yeah, perspective, yeah. It allows us to identify issues, remove the noise from vibration data. So we're only sending the alarms that matter. Yeah. And from a work execution perspective, we can then deliver that work in email to the customer. And why I, why I love email as part of the connected reliability solution is, every single product that we our customers use is part of a work process, email, and then is the capability to bring that work process throughout your organization. And, and I think from an email perspective, you have whether it's wired or wireless sensors, you have the capability without remote expertise, to send an instruction to a technician to do a specific job to ensure that one of your critical assets is stays up and running. Email is the vehicle that delivers the message is Ema is the solution that helps identify where the problem is and what you need to do.

16:29

That's a lot of cool stuff. That's an exciting time, isn't it? Yeah. It's,

16:34

it's, you know, every year we come in, there's, it's amazing when you see that you've taken another half step forward. And, you know, sometimes it's baby steps, but this year, it's been leaps and it's incredibly exciting. It's

16:46

going fast. That's a whole nother conversation, just technology in general. Just industry in general. Yeah. I always say that you just better keep educating. Just because it's, it's happening so fast. And you're just gonna get left behind. And I don't want that. I don't want anybody to be left behind. I want everybody to be successful. How did they get a hold of you? Catch

17:05

me on LinkedIn, Paraic O’Lochlainn on LinkedIn. I have the luxury of having a very unique name. Yeah. So Google, even if you make a habit of spelling my name, you'll find me online. Yeah,

17:17

I'll just get the first name for. Excellent job. All right. I'm gonna have all the contact information for parkour industry, old talk, Fluke Reliability. This is Xcelerate 2024. We are in Orlando, Florida. It is great. As you can tell by the buzz in the background, people are happening walking around and having conversations. It was a great event. Make sure that you put this on your calendar for next year. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

17:48

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

17:59

Check about that for a name. O’Lochlainn, I just he was just such a delight. Absolutely wonderful things going on with that EMaint platform. The reality is, is that if you're in the world of manufacturing or any industry, you need to make sure that you're managing and tracking your assets accordingly. Right. It just makes sense. And it makes sense to have a platform that is user friendly, easily approached, you know, to get the information that you need to make those strategic decisions on your operations. Right there. We're gonna have all the contact information for Barack out in Industrial Talk, as we always do. All right. Again, we are building a platform, a platform for industrial professionals such as yourself. You just go out to Industrial Talk, you'll see all the content you see, it's rich with with insights, but reach out to me tell your story. It's easy peasy. I lo hope to hope to talk to you soon. All right, be bold, be brave, daring, greatly hanging out with Paraic, you'll change the world. We're going to have another great conversation short