Samantha LeSesne with Fluke Reliability

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk Podcast, Scott MacKenzie, Fluke Reliability, Samantha LeSesne, asset management, process mapping, implementation team, product specialist, EAM (Enterprise Asset Management), AI (Artificial Intelligence), data analysis, customer success, problem-solving, maintenance managers, Reliabilityengineers.

00:00

Scott. 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

00:21

01:19

saying the same, the same. Like the river, Yeah, same.

01:24

If I was geographically savvy, I would say, Oh, wow. Really, that's great. But I'm not.

01:34

It's in France. It is. I remember correctly, Paris, yeah. Have you been to Paris? Yeah, I've been, I've walked along along the river. So,

01:43

you know, you know, it's sad because we were just in Paris this past year, and we walked along the river. And of course, Scott didn't really say what river is this.

01:58

Now, I know. Now, you know,

01:59

no, I'm all embarrassed. Do you know, when were you in Paris? When was

02:04

the last time I was there about a year and a half ago? Yeah, did you take the electric

02:10

Olympics? See we were we were there right to look for the Olympics as

02:14

well. See, we probably passed each other and didn't even know I

02:17

was on an electric bike. We were rented those electric bites. Yes, we were one of those

02:24

my bones far too much for it was exhilarating

02:29

as you toodle around Paris. Take me back Calgon.

02:37

There you go. You Should Do you should make it a regular, regular thing. Just keep going back. Yeah,

02:42

okay. But there's so many other places in Europe to sort of, you know, walk around all right. Before we get going, let's give us a little background on who Samantha is. Who Samantha

02:54

is. That's a great question, please. Yeah, let's relive it. Let's relive it. I've definitely a bit of jack of all trades. I'll say I was a teacher for a few years. Did teaching in New York City? So, you know, way funny places taught middle school, which, of course, is, you know, the easiest age ever,

03:19

never. Says, No one the years

03:23

when you know exactly who you are and what you want to

03:26

do amazing. No way.

03:29

And then, yeah, I started working with Fluke about eight years ago, and did a couple of different things, Product Marketing. Did some stint with product management. So really working with our engineering team figuring out how to work with customers, figure how to make products that people actually wanted to use and invest their time in. And then for the last couple of years, I've been working very internally, talking to the teams and working with our teams on figuring out what's the best way to do things. You know, if you've got a problem, how do you solve it? If you have a gap in a process, how do you fix the gap doing things like that? So now I'm the implementation and service director for email. So what's fantastic is I get to work with teams and customers a little bit more than I was for the last couple of years to figure out what's the best way for somebody to take E mate and the dream that was promised them during the sales process and make sure that it becomes reality afterwards.

04:31

So you, you, you take the arrows. You're the one that sits down and says, Well, that's not what they said,

04:37

Yeah. Well, we, what we tried to do is maybe that's not what they said, but here's how we can make it work. Yeah, that's right.

04:45

For clarification, I'm always interested. You've mentioned it in in your bio, yeah. Process, yeah. Explain to us, just generally speaking with that, I have something in my mind of a process. Explain to us from a. Fluke perspective, what that process is? Yeah,

05:01

that's what a process, what a process is. That's a great question. And, and you'll have to excuse me, because I'm slightly visual, which is, I'm all sometimes not, sometimes not, yeah, you all be waving my hands around. But essentially, you know, if you have a point A, and you have a desired state as your point. B, what are the steps that are needed to get Yes, right, sure, at a very high level. And you can go, you know, left or right, yes, this is a yes. And then you you know, I'm not going to get into the diamonds and trying,

05:32

but I lived it for years, and I understand it. You'd be talking to somebody that would say, No, yeah, that makes sense, yeah.

05:38

But, you know, I find students sometimes that we with processes. We make a overly complicated, right? We try to say, well, first it's got to go to Tim, and then is it got to go to Bill, and Bill's got to accept it here. And it's like, swipe all that away. What, what is the fastest and most effective way for us to go from here to here? And then, how do we make that happen? And a lot of times that's what customers want, right? And they do, they

06:06

really well, you know, that's

06:09

a great question, but I think they have timelines and plans in their head, right? So they'll say, Hey, I purchased something. I want to start using it as soon as I possibly can. And if you put too many roadblocks in, that's when they get dejected, and they say, Okay, well, I'm gonna go start looking for something else, because you guys aren't doing what I need to do. And so what we we really want to do is to say, okay, what are your goals? How are you gonna get how are we gonna help you to get there as quickly as you can?

06:37

Do you, speaking of process? Yeah, do you? Do? You run an as is map, like your, your, this is the way you do it today, yeah, yeah. And then you run, well, see, here's the two b's, and this is the where we want to be. And then all of a sudden you say, see, these are gaps. This is the where we need to bridge those. Yes, exactly.

07:00

Yeah, yeah. We have a future. We have what we call current state, yeah, and future state, yeah. Sometimes it's all about the language, right? You just gotta match the language. And yeah, you sit down and you say, you know, and, and I tell people, make it as dirty your as is, as dirty as it is, yeah, tell me. Tell me, what is the true statement? Yes, if you don't do that, if you, if you say, Oh, well, you know, we're gonna be nice to Bob, and we're gonna say, Bob does it this way. Then, no, that's not how Bob does it, right? Do it, how, how you really do it. It's dirty, and then we got to clean it. Yeah,

07:37

and, and, and I would imagine you're involved in the you clean it, there's that, there's the process, but then you have, you have to infuse the technology. So if I'm in E mate, where does it, where's there a handoff, and where's that, right, you know, document, or whatever, whatever the process is. Because if you're looking at current state, you know, over years and years and years is just been bastardizing the way, you know, and now you're trying to take technology in a way that gives you a future state that is

08:15

perfect, right? And a lot of times it's a, it's a, you have to be open to doing things that are, you know, slightly different. And you may say, hey, we had this plan, and we were gonna, my future state was supposed to look like this. And you're like, Okay, well, in order to get there, here we can, we can do that. Maybe we may need to have some extra, you know, layers there, yeah. And maybe it's not just email, you know, maybe, you gotta go and get some extra things to make this the best thing for you, yeah, but at its core, yeah, you know you're you want to say, Where are you going to be most effective, and how is that going to work with your to your team? And then, how does the technology meet that need? It shouldn't be. What does the technology do? It should be. How does the technology meet your need? Yes,

09:05

all right, she's hidden on all cylinders. I can. I love conversations. I I think that all conversations need to start with mapping out a process, yes, identifying the way it is today and where you want to it just, I just think that that's critical, or people are just talking around something, and they're not, they're not hitting the target. Yeah,

09:29

one. And what's fantastic at fluke and inside Fluke Reliabilityas well is that we have these, you know, the rules that we play by and we have champions who are perfect, who they spend months working on, how to how do I learn how to be the best at mapping? How do I learn to be the best at problem solving? How do I learn to be the best at this? And we're now saying, Okay, now that you guys know how to do that, go out into our workforce. Course, and teach that to other people so that they can be really great. Yeah, great people. I happen to be one of those people, those those champions, can process mapping and so, yeah. So they're like, Okay, you know, here's, here's a fantastic opportunity for us to look at, how do we help, not just our own selves, but how do we help the customer? So

10:21

the question is, do you do it internally and also externally? We

10:26

do it internally. Where we're moving to is now is going to be helping our customers do it? So when our customers come on board, we go through especially for, you know, big customers that have multi size that are kind of all over. What is your current state look like? Where are you trying to go? Yeah. And we map it out. Do we agree both? Do you know, does a customer agree? Do we agree? And then that's our guide, yeah. And then you can just run that to ground,

10:53

yeah. See, I love it. This is great. This is great. So take us through your your new role, yeah. What? What does that mean?

11:04

Yeah. So I've got two core teams. One team has all implementation team, so when somebody comes on as a mistake, say you end your sales process and you're elated about now you got it right. The first group that you'll start talking with are, we have implementation specialists, and their sole job is to get you up and running and using using email as best you can. And so I manage that team, and then I also manage another team. And the team that I manage, the second team is great because they're a bit introverted, like me, and as a whole, because they work on doing a lot of the coding and a lot of the customization, and saying, Okay, if you have the standard that the implementation team sets you up with, but there's that gap between the standard And what you're trying to get to that second team, my product specialist team, is so wonderful at saying, Okay, here's how you can customize. Here's how we can take this field and make it work for this particular need. Here's how you have maybe another system, SAP or something else, and here's how we connect to that, and really working on, kind of doing that extra, mostly the extra bow tie to finishing the you know, if you were wrapping a present, it's not just the wrapping paper. You got to put the bows on top, right? That's what they do.

12:34

It's absolutely important, because there's no, no company out there. I remember, this is a galaxy far, far away a long time ago when I started implementing systems. So when we implemented system, it was always the conversation, just take it off the shelf. No customization, just take it off the shelf and and that never, is never

12:58

no in what's what is crazy too, is that, and it's not crazy. You understand how it happens, how customers, even within a same the same company, at different sites, will have their own unique way of doing things. Will need their own slightly different set of things. So even when you say, Hey, we're going to standardize this for you your company, you have to then take it to that next level and say, Okay, well, what is it that each site needs? Because then if you don't get it to where they want it, they're not gonna use it, yeah, they're just gonna be like, use your compliance. Yeah, that tool over there that's working. It's, it's, yeah, it's

13:35

a fine line. Yeah, it's a fine line. And when you have a company that has multiple divisions, and they're using E mate for them, but, but we don't call it that. We call it this, and we, we want that, and we, we send this data through it. And you're right, it's that's that user acceptance, that usability, that if they don't use it. They think if they don't like it, holy moly, yeah, you don't like that

14:06

well, because they just, like you said before, they just won't use it, and then they'll complain about complaining

14:12

starts to fester, okay?

14:17

And you know, in the next year, oh, we tried that thing five years, ago, and it didn't work, yeah? So we try to make it so that it's, it's usable in a way where everybody can say, hey, I find value out of it, right? Because as soon as you find value, even if you need to tweak things a little bit, so maybe, you know, you use the different terms, you know, instead of as is, you say current state, right, but if people get comfortable with it, and they get to the point where they able to say, Hey, I find true value, and I can see how this is making my job better, not more of a drag or a time sucker, I'm doing duplicate work, if I can make my day better. With this, then I'm going to be actively using it. And I'm, not only am I going to be actively using it, I'm going to find my own ways to make it a little bit better. And hey, you know my customer success manager, hey, product specialist, can we do these five things too? And that's what really makes it sing. I think,

15:17

yeah, but I, but I think we're at a point to that E mate, and many of the solutions that are here are highly customizable, yeah, are highly intuitive and and interactive. So that that you, you do optimize the use of that that tool, right? And

15:39

you do it at multiple levels, yes, right? And then that's the important thing is, as as we're, everyone is aware that Gone are the days, because my father and my mother did engineering, and they used to talk about being in, you know, a room far away from management, and they they got to do their own thing. We're we've moved away from that, you know, now corporations, you've got C level people who are wanting to know the details and wanting to get into it. So what's great about the email is you can have stuff for your techs. You can have stuff for your maintenance managers and or your Reliabilityengineers. You can also have dashboards that are totally ready to send up to leadership to say, he big thinkers, yeah, you know, the ones with the grand ideas, right? But you should be able to show them like, Hey, we're doing our job, and we're doing it well, you know, we're finding and finding, you know, ways to save money for the company. And we should, you know, we should get that, props. So

16:42

where do you see some of this stuff going, like, put your future hat on. There's a lot of buzz around AI. There's a lot of buzz around collecting more data, having and just, just, where do you see it going?

16:58

Yes, I do think AI has, see it going, I see it going, Yeah, AI has a role to play. You know, we've been talking over the last couple of days about the fact that you can't get away from Ai. It's been here for a while. I think that's what you know. Some people, you know, they have seen that progression. And so for some people, it started with chat, GPT, right? Oh, yeah. And, and, but really, what we're saying is, how can you do things up faster, right? And that's where I think we can take, yes, you can go and get more data, but who's going to analyze it? You need the AI to do it, yeah? And what then allows, you know, the average technician, the average Maintenance Manager, to do is to then say, Yeah, I'm putting my thinking cap on. And the data that comes out of this tool is telling me to do this. Is that really what I need to do? And then they can have that overriding, you know, analysis on top of it, you

18:00

do that with a Zima, yeah, where you have a you have the tool, you have the data lake. You have the the the immense amount of data to be able to ping off of. But then you also have that human interface that says, right, yeah, or now, or whatever,

18:20

right? You know, embracing EI is the best way to look at it, because you have a situation where I think some people are fearful, right? And oh, you know, I'm going to lose my job, or I'm going to do that. Someone who is able to look at the data that's coming out of the AI that tells them this is what you should be doing, but they're able to say, Yes, I actively believe in that, or here's the anomaly that I'm seeing in the data, so we need to take it out. Yeah, those are the people that are going to be able to say, I can use this effectively, and I have a place in this new, new world.

18:56

Yeah, we've just scratched the surface. Yeah. I mean, we still and I think that there's a there's a speed issue, technology is always going to be faster than the human side, and it's, how do you keep it in line? Because I know that many in the world of manufacturing or industry, whatever. They're not there. No, they're not even close. They just know they're trying to do liability.

19:29

I'm aging myself here a bit and talk to their head. But, you know, I came up what I think the coolest thing to me when I was in high school was that my dad had a cell phone and, you know, one of the little cases, and it was the size of a, you know, the microphone. Yeah, exactly. But to see where we are now, and you wouldn't have even imagined that 25 years ago, and so the. And to see that go from there to there in 25 years, but in two years, see the progression that we've had in AI. You're right. It's moving so fast. And sometimes I was talking about this yesterday with somebody, what's unique about AI in the maintenance world in particular is we have a lot of people coming up with all of these grand ideas, and sometimes they miss, what are the actual realities on the floor? And I'm hoping with email and with group reliability, we're able to capture these two groups and bring them together to say, Okay, what is it that's truly needed on the floor? And how does AI really help to do that? Rather than say, Hey, we're going to make something that is neat and and cool to look at. And when you take it to somebody who's on the floor, they're saying, Well, I that's not practical for me to use, right? So you have to find the practical in there to say, what is it? What is your pain point? And then how does what we're doing help to solve that? I

21:03

think you're touching upon blocking and tackling using a sports analogy that you've just got to do the blocking and tackling of reliability, of managing your assets in a way that is effective, and, you know, truly leveraging the tool of E main, yeah, and doing it right without pencil whipping it, get the data right, do things that are really blocking and tackling. Then you can go into this, you know, other realm,

21:35

you know, you're still going to have people doing routes. We're still going to have people, you know, who got to go and turn the wrench? And there's nothing wrong with that. No, you know. You have to, you know. And what we're saying is now, all that it is is, is that once you have that data that you've gone and picked up as you've made your route, you know, how do we take that and make that and make that into something mean of meaningful for you? Yeah, what's wrong with that? Nothing. Ain't. Nothing wrong with that.

22:07

Yeah, I like that. I like back to what is real. All right, how do people get a hold of you? Samantha, yeah,

22:14

so I'm on LinkedIn. Samantha was saying, come find me. I'd love to talk to you.

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23:02

listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

23:12

Yeah, Fluke Reliabilitygot their act together. They got great people. Samantha, right there, talking process. Oh, I love process conversations. They reap such incredible rewards. If you do it right, if you just sort of set your ego off to the side, it's about that process and you really hash it out, great things can definitely happen. I love processes. Keep it simple. Just make it boxes. And, you know, other boxes, nothing fancy, yeah, connect with Samantha, find out more about processes. Xcelerate was the event. It was fantastic. All right, industrial talk is here for you. You are, if you're in need of marketing, we've been doing it. We've got a team of individuals that do a great job. Just reach out. Industrial talk.com find out more. All right, be bold, be brave. There greatly. Hang out with Samantha, and you will change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.