Rik Muschamp with Accruent

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Rik Muschamp, document management, Meridian, RedEye, cloud integration, maintenance connection, unlimited user license, digital twins, BIM, collaboration, user adoption, SharePoint issues, digital models, AI integration

00:00

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 right, industry professional,

00:22

thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk, and thank you for your continued support of this platform. As you can tell by the buzz of the background, we are at a crew and insights. This is in San Antonio, and everybody is enjoying, well, things and snacks and foods and all that stuff. And you know, we're here to celebrate you. So go out to Industrial Talk, find out more, see how you can get engaged, because it's all about education. It's all about collaboration, and it's definitely about innovation. Especially here at accruing in a hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of Rik Muschamp. Now, Rik, you're saying to yourself, Scott, I know how to spell it, Rik, if you're like me, you didn't know how to spell it this way, R, i, k, so make a note of that. So when you go out to into the your the LinkedIn stack card, you'll just be able to find them that way. So let's get cracking. Yeah, I'm so glad it's you know what's going to happen when I take this conversation Rik and we transcribe it using an AI product, Rik, yeah, I'm gonna have to modify all the Riks.

01:29

Just now. It's gonna be Rik. Rik. Rik. See, you're gonna have to take us out. Yeah, take a later.

01:33

I'm just gonna have to use the old word and get it out of there,

01:37

find and replace you.

01:40

Having a good conference? Yeah, great. What makes it? What makes it good

01:45

customers really see that

01:47

is a constant theme. Everybody that I asked that question to specifically with the crew and its customers. You get to, we just have wrap it up right now. I mean, you hit on a high note

01:59

just, I mean, you get to hear so many different stories about how our customers are using our products, which don't really get to hear when you're working from home and we're all remote. It's great. And then the thing I really enjoy, we had a customer panel earlier, and customers are asking the customers in the panel, Hey, how did you solve this problem? And they're all talking and brainstorming, and we're just taking a back seat. And it's great. I love that, yeah,

02:23

but you're listening, you're listening to the chirping that's going on. Is because but you guys do that, well, definitely. So let's start out with a little background on who Rik is. Give us a little 411 that's information here, over on this side of the pond, what is it over there on the other side in the UK where, like, 411 is information, 911, no, 911, bad over here. Never mind. Yeah, like

02:53

100 I think, okay,

02:54

400 give us some 400 so

02:56

03:07

the way the company constantly evolves.

03:11

And during my time at a current I've been part of the documents team, so I look after Meridian and also RedEye, which is a new product. So all about engineering, document management, and how our customers can benefit from the capabilities in those solutions.

03:26

So this is an interesting differentiate Meridian from RedEye.

03:34

So Meridian has been around for 30 years, so it's got tons and tons and tons of features in there, and it's very good at doing specific stuff with CAD drawings. And for document controllers, RedEye is new, so it's kind of 10 years old, and it's built for cloud native so that whole point of RedEye is you want as many people to access the drawing as possible. So whereas meridian, you had document controllers, who kind of often, are the gatekeepers of those documents, or is more about opening it up and letting more and more people access the detail that they need in the joints?

04:08

Why is that distinction important? What I mean, why not control the documents? Is there a different it's one on prem and the other ones in the cloud? Or is it sort of Yeah. So why is it important? So

04:19

Merton's typically on prem, yeah, and RedEye is for the cloud. The reason why that's becoming more and more important is because of integrations between different systems. So we've just completed our integration with maintenance connection, so now a technician using maintenance connection can pull up a drawing from RedEye without having to access RedEye. It's all done within maintenance collection. So they go out to fix an asset, and they want the latest drawing. So now they've got it. It's attached to the work order. They can bring up. They can look at it. They can make sure it helps them do their job. If there's something different, they can mark on it. They can do a red line on it, and. And say, what's wrong? And that goes back into the workflow in RedEye. It just makes it so much easier for people to find on the document, like orders of magnitude faster

05:10

in the world of meridian. Take us through a workflow associated with Meridian, with that that same use case of where I have a work order, I need to get that document. How's that different? So

05:25

we completed an integration with maintenance connection with Meridian last year, but before that, there was no integration between the two. So you would, you know the two systems didn't talk to each other, and you were reliant on I mean, if you're the technician and you want to find the right document. How do you find it? How do you know that the one that you've got, that you've searched for is the right one, is the most recent one? Without tying the two things together, you can't be sure that results in a lot of waste

05:55

the so now what I can do is I can use your platform, create the work order, pull in the documents, in essence, seamlessly, right? Yeah, and, and having the assurance that it's the latest, yep. So I get the latest. I go out as built is sort of not as latest as you know. So we've got a modified so it's a simple method of just redlining, and then it goes through, back through and gets modified. Yeah,

06:27

we've got a great talk tomorrow with one of our customers, Las Vegas Valley Water, yeah, before they adopted redeye, the technicians carried milk crates of paper documents around in the back of their truck, so they go out to some facility to look at stuff, and they have to search through all these documents to try and find the right one. Could take a day to find it. Now they've digitized all of those documents, put them in RedEye, and now the engineers have a tablet, and they just go out and they can search for it, and it's the right one. So you can find it in minutes.

06:59

What's the feedback on something like that? I mean, come on, amazing. I hate it. I'm just so surprised at that. When did they deploy RedEye,

07:11

I think in the last couple of years, yeah, before

07:16

07:20

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

07:29

You know the wild thing about it. I would imagine there are a number of companies that still are using crates of some sort or filing. I'll give you an example, and I don't know if they don't do it today. I sure. I'm sure they don't. So this is dated information, but when I was doing patrol work in transmission line work, right? And I was patrolling, we'd have our little single line maps, they would be in the patrol truck, and we would go out and patrol the lines. And you look at it, you look at the map, you say, well, that's not right, yeah. And then you would update the map in your truck. Yeah, it would never make it back to planning exactly, sit there and yeah. Or even

08:14

if it did, you would have to go and do paperwork. You'd have to go and file it somewhere, whereas, yes, there and then that's your job done. And then it goes to the document controller, and probably by the end of the day, it's been updated. Yes.

08:27

Okay, so we've got all this going on. We have some that there's a, there's a list of questions, but I have to ask the question about democratization. What does that mean? Yeah,

08:41

so it's what we've been talking about, is it's allowing everybody to have access to the information they need. And one of the ways that RedEye achieves that is by having an unlimited user license model. So most enterprise applications should charge per user, or you have to share a license between users, whereas RedEye is completely unlimited. So if you've got 10,000 people who want to access the documents, that's absolutely fine, no extra charge for that. It's all included in the press. And so what that encourages is people to collaborate across companies. So we've got some companies down in Australia and New Zealand, where there's a utility who has all these assets that other companies need to access, and they all just share the same RedEye bucket when they've all got access to the documentation, rather than having to collaborate and email documents or whatever, however you transmit them, everyone's just using one RedEye. Instance, I

09:43

Oh, that's interesting. So really this, this unlimited user model, was specifically to sort of encourage the collaboration, try not to prohibit. You know, the. The view of the document? Yeah.

10:01

I mean, why would you not want everybody who needs it to access it? Why would you want to limit that because of your license model, when the best measure of your of any system is how many people are using it, the more people are using it, the more valuable the system is. So that was RedEyes philosophy from day one.

10:18

So I can imagine having this conversation with the company and saying, Yeah, this is the document management system. We have RedEye. And they ask the question, well, how many you know, how much does it cost per user? And you say, Well, here's the here's the price, yeah. And everybody, yeah.

10:34

So one of the great examples of this use case, and we just had a session with the City of Seattle, so they've got, they've been digitizing their documents and drawings. They've got a GIS model of the whole city and mapped, like every bit of infrastructure in the city to the map, so you can search for on the map and bring up 150 year old scand drawings. Their use case, they allow members of the public to view the documents. So rather than having to go down to City Hall and submit a request and try and find a blueprint, they just log into RedEye and can search for it. And so they have the whole city as users potentially. Oh, that's

11:18

that's interesting. But but in RedEye, you're able to sort of set up parameters, access parameters, right? You know, yeah, your access versus my access would be different. So you still have to do that, yeah? So

11:33

you've got, you've got the administrators who do the workflows, do approvals, but you can give anybody view access, and they can just search and view documents.

11:43

Can I print them out? Yeah,

11:45

yeah, which

11:46

is just sort of anathema to what you're trying to accomplish. Of course, I go right to printing. Hey, can I download it into an Excel spreadsheet?

11:56

Yeah, but hey, I was just in the maintenance connection. RedEye demo that we just had. One of the use cases is you're in maintenance connection. You're looking at the work order. Maybe there's a reason why you need to print it. Maybe you need to go offline somewhere, whatever process that you've got. You can print out the drawing, go and work on it, and if you mark it up with pen, you can then email it to this email address that's put on the side of the work order, and then it goes automatically back into RedEye and gets scanned in with the drawing market. So it's merging digital and old school ways of working. So if you're a bit scared, and

12:38

you did, I need to touch paper for whatever reason, but, but that markup drawing still needs to be updated so it the workflow must take it into, I don't know, the term, let's say, an engineer or a planner of something, something. Yeah, right. They get that, they get a copy, and then they update the drawings. Yeah,

13:00

exactly. So, I mean, and you can have multiple markups coming in from different places, and then it's the document controllers job to sort through that update the drawing. And then you've got the complete revision history as well. So you can always go back in time and see when a markup was made and when the change was made. So got that complete audit trail for everything

13:21

you would see, it would seem to me, user adoption in that sort of environment where it's, you know, you get access. You don't get access. You get to talk to Scott. Scott gives you the, you know, the information. Scott's The conduit versus the way it is in RedEye, I know. Go, go. You go, check it right? You figure it out. And because you have access, you, I would think user adoption is probably through the roof in a sense, yeah, and it's

13:55

new for a lot of people, because they're not used to having that no traditional ways you have to go and

14:00

speak. How many years I've been talking about this forever?

14:03

Yeah, exactly. So there's so much excitement here. So many customers are seeing this for the first time and going, I want this. I'm using SharePoint, and it's terrible. This is going to solve a lot of problems

14:13

for me. You're the third person I heard talk about this. There's the SharePoint connection. Point. God, you're using SharePoint. Oh, my God bless you, definitely. So put your future hat on. Where do you see it going?

14:28

So, I mean, one of the things that comes up time and time again is bit right, which is building information modeling. So this is sort of the digital version. Yeah, build now. Construction's been doing this for 20 years, because when you're designing something new, it makes sense to make a digital version. They use that. They go and build the building, and then they hand it over to the operator. Sometimes they hand over that digital model. Sometimes they don't that handover processes isn't great, but historically, the. Operators haven't really embraced bit for various reasons. I mean, they might not have the skill set in house to maintain the ly model, but it's it's going more and more in that direction. More and more people are asking for that. So it's a very complex set of features. It's not like one thing that we could just deliver, you know, 3d modeling. It's limitations. It's making sure you can get the standards. And so we try to solve that problem, which is difficult because it means a lot of different things to different people. And so we're doing a lot of round table discussions here at insights

15:35

together, a whole set of opportunities from from my perspective, if I am the owner of this asset, this hotel, then I can create that sort of digital representation of this hotel, yeah, I can simulate, I can do things with it, so before I put it into the physical world, Yeah, I can see things and be able to properly allocate capital where it needs to be, because I have the tools that are available.

16:10

And I think a lot of the stuff we've seen from AI companies like Nvidia doing a lot of stuff with modeling and digital twins and things like that. Yeah. And so rather than us just trying to build everything ourselves, it's like, Who can we integrate with? Who can we partner with? To me as a better solution. So one of the good strengths of RedEye is integration with lots of different things to become the hub for the for the drawing. So RedEye, we don't want to become a CAT tool. There's plenty of CAT tools, but we want to work really well with the cats seamless integration. And the same thing applies to lots of the digital

16:45

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So with that said, with all that wonderful insight and knowledge. Rik ri K, how do people get a hold of you?

17:02

LinkedIn is probably the best way. That's the only story good to run on. So yeah, discussion. I really enjoyed

17:09

this conversation. You were absolutely wonderful. Thank you. All right, listeners, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. We're going to have all the confident contact information for Rik out on Industrial Talk. We are broadcasting on site a crew at insights. It is in San Antonio, and it is a break time. Well, it's at the end of the day, and everybody's just enjoying the beverage of choice. You gotta admit, this is a pretty doggone nice, nice venue. It's pretty good. It is, all right, now that we've recreated that, all right, we're gonna wrap it up on the inside. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

17:42

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

17:51

Cool, absolutely cool. It's an industry Great. How far we progress. I remember being out in the field. I'd have these single line maps when I was in lineman, and you just sort of, they're physical, right? And, and you'd be making the the adjustments right on this. We had it in the back of the truck, just like Rik was saying, R, I K, by the way. And, and that's how we roll. That's how we but now, wow, how powerful is that, being able to access accurate documentation out of the field. Cool, time to be alive. Big time. All right, we're building a platform. We're building a platform that you can connect with Rik and others. You have a podcast, put it out on Industrial Talk. Do you have technology you want to be on the podcast? Just go out to Industrial Talk.com. Reach out to me. Let's have a conversation. Your story must be told. Absolutely agree. All right. Be bold, be brave. Dear greatly. Hang out with Rik and you will change the world. So stay tuned. You.