Tom Kurtz with Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, asset management, utility space, Siemens, distributed tech, asset performance, maintenance efficiency, change management, EAM system, reality viewer, network design, project portfolio planning, data management, strategic planning, reliability engineers.

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

00:21

let's go all right once again. Welcome to Industrial Talk, a platform that is dedicated to industrial professionals all around the world. You're bold or brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you're solving problems each and every day. You're making the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk, and we are brought to you by those wonderful people at Siemens, smart infrastructure, as well as grid software. Go to siemens.com go to siemens.com Great people, great company, great solutions. Siemens.com we're broadcasting on site. Distribute tech, Dallas, Texas, and I got to tell you, if you if you're in the utility space, if you're in the distribution, transmission equipment, asset management. This the cool kids hang out here. You need to put this on your calendar. Make it happen. If you're not here this year, put it on the calendar. It's getting bigger, stronger, faster. You get to meet great people. Tom is in the hot seat. Kurtz last name, hexagons, the company. Let's get cracking. Yeah, having a good conference.

01:27

I am Scott. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. I worked hard on that, and thank you for the invitation. I couldn't have, not going to even try, but I couldn't have said it as well as you just did in terms of the distributed attack. It's fantastic being here. It is, it is there is, it's. There's so much to see, like it's suddenly it's three o'clock and day two, and I feel like I just got here. There's so many things to go see, so many people to talk to, and I've been able to do that, and I appreciate one of those people being you. So I'm excited to be here same market. It really is there well, and you see how diversified it is, it is when you you walk, you see trucks, you see electrical poles, you see software it, and all of the above is here. And people are here for different reasons, but

02:11

they're all related. They are and I just, I get dazzled by the fact that me being a recovering transmission lineman, I'm very linear in my knowledge of the utility space, right power transmission and distribution on down to the customers and using it. Here is, it's completely blown up. There's you get this standard stuff. That's fine, but all of the other ancillary solutions about making the grid smarter, more efficient, driving it out, and then, of course, the demand for power is going through the roof. What do we do? It's way above my picker.

02:51

Indeed, indeed it is. And you know, it's interesting. You You touched in your opening soliloquy. There, you mentioned asset management. You mentioned, yeah, did I think I pulled a muscle? I think I'll I think I'll be okay. Hope I used it right when my wife's here. I'm the numbers guy. I usually did I say that, Oh, you, that's not really an equal, yeah. But I, I like how you tied the business functions of transport, transmission, distribution, with the asset side of it, the uptime, and not only the uptime, but the regulatory considerations that the utilities companies have to go through every suit so many years. And how can Asset Management help them with that? How can that help them with their overall strategic planning around that? I mean, that's something we we're seeing here a lot today. We see a lot at ex con about that as well. See what's

03:43

interesting, and we'll get to your, you know, your verbal stat card around the corner here. But what fascinates me and what it's easy, from an asset management perspective, to look at spinning equipment. You see it, it's working. And, you know, you get your generating assets, you can see it. It's fine. You can pull data off of that many of the assets that exist within a utility. You don't see it moving. It's moving, but you can't see it moving. And then, of course, it's how do you, how do you properly track the health of that asset, in a way that makes sense, and that's always been a challenge, like a transformer. Well, there's the transformer, yeah, yeah, you know, is it

04:27

humming? Does that mean it's good or bad? Yeah,

04:29

you don't know. You have no it is. And you're not pulling the dissolved gasses out of it. There's just a ton of stuff. It's interesting.

04:35

Yeah? No, I agree with that, and so I'll build on that, because so I've been in asset management for a number of years, and a customer years ago said, ago said this to me, and I always, maybe we've talked about it before. I always use this example where customers say, I want to, I've been maintaining my equipment for years. I'm always going to want to maintain my equipment, but I want to go more in that. I don't want to just maintain the equipment. I want to manage the entire life cycle of my assets. Okay, well, what does that mean? Well, me. Any of the equipment. You have to be able to do that. You have to be able to create maintenance requests. You have to be able to schedule and dispatch technicians. You have to be able to execute the work. But further upstream, what you just talked about getting into, Hey, can I be more proactive about this? Can I manage the reliability in a more predictive way, more prescriptive way? And that's when you start getting into moving from really enterprise asset management, those maintenance considerations, to asset performance. How do I want to actually look at the reliability? How do I want to look at the risk and criticality? What happens with consequence of failure? Not just does an asset fail, but what's the consequence of that failing? And maybe I, maybe I care more about some than others, because the consequence is higher. So it starts getting at that I don't want to just manage. I just want to. I want to just maintain my equipment. I want to manage the entire life cycle. And what can, how strategic can I get with that asset strategy up

05:48

06:35

09:17

this. It's sort of smacks of change management, too. So it is a human equation. I'll

09:23

buy that absolutely, because

09:25

how does, how does hexagon sort of help facilitate that. You got the technology. The technology is brilliant. Don't get me wrong. I think it's a phenomenal platform, but, but appreciate that. But the the the human element, and getting people to properly use it and embrace it, and, and, and I'm sure, because I'm on recovering one, I know that this is how we always done, yeah, how does, how does, how does hexagon help with that?

09:59

So. Think recognition is, what's the phrase? Recognition is part of the road to recovery, right? You if, if a company, first of all, recognizes what you just stated, that it's not a it's not just about deploying a new software solution, and magic will happen. There are, there are human considerations there. And so you want to look at that change management component. So what does that look like to be able to be able to look at it. Well, first of all, I think it starts in the in the design positioning process up front, if I'm walking in from hexagon and and I'm talking to you about the value that I think you can achieve during that discussion, early discussion process, we better be having that level of business value. We better be I shouldn't just be telling we shouldn't just be having a technical deployment conversation or getting in, getting online with your architects. I want to be online. I want to be interacting with your business leaders as well your functional leaders, to say, how is this going to impact the business processes that you're trying to drive to? So now you're getting the right people from the get go, in the in the conversation. Okay, let's great. This is great. Let's move forward. Let's start deploying this now. As part of the deployment, you have to consider the adoption side of it, and you call it change management, call it adoption, but you want to look at it from a user, a usability and user adoption perspective. So how do you do that? Yeah, agreed.

11:16

You. You take a situation where I'm a crew and and I have my my my truck, my other truck I've got, I've got assets that are specific to me, running a crew and I'm going out to a specific location. And how does, how does the the EAM platform, help facilitate, make that life easier the way it normally was, was somebody give me a work order. It's a piece of paper. Somebody said, go out to this location on the corner of Main and Elm, and then that's the the construction. Make sure that you get the right, you know, the the material necessary to affect the whatever the the job, right? Yep, yep. How does, how does the am sort of streamline that miserable, fantastic

12:06

question. I'm going to break that answer down in three or four buckets. So two hexagon, a strong Em, so at the base of any am solution, a strong solution is going to have strong work management processes. So what you just said, the ability to create open a maintenance request, have that request progress to a work order. That work order being planned by the maintenance planner, eventually scheduled, eventually assigned texts or dispatch. The ability to execute across all that work, management has to be there and has to be really solid. Second piece is the ability to link that to asset hierarchies. So I want the overall assets that I have. I want to know functional location of where they are. I want to be able to know the classes that they're a part of and how I want to execute against that now I can store that in an EAM system. I can store that in the ERP system, and different customers are going to look at that differently. We can store that in hexagon EAM, and we do for a lot of our customers. Third piece you also touched on having making sure parts are available, that's getting into spare parts management, that's getting into inventory management, inventory planning. Not every EAM system has that because some EAM systems maybe have a closer tie to the larger ERP narrative. And so inventory can be their MRO is handling slightly different. But I, like a lot of our customers, like that, you can have inventory right a part of that, a couple so those are kind of some of the big pieces, but a couple of things I want to throw in there, just from a those are more process and functionality considerations, couple technology considerations as well. One is, you mentioned, hey, I got an asset out in the field, and I need to go out, and what's it going to look like when I get there? What if you could visualize while you're still in the am system? Visualize either the planner or the tech, visualize the facility that that assets a part of, and be able to look at a 3d point cloud solution, rendering that facility so a reality, something that was captured by reality capture hardware. And be able to render a point cloud solution that's ingested into EAM, associate all your assets with points in that point cloud, and be able to say now that that that whole pole, utility pole, that you're going to go out to in a certain area. We did scans of that, so I can tell you exactly what the area around it looks like, and I can point you to exactly where it is. If I'm a tech, I can actually go do that. So the ability, something we call reality viewer in our EAM has the ability to do that, and that's why companies really excited about

14:45

and that is cool. But boy, talk about a heavy lift, because let's, let's just say I, I can go down to transmission, and those are big objects. And, yeah, here's the tower. Tower, tower, tower. Look at it. Look at it. Look at it. That's fine. That's good. And then when you start talking. Talking about, let's say, a metropolitan area, which where I worked. You know now you have transmission polls, right, poll after poll after poll after poll. Then you have joint pole construction, where you have distribution and transmis and then to be able in a distribution that come on their alleys and they're everywhere.

15:25

You are recovering at

15:29

my head, my ears are bleeding inside these headphones, because that would be great, yeah, to be able to have that visual representation. But that is a heavy lift. It

15:39

is now. So we're gonna, we're gonna touch on, we're gonna add something to the equation here. So you're right as you start to get in, especially in the utilities world. So I use the term facility. So now you might, you might be in one building with four walls to your point. Now you get into the utility world. Now you're getting outside of those facilities. You're getting into open space. You're getting into acreage and miles and what have you. So that's like, goes forever. Yeah, exactly. So that is now okay with now we're going to shift from an EAM conversation to a very related networking conversation, asset networks. And so what if the everything we just talked about you had then the ability to link that EAM system to a network design and operation system. In other words, you had a network within a certain range, the acreage that we're talking about, if you're able to map all that in a design tool, and you have all your access points and your connection points from access to access, and so you're able now to go into a certain GPS area, tight you tie it into a, you know, GIS, type of view, but you're doing it for a broader perspective of just GIS. You're looking at it from overall asset management. How does that tie into the design on the front end? How does that tie into operations on the back end, once it's actually in production? The ability to be able to do that is something called Hexagon networks. So we have a second product called Hexagon networks. It is something that today, today works with Hexagon EAM, where we're going with it is absolutely tighter integration and be the ability to be able to do exactly what you just said, because that's the scenario, how we see it playing out. We want to be able to not just do it with, visualize it within facility. We want to understand the network as outside of the facility as well.

17:31

One last question, because please, my one last question about keeping current with that information. Sure like, okay, so you, you invest time, energy and effort. You're doing a great job. You're just, you're mapping this bad boy out. And I, I'm on my my pad, and I'm like, yeah, check it out. There it is that construction. Look at that. There was a dog there at that. But whatever. But then construction just continues. You have to have that workflow to be able to, you know, new construction, do that, do this, do that, and be able to get it back into the system.

18:08

Yeah, absolutely. So you touch on your touch on a couple things. So I think one is data management is a big part of that. So being able to manage the data, there's all kinds of expressions that you've heard, and the new oil and all those kind of things. It is a commodity, and you need to be able to manage that. That's a great example. You need to whether it be your asset information in your EAM system, whether it be the overall assets that you have in your broader network, Utility Network, communication, fiber network, etc. You have to be able to do those things. So managing data and having that underlying data layer is an important thing, and I definitely want to see that the other piece you mentioned construction too. I mean that that's a third product meter to throw out there. Hex con ecosystems is a project portfolio planning product. So it's the ability during construction projects to be able to tie in. How are we doing capital planning? How are we doing the overall project planning of this engagement. So now you have the construction side of it. How are we building that out? How are we tracking to that? How does that tie into some of the other things we talked about? So I mean, we could go on and on. There's an investment planning side of it. But you know what? I like you that too much, Scott, I won't talk. I

19:15

love it. I love it. All right. How do people get a hold of you a

19:21

couple ways. Probably the easiest way, though, is LinkedIn. Tom Kurtz, LinkedIn, thanks.

19:26

That's what I like. Was he? Was he giving you the wrap up? He was

19:30

very politely,

19:32

no, it wasn't. I saw him. He's wrapping his arms around that's why I don't listen to him like he was throwing out his shoulder. He's gonna get a rotator cuff problem. His His name is Tom. Reach out. That's a must. It is. He's got it, his sidekick, you know, whatever

19:51

keeps me honest, yeah, that's right. All

19:54

right. We're broadcasting right from distribute tech here in Dallas, Texas. We're brought to you by those wonderful people that seem. Siemens smart infrastructure and grid software. Go out to siemens.com siemens.com Great people, great company, great solutions. You will not be disappointed. All right, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

20:14

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. You

20:23

Yeah, I geek out on anything that's asset management, reliability, maintenance specific, but I amp it up even more so when we start talking about applying those, those tools and techniques and strategies to the utility, power, Gen transmission space, love it all. Tom Kurtz, hexagon, I tell you, hexagon. Asset life cycle intelligence is the platform powerful, powerful solutions for managing your assets in the utility, transmission and generation space. It's very cool. All right, we were at distribute tech that was a great conference. Put that on your calendar. If you are in that market, it's a must attend event. You get to meet people like Tom all his contact information out on Industrial Talk. So reach out, find out more. All right, be bold, be brave. Dear greatly. Hang out with Tom. Change the world. We're going to have another great conversation coming from distribute tech shortly. So stay tuned. You.