Pieter van Schalkwyk with XMPRO

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

twin, talk, capabilities, digital, dtc, periodic table, ai, Pieter, industrial, put, technology, real, absolutely, event, omg, assets, main categories, started, organization, business

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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 get around once again, and welcome to Industrial Talk a platform that is dedicated to industrial professionals all around the world. I say it once I say it a million times you are bold, brave, you dare greatly you collaborate, you solve problems, you innovate. And therefore you are making the world a better place. Thank you very much for what you do. And that's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk. We are broadcasting from Reston, Virginia.

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It's a quiet place. It we've been around Pieter, he'd been walking around. Yeah, it's a quiet

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place. And we are broadcasting at OMG’s Q1 meeting. And it is a collection of incredible, passionate, problem solvers that truly want to do what is great and wonderful, and

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they tucked away

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in a hot seat. You heard his voice is silky smooth. His name is Pieter.

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That's pretty much and I'm not going to pronounce his last name. Nope, nope, nope.

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How do you pronounce your last name? events called back? Yep, there it is.

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There it is. Now I have to in my transcription. I've got to try to figure out how to spell.

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You having a good meeting just just started. Yeah, just starting today. Yeah. First day, we're actually doing training on next generation digital twin. So that's our first day for this. So before we get cerpen on the there's a periodic table out there. Yeah, digital twin stuff.

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Before we get going on that give us a little background on who Pieter is.

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Good event Scott. I'm CEO at XMPro. I'm kind of the

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Chief Technology enthusiast as well, in real terms.

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My day job is looking after the business. But I'm also heavily involved with DTC Digital Twin Consortium

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started the capabilities periodic table, which we'll talk about, but I'm also J for the natural resources working group as well as the composability. Subprime sub task group. There are just a number of initiatives.

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I hope there's not a test because I every time I come to an OMG event, there's just

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so many organizations, consortium teams, whatever you want to call them.

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But they they're just heavily involved in really debating challenges and and in this the world that we this industry right now. It it's even more needed than ever before I just this, this pursuit of doing it right. And figuring that out. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the, the opportunities and challenges is that the complexity is increasing, it's almost exponential. As soon as you start with the basic digital twin, and then you start adding intelligence on to it AI, IoT, all those things, you just increased complexity, almost exponential. So if you don't work at standards and interoperability and all the good things that OMG and DTC are doing, then it's gonna be really, really tough going forward trying to put these things in to get real business value, because that's really what you Yes. And I think I'm glad you brought that out, because I just said, If you don't do it, right, and people don't see the value. They're not going to there's no, there's not going to be any adoption of it. They're going to just look at it. And that's why would I want that pain. Why would I want that aggravation. Who do I trust? Where do I go? Who do you got to get it? Right? Good, right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, people don't bind digital twins, because they want to have a digital twin. They buy it because they need a business problem solved. They need ROI. And it's also reason why we came up with a technology agnostic approach, like the capabilities periodic table, which removes the technology and you know, all the things around it and really talk about what should it do?

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So take us through that. That's a good segue into, you know, what we want to talk about it, take us through what it is, and then why it's it why it's meaningful. So we started this initiative in 2022. In the natural resources working group so much, mostly coming out of oil and gas and mining, really complex systems, trying to explain to your boss on a budget for a digital twin really hard because they want to understand the business value.

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So we had to, we had to come up with a way to make it technology agnostic. Firstly

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I

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And also not bound to any architecture. And it was really around what job Am I hiring the twin to do? And if that twin was a person what skill sets with a nice need ik capabilities, so we within broken into six main categories, six areas, and this is all downloadable from the DTC website. So I'm not going to run through detail of it. No, no, no, no, no, it's okay. But it's available. It's available. It's freely available. Yeah. Started in 2022. And it's been through a few iterations, some large organizations have even adopted it as their corporate standard in terms of how they organize the business around digital twins in it. And we've just released a version 1.1 update. And looking forward to version two, which also incorporates some of all the new things like AI and Gen AI, and where the markets heading with this stuff.

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Why? Why is it important? Why would, for me, personally, I, I, I'm always gonna go to the business reason, it's one thing to be able to talk about all of this wonderful innovation and technology that exists out there today, and get caught up with the shiny object. But the reality is, is that it has to, has to benefit me as a business. And tell talk to us about that. And that was one of the key reasons, again, why we created this. So when you when you explained to an executive that I needed a digital twin need to kind of break it down into what are the core things that from a capabilities point of view that we are going to achieve with that. So

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the the, the other opportunity that it gives us is also to look at what capabilities we don't have in our organization. So let's say we want to do

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predictive energy for a wind farm, it's going to need some AI, maybe we don't have that in organization. So if there's not a way that I can bring a multidisciplinary team, and that's the other kind of thing. If I've got a multidisciplinary team, no one agrees on what the thing should be that I do I get them to talk about capabilities rather than technology. And then if we have it, or don't have it, do we hire do we partner? How do we go about getting that capability into our organization? Again, removing it from the technology, conversation, I can I can put it all on one slide or my CEO, to show what it is that we're trying to do. How do you come up with capabilities? What I mean, it's so easy to talk about the technology, it's so easy to google it and Bing, boom, here it is. It's all great. And but how do you? How do you know what capabilities you need? In an organization? Do you just sort of have a

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sort of a conversation around a coffee table? And like we said, was that easy? Yeah. Yeah. So what we've done is we've created it in six main categories. And there are 62 elements in it. Each one was a kind of detailed description. So if you look at

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data services, or intelligence or user experience, there's some sub capabilities in there. And with there's also a format in the in the periodic table that helps you run through and say, what questions do you need to ask? It's the ability to So describe to me, so when you're in a large

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workshop setting, you can say, you know,

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describe the ability to,

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you know, have a gaming engine as a front end or, again, or do data integration from my IoT systems or use a standard for for for data management, but it's the description of the of the, of the ability, and it's done. Again, there's a there's a

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format that with, with questions that help you derive for each of those, whether it's applicable or not, so the ones are not just bought them and just focus on the ones that you actually need.

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Trust is a big deal.

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Absolutely.

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Because if I'm going to look at that chart, I'm going to

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it has to be predicated on the fact that what I'm looking at from this chart has been thoroughly vetted by a bunch of good people who are truly having that passion and then I can feel comfortable in and trying to find those capabilities. Is that Yeah, so it comes from both industry practitioners have you used this practically and also from

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members inside DTC, both vendors and again,

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end user organizations. And that's actually why we have a version 1.1 There was some some combinations like AI and ML combined, but then also some new areas like responsible so how do we bring in responsible capabilities? So how do we make digital twins that they are used for good and not for back? So those are some of the

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The feedback that we had, and also things like spatial data and very domain specific things. We had some feedback around expanding that and improving that.

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What do you see it going? I mean, you're gonna come out with an, it seems like it's a document that is going to continue to just sort of evolve, grow, adapt to what's taking place.

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Yeah, I think that we should be taking it in two directions. So the one is, how do we expand it for emerging capabilities and technologies like Gen AI? I mean, that's not a conversation we in this days, which is not a bad, how do we bring it in, there's a lot of regulation in that area that's starting to happen, we see that with EU and other places. So that's the one area that we don't want to keep it as a as a paper based documents, we also also think, turning it into a machine, kind of readable standard, so that you can plug it into real system. And it's not just a

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paper based exercise by a bunch of people sitting in rest, and in a little boardroom,

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which

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is, in talking to David.

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What I can appreciate is,

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I'm not a I'm not a software engineer, I'm not any. I'm just a business guy, right. And what I can appreciate it is that with every system that I've ever tried to deploy, I was always looking for that simplistic approach, make it as simple as possible to ensure that there's this adoption that happens, and compliance and whatever those are the terms that are used to use the system itself. And what I heard him saying, and what I hear you saying is that that's exactly what this chart allows, it's just it's makes it more approachable, that absolutely, the whole objective from the start was to put it on one page, firstly, so that I can explain it, I can get you to shrink in size. Well, as it continues to expand, you just keep shrinking, and eventually you'll need, it still needs to be readable on one page, but

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and know that that was a driver from the start and also put it into plain explainable language. And don't use complex word and

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anyone should be able to read it and understand it's almost like when you have a resume for a person, if you're hiring a twin to do a certain job for you, the resume explains what they can do in simple terms. So your resume for the digital twin should be in simple terms.

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With all that said, I'm intrigued by what does your company do? We're a real time digital twin platform. So we take data from real time systems and grid,

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solution based applications around predictive maintenance, predictive quality. So again, we building digital twins that solve real problems. So that's why we started and going back into the periodic table, because the conversation always been to technology. And we are what's the problem that you're trying to solve? And what capabilities do we need to do that? So that's what XMPro does. So we work primarily in asset intensive industries like oil and gas, mining, energy, utilities, all the big things are looking at the assets themselves in health assets, and then determining the failure rate associated with those assets. Yeah, I didn't know that.

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Because I'm a big fan of asset management reliability. I have had a number of those conversations, and I can really appreciate that.

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Well, you are just absolutely fantastic. How do people get a hold of you, these days to get to get hold of me on LinkedIn, feed events qualified.

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I'm going to have all the contact information for Pieter out there. That's so you don't have to worry about it. Just go out there and just real talk. And we're going to have this LinkedIn stat card out there. So you got to connect because it's all about education, especially today, education, collaboration and innovation. Whether you like it or not, it's happening. That train has left the station, and it's a bullet train, whether you like it or not. All right, you are absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much. All right, listeners. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. We're gonna have all the contact information for Pieter out on Industrial Talk. As I said, we are broadcasting from OMG Reston, Virginia. This is the Q1 meeting. And it is a collection of people like Pieter solving problems making our lives better. They are the heroes in this story. Stay tuned we will be right back.

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You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network

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your to do list what reach out to Pieter. We're gonna have the all the time

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Contact information out on Industrial Talk CEO of XMPro that's x m p r o. And you will not be disappointed. We talked about digital twin. We talked about AI, we talked about the digital twin, periodic table, you need to implement digital twin you need to be successful at it because it's important. He also has a book, I go up to a stack card. He has a book. It's called Building industrial digital twin. Learn how to design, develop and deploy digital twin solutions for real world industries. using Azure digital twin right there, get that book to be successful. We need you to be successful. All right. We're building a platform Industrial Talk, you have a podcast, put it out on Industrial Talk, you have technology that you want to promote, put it out on and does real talk. That's what Industrial Talk is all about. Educating, collaborating, and of course, innovating. That's what we're here for you. All right, be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Pieter change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation coming from OMG shortly so stay tuned.