Pat Newberry with Aptim

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

maintenance, assets, valve, work, industrial, platform, people, pat, company, inspection, put, connection, tanks, denver, manage, system, talk, operations, facilities, cb

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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 Alright,

01:34

once again, thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk. And thank you for your continued support of a platform that is celebrating industry professionals all around the world because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly. You are collaborating, you are solving problems. You're making lives better and the world a better place. So that's why we celebrate you on this podcast. We are also on site. This is the accrual insights at at what is this? So it's a Gaylord at the Gaylord, and it is it's a big place. It's a big place. But what is great about this particular conference is the fact that I'm looking out and I'm seeing people having great conversations, solving problems, having these conversations to make their business better. So absolutely wonderful. In the hot seat. We have a gentleman by the name of Pat, that Newbery Aptimize the company. And we're going to be talking about maintenance connect and how they use that product. So let's get cracking. How are you doing?

02:37

I'm doing okay.

02:38

Having a good conference.

02:39

It has been a great conference.

02:40

How long have you been with that?

02:41

I've been with Aptim for 26 years. Yeah. Second job out of college. Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. It's I'm an oddball. I know that.

02:53

I want to take something did mark and grab your ear and look at that long term employee. Yeah, exactly.

02:59

Exact.

03:00

So where are sapling located?

03:02

We're located all over but our headquarters are in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I'm out of Denver, Colorado. I actually have not I've avoided that I avoided the corporate office.

03:16

Because we live in right outside of New Orleans in a town called Mandeville. Okay. Yeah. So, my wife was from around that area. So

03:23

yeah, we used to be Shah. Oh, yeah. So if you know Shah, that's what we used to be. I had ministry was Shaw environmental, and infrastructure is what we used to be. Yeah, well, we two companies ago so I originally was Stone and Webster. Yes. Went to Shaw.

03:40

Because whoever Yes, so

03:42

the pedigree was done in Webster right at a drop out of school. Yes. And then we transferred and get got bought by Shaw and then became a Shar E and I CB and I then bought us. Yep. And then CB and I went under and they sold our part off and back to I did it did. Yep. And then macoco briga bridge and iron is no more. I didn't know that. They were around forever. They Yeah, they've been around for it's crazy. Bad management. McDermott bought them. McDermott. Yep. And then they disappeared CB and I haven't know exactly what happened. But it was after they kind of partial us off and put us into a venture capital firm. And that's where we are. So

04:27

now we're rolling. So before we get into the conversation about what you do, give us a little background on who you are.

04:35

Well, I'm originally training as a mechanical engineer, grew up in Arkansas, went to grad school to go skiing and got an environmental engineering degree. Started with the Department of Energy after that, I did that for a couple years right out of school and ended up in Denver and been doing all sorts of stuff with all the companies that I've been with in the same seat.

04:58

Ah, Yeah, that's that's pretty good. Okay, so for the listeners also out there, probably have not

05:05

heard of APA. Yeah, probably, if not, we're kind of about what that company is. Yeah. So Aptim largely government consulting. What I do specifically is we work with federal fuels. So fuel systems on we build them, we construct them, we repair them. My job is to do all the maintenance for select locations. But after most of those coastal restoration, they do emergency response, disaster recovery. They were huge in Katrina. So hurricanes come through, we provide trailers, manage things for FEMA. We do laboratory management, environmental cleanup, nuclear decommissioning of ships, all sorts of things. It is a conglomeration of some really interesting, folks. Yeah.

05:50

How many people?

05:52

I think we're in the 3000 range.

05:54

That's yeah, you're doing all that with 3000?

05:57

I think. And lots of good relationships.

06:02

That's pretty cool. It's

06:04

pretty amazing.

06:05

So we've got maintenance connection. We, you are, what's your title?

06:13

I'm a program manager for our recurring maintenance. Recurring maintenance. Yeah. So the maintenance for our fuel system. So the military has standard procedures on how they like their pipes kept and coded and maintained and pumps tested. And so we manage that For 70 installations in Pacific 7070 different military installations in the Pacific. In the Pacific, mostly in Japan, we do all of Japan. We do Korea. Guam, Wake Island. We have a couple in Seattle, some in Alabama, Mississippi area, those are easy. Those are easy ones.

06:52

But the ones Yeah, yes. Yes. Pacific? Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

06:56

It's it's pretty interesting stuff. What we do, everybody's like, Oh, we do that. And we're the only group that really does kind of international stuff for our company, which makes us kind of hard to deal with sometimes.

07:09

Make it hard to because we're International.

07:10

So we have to travel and the flights and security is most of the rest of the company is

07:15

just us. Do you have a team in the Pacific? Yep.

07:20

We have people that are at the bases. My engineers at a Denver will fly over and be in the field for two or three weeks at a time and they'll work there. We have a gentleman that's permanently stationed in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. I haven't heard that name in a long time. Yeah. So we have a guy there. And we do all the maintenance for them as well.

07:38

So do you do you travel?

07:41

i less than I used to? But yeah, yes. I've been to all the places in Japan. I used to go once every three months. It was a wild ride. It is.

07:50

That is a guy that's a grind. Yes. Look at you. You're here to say I survived. Yeah. So with the fact that you have 70 facilities, right? Are they all on maintenance connection?

08:05

They all are on maintenance connection. So we have about 97,000 assets that we manage so pipes, pumps, tanks? Yeah. Yeah. It's been quite a Archer was trained to get it switched from our old system, get everything in and the assets updated, where we can use it and get our people trained. But it's, it's well worth it. We've We've really enjoyed it.

08:30

So are the facilities, there's some commonality with the facility. So you're able to say, hey, here's a pump here, there's a pump there, you can see how this pump is performing, be able to sort of triangulate some sort of Maintenance Solution around that. Yeah, yeah.

08:46

And the most of the facilities are built relatively the same regionally. So Japanese facilities are a little different than other places, but it's essentially a big tank, all the tanks have the same type of valving. And structure, there may be three entrance or four different pipe entrances to those. So they're kind of configured the same way. But a big isolation valve for the tank is maintained the same in Japan as it is in Alabama. So the work is the same, it's just a full summer, some have floating roofs, some don't. But the maintenance is the same if it's a floating roof in Seattle, or wherever we do the same stuff to them. And so it's maintenance connection makes it really easy for us to take all that put it in a stack, and be able to do things repetitively and do it over and over and make sure everybody has the same stuff in front of them.

09:34

The How long have you been on maintenance Connect?

09:37

We've been working with maintenance connection for the last two years, kind of coming up on our two years, roughly, but first year was mostly transfer of all of our Yeah, how

09:47

long did it take for that? Um,

09:49

it took us four or five months to get that going. And now our office staff so the office staff uses the, the, I guess the MRO piece, the maintenance piece that's on on the Desktop, we're just now getting the mobile capacity because like you said, like I was saying it was in Diego. There's no cell service of any of any consistency there. So we've been really involved with the Kinetic Development to make sure that it's going to work for our guys, because if it doesn't,

10:19

did you have any pushback? I mean, these these assets have been around for many years. Yep. So there was a number of years that were just, this is what we do. This is how we do it. This is how we maintain our assets. No, you can't tell me how I did this. And so on and so forth,

10:37

we get some of that. But most of that push is actually coming from the funding agent through the government. So the Defense Logistics Agency is the funding source for all of this. And they're the ones that say, no, these guys are going to do it. And so they have to deal with the service member that is out there doing the operations. And they've done a actually believe or not a pretty decent job of splitting that line and going, okay, these things are the stuff we're going to have contractors come in and do. This is what you're going to do. Now granted, individuals are individuals, but for the most part, the government organization has said, No, this is how we're going to do this. So we have this responsibility. These groups have that responsibility. So it's really been interesting in a training sense from Eric perspective, because we're under contract. So we know what we're supposed to do. The operating guys on the base are like, no, no, I've always done this, just like you said, we're like, Okay, well, let's sit down and figure out how can we all get this done, because everybody wants to make sure that the plane flies and doesn't fall out of the sky. That's what I tell my young engineers all the time.

11:38

Take us through the the, the the asset base, the you've got the tanks, you've got the piping, you've got the ship got the valves, you've got everything that's associated with it, how far into that whole model? Or is that just what you?

11:57

Well we go through and like when we went to new contract, we have a new site that we haven't been at, we usually send a team of four to five, depending on how large it is to do a full inventory. And they go out for two or three weeks at a time with iPads. And they're counting valves. And they're measuring what the makes and the models are. And we have a relatively unique set of about 150 classifications, which is determined maintenance connection that we count, so we'll kind of fire protection system that supports the tanks that the fueling system, but we won't count every valve will just say that's the fire protection, because that's all we have, we just have to make sure it's painted, make sure it works. But when I look at the valving system, I'm talking about a two inch valve and then the next valve and so I'll count very detailed if it holds fuel. So we call it our wetted surface approach. And so that inventory is really kind of our base point. And if we don't get it right, all of our maintenance down the road doesn't work. And maintenance connection does all of that for us, we come out to do a quarterly event and do quarterly inspections, we just have maintenance connection, where the assets generate the work orders, and I give a big stack to my guys in the field through their iPads.

13:14

There had been an evaluation of a platform, there's there's their appointments,

13:19

why maintenance Connecticut, um, the biggest seller was it was nimble. They were working on an offline mobile app when we first purchased it a couple years ago, which is kinetic. And we've been working with them very closely to make sure it's working and what we need, and it's going to meet all our expectations. When we originally started doing this maintenance jobs back in 2012, when we our very first contract when we didn't know what we were doing our IT group and our software folks said let's go use maximum. And we did we put the assets in maximum. But I couldn't use it. I couldn't make it work. It was too I use the word heavy for what we were doing. It was just too big, I think and I couldn't manipulate it and do my reporting and be very quick with reports that the government would ask me for it. So we use that for a while I figured out that was not going to do and I had to move to something. So while we're all at home and COVID we took all the data out and put it in SharePoint and kind of hang on to it and got a little inspection, a little inspection program called PVD that we've used, and it's been very successful, but it's just inspections. And so it makes it hard to manage all of the repairs and the costing and lifecycle of what we do. So he said okay, we got to find something and we started shopping and we were looking, we looked at Procore we looked at a couple other things that were more project management driven, blue folder, we looked at some other stuff, but maintenance connection was the thing when they put it out there it does everything that we need. So,

14:54

again,

14:56

nimble, nimble and moves quickly. Yeah,

14:58

you don't have Have the friction if you can, sort of that intuitive capability of like, okay, I get it I Yeah, you know, yeah.

15:07

And we could manipulate it was it was flexible enough that we could manipulate it away from just a standard Facilities Maintenance Program, which is what it was designed for. And we have talked to guys, that's one of the been the great things about the conference. I've talked to some of the people that are truly facilities maintenance guys. And they use it and it seems very simple. And it's like a, like an old tennis shoe, it fits well, I've had to take that shoe and break it in and twist it and paint it and make it look a little different than what it does normally. But it wasn't that hard. I just had to think about it a little harder at the beginning. And then once we got to go in it's everybody's very happy with it. My team loves it.

15:45

With that said, you've had this journey into sort of how to a solution, a platform for managing your assets. What were the benefits associated with, with that common platform over the benefits some

16:03

of the benefits that we've my engineering staff, because our engineers do all the heavy lifting for us. And so they can see the data on the asset quickly, we can be consistent in common whereas In Maximo they couldn't see it, because it's too heavy, they couldn't find the thing. And I have photos and documents for that asset, they can see what's wrong. So when the, you know, the airman calls my service order engineer and says, Hey, my valve is broken, he can go, where is it? Can you give me a number? If you've stamped it, some of our valves have stamps on it as the standard? Can you give me that number or give me your number that they call it, they can pull it up in the system, they see a picture, maybe multiple pictures, all the work orders that have ever been done on that every inspection, they can see it like instantaneously while the guys on the phone and go, Oh, okay, now I know what's wrong. Now I can give you a solution. And I can make this work. And I can give you a service order and we can get this thing fixed.

16:59

Where do you see it going?

17:02

Our next big push for us is to get our 3d scanning, we do a 3d scanning. And we want to get those things connected. So that not only can you see it by picture by picture, he can go to our 3d scan. And I can see it. Think of Oh, that's my bow. Now I can see it not only is it just my valve, but now it's at height, or it's in a box or I can't really get it in there because it's a 500 pound valve and I got to lift a crane into the containment to lift the valve out. And yeah, they can do all that without having to, they just know what it looks like and not have to go there. And all my travels goes down. So I don't have to send them, ship them and fly them everywhere all the time.

17:44

Exciting stuff are awesome.

17:48

That compensates you do some interesting, a lot of different stuff than what they did here.

17:52

How do people get a hold of that

17:55

can give me a email george.newberry@abdom.com or cell phone is our telephone 303? I am but I don't use it that much. But I am out there. Okay, email to this email is the best. You're

18:11

wonderful. Thank you very much. All right, listeners. We're going to have all the contact information for Pat aka George, out on Industrial Talk. So if you're not you'll be able to contact him with no problemo. All right. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Thank you very much for joining. We

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will be right back. You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

18:39

That was a meaty conversation, Pat delivered, that I enjoyed the fact that it was maintenance and asset management, inaction real on the ground maintenance, and reliability and asset management right there dealing with fuel systems all around the world. Very cool. Re listen to that one. That's really good. All right, we're building a platform as I continue to say all the time. This platform is dedicated to amplifying your voice, your industrial voice. It is necessary. We need you to succeed. Reach out to me go out to Industrial Talk, click Let's collaborate. Let's talk let's have a conversation. Because it's important that we continue to educate, we can elaborate and of course, we continue to innovate, as you can tell by Pat, there's a lot of innovation going on out there. And you know what causes some great, I guess concern is the confusion. Let's let's just demystify. People will be brave. They're greatly hanging out with Pat changed the world. We're going to have another great conversation coming from