Peter Morrow with Total Resource Management

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, asset management, reliability, maintenance, SMRP 33, Peter Morrow, TRM, Maximo, Hexagon, predictive maintenance, AI, digital transformation, EAM systems, SAP, private equity.

00:03

Scott,

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 go. All

00:22

right, once again, welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining, and your continued support of this platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you are solving problems each and every day. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk. And, as you can tell by the buzz buzz in the background, we are here, SMRP 33 This is the 33rd annual event. It is in Fort Worth, yeah, Fort Worth, that's where we are, right?

00:53

So we're somewhere in Texas,

00:54

yeah, yeah, where it's the other other town next to Dallas, and it is, it's a collection of great problem solvers. If you're in the world of asset management, reliability, maintenance, or anything in between, this is the event for you. We have in the hot seat Peter Morrow, the company is TRM, and we're going to be talking about, yeah, reliability, asset management, and all the other stuff. Let's get cracking. Hey, how you doing?

01:23

I'm good, Scott. How you doing?

01:25

Yeah, this was such a quick.. it's like I wandered on over. I said, "Hey, Lou, we gotta talk, and you said, "Okay. And you couldn't find time, and so we decided to do it. Now

01:36

you got a good flow.

01:37

Yeah,

01:38

I hope I can keep up.

01:39

Oh, it's. I've done a couple of these and I geek out on all of them, so anyway. Hey, before we get in the conversation, give us a little background on who Peter

01:49

is. Yes, sure, no problem, Scott. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at TRM

01:54

CR. Oh, I got that.

01:57

Yeah, it's sales and marketing, not.

01:59

yeah,

01:59

not the money

02:01

I got,

02:02

not, not the CFO, but still the revenue. Yeah, that's what counts.

02:08

Yeah, absolutely. I agree. So, how long you been with them?

02:12

About 15 years.

02:13

No way, really.

02:14

Yeah.

02:15

Well, you start out of high school or

02:17

something. So, I started out in sales,

02:19

yeah,

02:20

and then got into sales management, and then we got bought by a private equity firm called 424 last year, and since then we've been on a little bit of a ride. It's been really exciting.

02:35

Yeah, what I've got to have to go to, and you, you pull me back if you're saying, hey Scott, that's a little too personal, because I've been coming to SMRP for many years, you've been a staple, right? And so, why, why did you go down that private equity? What was, what was the reason behind that,

03:01

the number one thing is that asset management is a discipline that big companies care about.

03:10

That's an interesting,

03:12

and it's hard to be a niche player if you're an expert in this domain. You have to be able to solve the biggest, most complex problems, and it's hard to be kind of known as a small business who specializes in Maximo, which is what TRM history has been about.

03:35

Didn't know that, didn't know that at all.

03:37

So, with with the PE investment, what that's done for us is to be able to expand the scope of what we do and grow into other areas through acquisition, so that's what brought us into the maintenance and reliability business. We acquired Idcon a couple years ago, we acquired a couple more Maximo organizations. We acquired a hexagon company. Are in our ambition is to be software agnostic, you know, not purely agnostic in that we will specialize in the leading EAM systems, but we don't want to have a perception of being biased for just Maximo, just hexagon. We want to be recognized for our strengths across the spectrum of different technology products.

04:33

So, are you deploying, or do you deploy systems?

04:36

Oh, yeah.

04:36

So, are you deploying Ali Hexagon, Ali?

04:39

Yeah.

04:40

Do you know that they're going to be octave,

04:43

it's gonna be hard.

04:46

Just want to make sure

04:48

off the tongue like hexagon or in four.

04:51

I just want to make sure that you're all up to speed down on your notebook, because I was at hexagon live. And I was doing some broadcasting there, and my daughter works for Hexagon, and that's when it was announced, like it's like, wow, guys are active now. What does that mean? Where are you going? What's that all about? All right, that's pretty cool. And so, but you also deployed Maximo.

05:17

We deploy Maximo.

05:18

Are there any other sort of enterprise asset management type solutions, you guys outside of Hexagon Maximo, what else

05:26

we hexagon and Maximo, number one and two, Aspen Tech on predictive maintenance, they do, they have a product called Mt. We specialize in that, we specialize in another product called Fidelis,

05:40

I don't know these systems

05:43

from a predictive maintenance standpoint. Mtel has been a leader for a decade.

05:51

How have they always been collecting? Because the predictive

05:55

OT, it's all the OT, it's kind of a whole different side of the ecosystem.

06:01

Interesting, so how does let's go. How does the, the, you got the Ali, you got you got Maximo, and they come to the table and they say that we do all of that, but then you just popped out a couple of systems and they do more. Are those systems connected to these other sort of massive enterprise systems.

06:25

It's all connected. Yes, the problem is the organizations are not connected. You know, you got these rifts that exist,

06:35

yeah,

06:35

that everybody has their system experts if you're on the OT side,

06:42

yeah,

06:42

you got your consulting experts. If you're on the business side, you got your EAM experts. If you're embracing AMP

06:51

management, yeah,

06:55

a lot of times it's the ERP, and then nothing else.

06:59

Yeah,

07:00

so we do have an SAP practice, also.

07:03

Yeah, yeah,

07:05

SAP business is a whole different animal, but it's not. It's we love EAM, and having an EAM as a standalone system, we believe is the best way to go.

07:20

You brought up a good point, I, you know, you come to the events like this, and you've got all these CMS. Now, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, however, it's hard for me to differentiate some of these systems. Like, what do you do? Well, we track assets, yeah. Well, they do too, and they do too. And what's what's that secret sauce? What makes you know your organization take these platforms and make them excel, make them deliver?

07:55

If you look at the dominant EAM players, you got IBM Maximo, you got Hexagon one and two as a standalone EAM, you got you got other great EAMs. What's a third, maybe, maybe Asset Suite from Hitachi? Maybe,

08:17

yeah, yeah,

08:18

it's not under ERP. You got IFS, they're big, ifs is like disrupting the market in an interesting way, but they're also got an ERP, so that's that's what makes them more like SAP and Oracle than an IBM or an Octave hexagon,

08:41

yeah. There you go. All right, but no, that's that's interesting.

08:44

But there's dynamics there that I think drive the market.

08:48

So,

08:49

how do different directions

08:50

then? How do you, your organization play in that that world?

08:55

Our expertise is asset management end to end, and so what we care about is asset management best practices, and making the technology align with the best practice, regardless of what you're using. Now, most use, you know, the dominant systems who have the biggest market share, you know, the maximum and the ERPs, but our philosophy is uniform, regardless of what system you implement. The foundation is what we care about first. Making the system work is super important, believe me, it's super important. But that's what's missing.

09:37

Do you and your organization go into existing technology stacks. These, hi, we're a company. We already have Maximo deployed. Where I don't think we're getting the most out of it. Or the do you go in and just say great, we'll help you get to that point. Of leveraging this tool to optimize your business.

10:05

I mean, that's the goal,

10:07

like

10:08

100% of the time,

10:10

it's always just like brownfield type of

10:13

technology. Invariably, we encounter 90% of our customers who are frustrated that they haven't gotten the value they were promised from the EAM system? It's upsetting.

10:26

It is

10:27

very upsetting, but it's also one of those things that happens in ways that many people in the organization don't see. You have to have a transactional system measuring everything, tracking everything, and being able to aggregate it up, and that's more from the corporate finance and accounting side, where they get better visibility, but everyone bought it in the first place to reduce costs, reduce inventory, save money, reduce headcount, make it more efficient, and it's, it's questionable, but the world has changed so much over the course of their experience too, that you can't freeze time,

11:14

it's a common tale,

11:16

super frustrating,

11:18

it is, and, and it's so funny, I've been in, I've been in the business for a number of years, and I long ago I deployed a product called Indus Passport, and it was, and we had to connect it to Peoplesoft, which turned out to be Oracle after a while, but it was Peoplesoft at the time, and they were, that was the ERP, and everybody, and I mean everybody, nobody came in and said, "God, this is just absolutely wonderful swimming. No, it was always nobody liked it. It was like being shoving something down somebody's throat, and technology, the solution. Now you're going to do it this way, you're going to do work this way, I'm glad, especially today, that systems are a far more configurable and nimble and connectable, right. How, where, where does, where do you see your organization going, given given all of the incredible technology that's taking place in this world? Like, what put that future hat on,

12:22

I think. I think the AI is fascinating.

12:28

Yeah,

12:28

what it's going to do to our industry. I don't think it's going to disrupt the way we work from the maintenance and reliability perspective for a couple years. The biggest problem is foundational data. The biggest problem is lack of standards and process. So, where I think what's going to happen with our business is helping companies organize and establish those foundations, so that they can take advantage of what the force multipliers can be with advanced analytics and AI, it's happening, but failure prediction is not going to be a reality for the entire plan.

13:16

Yeah,

13:17

you know, for we've done vibration

13:20

forever,

13:21

forever,

13:21

forever. It, yeah, it's that's a yeah. How,

13:25

how connected is it with your enterprise systems? It's actually not very connected, but it should be establishing a foundational layer of doing all your vibration and bringing it into an enterprise system that can reveal amazing insights.

13:42

It's, it's just how you do it. It's always great to say, yeah, I get it, I understand it, it's powerful, but how,

13:52

how you do it in, in the obstacles in doing that is the biggest problem, in my opinion. There's, there's a bit of a there's rifts that exists in our clients between operational IT and IT and plant engineering and the actual maintenance staff and leadership and then people at the corporate side and and then you have these initiatives of we're going to do a digital transformation project.

14:29

Yeah,

14:30

and really, what that means is we're going to spend maybe 100 million bucks on an SAP upgrade, or whatever the corporate ERP is a huge amount of money on an upgrade, and this belief that all of the issues that exist pre upgrade are going to get taken care of with the upgrade of the technology, and it never happens.

14:57

Are you painting that?

14:59

Never

14:59

having.

15:00

Like the picture,

15:00

what I love about this group is these guys, the attendees of this conference, SMRP, are the maintenance and reliability professionals.

15:11

They are,

15:12

they're the ones who know it is not the answer, and they're the ones who are like witnessing these projects, they're so close to it, but they're like, why am I not involved, right? Because these guys don't know my business, they don't know the maintenance that's happening, they just know the system. So, what I believe needs to happen is maintenance and reliability professionals need to recognize their moment to actually get the budget they need to make these changes is to piggyback on top of these big projects, and they're kind of passengers on those projects instead of the leaders of those projects,

16:02

see, I think we're at a renaissance. I think you know, I've been, I've been circling around asset management, reliability, maintenance. I've been doing that forever, right. And, and, and I got to tell you, the conversations have always been the same. You know, we're going to be focused on, you know, reliability, and then one week after that, we're back into being reactive, and we're not doing what we need to do, and so on and so forth. It just is. I think we're at a point, given some of the constraints that take are taking place in the marketplace, primarily people finding the right people, we need to be more efficient. We, this is this is their time to shine. That's my point.

16:46

I mean, I agree. You know what's different about now than before? I don't know. It's always there's always this imperative to do more with us.

16:55

Yeah,

16:56

and it's kind of Groundhog Day in some ways.

16:59

It is,

17:00

you know, like, I see, and I hear about these massive projects.

17:07

Yeah,

17:07

they're usually tangled up around an ERP upgrade or a new ERP implementation, but guess what? That touches our world.

17:13

Yeah, yeah,

17:14

especially if you're in an asset-intensive industry, it's all asset management. If you're a utility, it's all asset management. If you're in oil and gas and petrochem,

17:25

it is

17:26

your business is about keeping your equipment running, and that's more EAM than ERP.

17:33

It is,

17:34

so get the EAM leaders leading that in a way that is not - they're not going to be misled by the large implementers, who are just going to take care of it. You got to get experts in to really

17:49

help with the

17:49

process. Again, I always go down the road, I say, you need to educate, there's just so much going on, educate, just figure it out, it's all all available. Come to this place, educate, you need to collaborate. You don't have all the answers. You need to find trusted individuals. You might have, you might have part of the answer, but not all the answers. And you come to events like this, and you can find maybe all of the answers. You collaborate, and then, of course, you need to innovate as much as you possibly can and do it, but you can't. You can't just go jump into innovation without doing some educating and collaborating. I just don't think,

18:25

and you gotta, and you gotta understand where the impact is going to be.

18:30

Yeah,

18:31

just because it's innovative doesn't mean,

18:34

yeah,

18:34

you gotta invest in it. You gotta find the problems, which are the big problems to solve that humans can't solve on their own easily. Then we can go and talk about AI.

18:44

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I like it. You didn't disappoint. You were great. I like that. So, somebody's listening to this conversation and they're saying, "I want to connect with Peter. What's the best way to connect with you?

18:56

Just come to our website, TRM, yeah, TRM group.com TRM net.com

19:03

Okay, check this out, and, and LinkedIn, right, and LinkedIn,

19:09

TRM Pete Morrow,

19:12

yeah,

19:12

at TRM net.com

19:14

See, that it's easier for me to give the link to LinkedIn, your stat card, so that they go out there and say, yeah, there's that's Pete. I got it. You saw him on a video, but you know, now I want to connect. Well, you were fantastic. Thank you very much for being so game to get on the podcast. I appreciate that.

19:32

Yeah, my pleasure.

19:32

All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for Pete out on Industrial Talk. I said, Pete, you want to be Peter, Peter, Peter, not Pete, no, no,

19:43

it's all good, man.

19:43

Peter,

19:45

Peter, dot Morrow,

19:47

there he is. We're gonna have it all out on Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining. We are broadcasting once again from SMRP. It's a great event. It is Fort Worth, Texas, and it is a collection of incredible people. Whole side coming home. I know all these people, all right. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

20:06

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

20:17

Yeah, it's never a dull moment. SMRP, you need if you're in the world of asset management, reliability, maintenance, the solutions, all of the solutions, you need to put this event on your calendar. It is a must-attend event. You get great people like Peter, Peter Morrow, Total Resource Management is the organization, and they were, they were right behind me when my little booth, my podcast booth, they were right behind me. Great conversation. All right, Industrial Talk is here for you. We're always here for you. We want you industrial professionals to tell your story, that's what we want you to do. It's important. If you want more eyes to what you do, the solutions you bring to the table, you have to tell your story. You have to bring that human component to it. Industrial Talk is here for you. Just go out to industrialtalk.com and just click connect with me. I think that's what the button says, or connect, or contact. I don't know, it's out there on Industrial Talk, and you'll be contacting me, and we'll have a conversation, because we want you to succeed. And to do that, please tell your story, that's what it's all about. We're going to be broadcasting from SMRP again this year, and we're pretty excited about that, because it's an exceptional event. Go out to Industrial Talk, find out more, get involved with SMRP. All right, be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Peter, and you will be changing the world, we're going to have another great conversation shortly, so stay tuned.