Shownotes
In this episode of the Industrial Talk Podcast, Kevin Price, Technical Product Evangelist and Product Strategist at Infor, dives deep into the future of Enterprise Asset Management (“EAM”) solutions. Kevin draws from his extensive EAM experience of the past and lays out a bright and exciting future of a dynamic InforEAM, Mobility and Cloud solutions. Find out more about Kevin by the links below and reach out to connect. Also, get your free InforEAM Toolkit and exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy. Both links designed for keeping you current in a rapidly changing Industrial Market. Enjoy!
KEVIN PRICES'S CONTACT INFORMATION:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevineprice/
Infor EAM: https://www.infor.com/about/contact
YOUR INFOR EAM TOOLKIT:
Click on the InforEAM Toolkit picture above and receive the following “Must Have” EAM reports:
- 7 Steps for implementing reliability-based maintenance
- 10 steps toward a paperless operation with mobile EAM checklist
- Asset intensive industries, finding the straightest path to the cloud
- EAM vs CMMS, don't get fooled
- Infor EAM Brochure
- Infor EAM Overview
- 9 fleet management challenges and how to resolve
PODCAST VIDEO:
Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access and One Free Licence for Future Industrial Leader):
OTHER PODCAST RESOURCES:
Mr. Ruben Stancel Discusses building a Seamless EAM platform
Industrial Leadership: Overcoming Failure!
Podcast Transcript:
[00:02] [inaudible].
[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.
[00:21] All right, let's go. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast. My name is Scott MacKenzie, so glad that you are here. You industrial juggernaut. You have joined the number one industrial podcast in the universe. I'm pretty confident about that as I look at the guest here and Martin. Anyway. Yeah, thank you very much. We're going to have another wonderful conversation with a gentleman by the name of Kevin Price. He is within forum. We're going to talk, we're going to, of course, we're going to talk about the future. We're going to talk about the past. We're going to talk about the solutions that in four camp provide and why he is such a spectacular resource, so hang on. It'll be a great conversation. All right, Kevin, it's all about you right now. 100% and now you're going to have to make me work for this because this is the Mike and you're about five feet away from it. No, I've got to work with professionals, Kevin, and we're going to have to work with that. I get it. So Kevin, now, how long have you been with [inaudible]? Tell us a little bit about your background, where you come from and why you're such an incredible professional.
[01:25] Absolutely. So I started in the enterprise asset management space in 1997 so 22 years. Geez, that's uh Huh.
[01:34] Hey, it wasn't a pretty system back then. Oh, of course. At least challenges to say it as best. Yeah. When I came into the market, we're
[01:41] still actually working with DOS systems and there was a system out there that we had called maintenance pack running on Dawson. It was with data stream at the time and we started working with some Microsoft development funds and they said, man, it would be great if you took the application and put it into this thing that we have called windows 95 and 98 and would be wonderful for us to do that. So we did, we upgraded it from what we had in dos, we put it into windows environment and we were going to call it maintenance professional again. But we already did that. We needed a two somethings. So we shorten it down to two and launched that out a long time ago. And then more money came from Microsoft. We did some things on the active server pages that were popular at the time and did the thing.
[02:21] I was mobile and just kept moving on and on and on and any brought it here pretty much 2006 when we were acquired by n four. So it was an interesting day. It was itchy from the standpoint of back then. Uh, we were in the process of doing things on the web because in 2001, we took our applications, we modernized them and then made them available on the web. So we were one of the first people to offer a multitenant SAS product at the time. And Oh, absolutely. It was wonderful because we were thinking this is going to be the wave of the future. This is an opportunity for us to be able to take it application, make it available in a subscription way so that we could take the onus off of somebody installing it locally. So we did that a while. We kept developing that and it was because of the architecture that really got us there. We decided to make a database, do what a database does and store information. We decided to take the presentation, do what presentation does, and just make it look good and integration and built out in a big way. And for lucky, for us, it really worked out. The architecture proved positive.
[03:17] Well, I'm telling you, you are, you're ahead of your time because now that's what everybody talks about today. In a sense that SAS at that solution, that cloud, all of the steps associated with that and you guys were ahead of it,
[03:29] you bet. But it was a bit of a gamble because at the time a lot of people were tarring their horse to different types of structure, different types of architecture. They were going against the oracle model or they go in against the Microsoft DNA model and all these other types of things. We just wanted a way that would make it available for many different platforms, meaning browsers, whether it's going to be chrome or internet explorer or safari or what have you. We didn't want to be tied to the front end and the back end. We wanted to scale in a big way. We want it to be our own. We wanted to though, important factors. We want it to be a product. We didn't want it to turn into a bunch of platform development pieces. So to do that we had, we had a modernize
[04:06] like a just a cohesive product. It's like, yeah, or here it is. Not exactly, we didn't want to be similar. That was a project. We always call it our product versus project because we don't want you to have to be in a situation where we give you a code set right now. You gotta develop it on site and then you get to have certain types of resources available. We wanted it to be a cohesive set of product. And you know that, that, that, that mindset that what you just described is why people have a sour taste in their mouth. You Bet. When, when you go to a potential client, a prospect and say, hey, we've got a great solution for you. What is it? Oh, it's the, oh no, thank you. We went down that road a couple of times and, and uh, I've, I'm balled because of it, so I don't, I blame you. I'm ugly because of you and it's not, has, it has nothing to do with you. It's just that's the experience that people,
[04:53] well, you bet. In the competitive space. It also meant that they would focus on certain areas of the product but not others. As an example, you'll find mobility was an external add on. It was an external thing for us, man, mobile is is who we are. When you go out in the field, you're doing work, you need something with you. If I can get that technician to actually record as they work instead of workforce and den record, I immediately say them between 45 and 50 minutes a day.
[05:17] It it, it, it makes complete sense. There was no argument to say no. I'd like it the older other way because the, the technology, the ability, the hardware that is there ready to go and if I'm at the asset or whatever that thing is and I start got that done. Real time visibility into whatever you're looking at. Absolutely. Yeah.
[05:40] Be able to do a lot of things. I mean just because it's a digital component now you have dropdown selection, you have radio button selection, you have complete audit trail support for it. Now. In the past, it used to be really seen as a big brother type of thing. We were doing an implementation long ago when we did mobility, we did it an old windows format, and we would document where that technician was because we would say, okay, it was done at this particular location. That means it was done here. Well over time, what we started noticing is that a lot of technicians were doing work at the same location every Thursday. And we're like, oh my God, why is that? Why are they doing it every Thursday? The reason why is because the guy that was there, he also had a kitchen. He had really good Chili.
[06:18] So we had a bunch of technicians that were bushing in their time at that particular location. And then all of a sudden we found that out when we reported it and we let them know it was big brother and now all they're not going to touch this piece of equipment, not gonna touch this mobile device anymore. So in the past it used to be, it used to be seen as a game, as a tool or a big brother aspect to their lives and now it's expected, especially as you get people out of college and they're used to using
[06:43] the solutions are ready. Yeah, and that, that, that ability to adopt quickly. You Bet. I mean, ed, let's say a few years ago, let's say five, 10 whatever years ago, it's that adoption it maybe the technology was pretty superior at the time. It's still, I don't want to go down that road. I don't want to do that.
[07:03] It's tough to find trades that are coming out of school right now. It really is. It's a lot of industries, but the ones that are coming out, they're coming out with the expectation that I can do this and mobile already, that I can do this in a tablet already that I don't need to have to go back to another. The last thing you want to find out. It's coming out of school where you have all these advanced techniques and you come and a guy goes, yeah, I realized he'd been doing things on mobile. We get this green screen that I want you to be able to type everything in. It's just not gonna happen.
[07:26] It isn't and it shouldn't because I don't think that, I mean, come on, if you have a green screen, I think there's other problems we've got to sort of address because that does it
[07:39] thing of the past or, yeah. Yup. The other thing too, there's a focus on the past that we really didn't focus on, but we do now is usability. The idea of usability. To give you an idea, just on the mobile concept and usability, back in 2012 we were rolling out our first iPad application. Now we've done other ones before. We've done windows environments. We've done the big bricks that used to be used. We should call them a long time ago. Okay.
[08:00] Didn't like, uh, was there, there was a PR Panasonic tough book. Tough book up. Oh yeah. Those. Those things were amazing at one. Those things are military grades here, brother. So what happened is this
[08:14] is, we were going through it. We're like, we're going to make this, we're going to relaunch it. We're going to do a new code set. We're going to make it highly usable. I want to get it to the point where it's just like an ATM. I can be able to put my card in. I get them. I didn't have to be taught that. I can just pick it up. I want to do that with work management applications. So we rolled it out. You log in, it's the same login that you have when you log into the browser. You download your work for the day, you can update your activity, book your materials, do different things. This is going to be great. It's easy. So I was thinking, you know, my daughter right now is eight years old. I'm going to take it to her if she can use it.
[08:44] If she can pick it up and use it and understand what I'm talking about, then I've won. Right. So I walked in, I saw I had to translate a little bit for the eight year old. I had to say, okay, let's just imagine that Mama's car breaks down. I have to go out and fix it. So I'm going to, I've walked her through it. I said, I'm going to open it up, opened up the work order. I went to the piece of equipment. I said I'm going to get a new tire. I'm going to put it in. And then when I got to the, to the, the comments, I'm going to write notes. I'm going to tell her what happened so that she can come back and see it. And then the first thing I started pulling up the keyboard started typing it in. The first thing she said was, Daddy, why you gotta type in your iPad?
[09:15] I don't have to type my iPad. And I thought for a second, you're absolutely right. You shouldn't have to type it. You should speak to it and it should hear you and it should write down the words that you're saying. And at the time this was a thing that was just expected because she could do it in her application, and this is a thing. At the time though, it was a Siri control and you had to put the development framework and you had to roll it in. Right now these types of things are commonplace. You're right. I should be able to open up now. I can open up my phone, I can go to my work order, I'd go to my comments, I could tell you what's wrong with it and it just automatically types of donuts. It records it. So a lot of these feature functions that are just nuances that you're not expecting or demanding, they should be there.
[09:52] They should be already there. You don't think about a lot of those things. When I log into the application, I should use my face. I should have face Id. I should be able
