SUMMARY KEYWORDS

part, aftermarket, manufacturer, industrial, scott, manufacturing, automate, data, autonomous, system, podcast, email, pump, bought, company, customers, talk, assets, technology, service

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 get there. Welcome

00:22

to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining and your continued support of this platform. There's number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals such as yourself, because you're bold, brave and daring greatly. I say it all the time, you're changing lines, and you're changing the world each and every day. Thank you very much for what you do. And thank you just for being a part of this ever expanding ecosystem. In the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of Vivek Joshi, entitled is the company, we're talking about aftermarket, you're saying to yourself, Scott, I don't know what that means? Well, you've joined a podcast that can definitely explain that let's get cracking. Great conversation. There's so much with industry, there is there's just so much going on in industry never ends. It's it's, the topics never stopped coming. Anyway, a couple of points of note that I want you to put on your calendar, at least, you know, we do webcasts. And we have a number of webcasts out on Industrial Talk, we have a new series that we're going to be working with hexagon. And it is future proofing manufacturing a roadmap to resilience and efficiency. It's a three part series. And we've already put one in the can, it's going to be coming out shortly. I don't know when it's going to come out. But it's going to be coming out shortly. And I highly recommend it was great. A lot of meat to it, a lot of meat to it. The other point that I want to at least put in your your mind. And that is Industrial Talk is features other podcasts. So if you want to be on Industrial Talk, you don't have to be on and does your talk or my podcast, which you have no problem. Yeah, you know, you want to be on a podcast. That's great. Go out to Industrial Talk. But if you are, if you have your own podcast, did you want to amplify that podcast on a platform that is, shall I say the Spotify of podcasts, industrial podcast, Industrial Talk, feature, front page, front page homepage. And, and then we'll chirp about your podcasts all day long and say, Hey, go check out this. And just all you have to do is just talk to me if you have a podcast that you're trying to get some traction on. And you would like to do that. And it's industrial related. Consider being out on Industrial Talk, and it'll be right there. Let's have a conversation. Go out to Industrial Talk and connect with me. All right. Nope, with the plugs. Okay, we're gonna have a conversation. It is about aftermarket. We have a lot of me to get to. And definitely a paper and pencil. A lot of great information. But enjoy this particular chitchat with Vivek Joshi. Vivek, welcome to Industrial Talk. How are you doing today? Thank you very much for joining this podcast. How are you doing?

03:35

Excellent. You know, it's a beautiful day in Austin, Texas. I can't complain. It's beautiful weather and this time of the year is a nice tend to be here in Austin. My

03:42

son Toodles. around Austin, you have a lot of great food places as well as coffee shops. Because he takes

03:49

pictures so lots of coffee shop. Coffee, lots of good breweries.

03:57

It's it's one of my top towns to go visit and enjoy food. The downtown there's a great there's a great wall Hockin while Hockin restaurant downtown. Awesome. Very unique, very delicious. Don't ask me to I don't know

04:22

the name of the name. Okay. All right.

04:23

Well, Hakan, I had a hard enough time remembering while Hockin because it is unique in that sense. So it is downtown. All right. Before we get into the conversation and listeners, we're going to be talking I'm looking on his trusty form that I have before me. Autonomous aftermarket. I have no idea what that is. But we're gonna find out what that means. Before we get into that particular topic, the vague give us a little background on who you are. Great.

04:53

Thank you, Scott, for having me today. Appreciate it. myself. I'm a engineer by training but a few Illumina debt. And over the last 30 years, I've been in and around manufacturing companies primarily doing murals everything from running a factory floor or running a sales and marketing outfit running services and marketing a large industrial companies to eventually starting a couple of enterprises of my own one is a, a roll up have a bunch of industrial instrumentation companies that are put together many years ago and would then be sold it. And then most recently, about a decade ago, I started the software company. So now our software founder, even though I'm not a software engineer, so primarily around what I would call b2b and industrial companies, his bulk of my career,

05:36

the company's name is in title, that's e n, t, y, t le, so make a note of that listener. But everything will be out on Industrial Talk. So we're not, you know, you'll be able to connect with this particular company as well. Just for to level set. The term aftermarket, gets bandied back and forth and around and all of that stuff. Can you sort of help us define what that means?

06:04

Yeah, you know, when you do a Google search on aftermarket, the first 15, things that show will probably something to do with aftermarket parts for cars, right? That's typically where the phrase Yes. So that's the one part of it. But what has happened in the last decade, or maybe 15 years is that phase of inappropriate it into what are called broadly speaking, the post sales activities, in parts, service consumables and other things that a manufacturer would do, to the, to the asset to the product of Solon, typically, business or business situations as well. So while the origin was the automotive business has really now become a bigger play for machinery makers, equipment makers, who talk about quote, unquote, aftermarket and service sales, which is really a post sale lifecycle. So that's kind of where we play in our space today.

06:53

So use me as an example, I have a manufacturer, I'm a manufacturer, and I have equipment, and the pumps, valves, whatever it might be, you're saying that I can find aftermarket valves and parts that might meet my needs, and I don't have to go buy new I can buy something that's aftermarket Is that Is that what you're saying?

07:19

08:41

Oh, that is interesting. How do you? And yeah, there's a topic, we're gonna be talking about it but I'm more intrigued with the business model itself. Yeah. How do you say I'm a baker, Hughes, GE, whatever it might be? I have equipment that's out there in the marketplace, all over the world, just everywhere? How do you begin that process of identifying these these assets that I've just lost track of, and then be able to determine the quality of that assets so that there's a, there's a value attached to it? How do you how do you begin that journey?

09:22

11:10

let's say I'm a manufacturer, you come knocking on my door, what what's in it for me if I have all of this and these embedded assets, and I've been in business for 60 years, saying, Sure, come on in and title and take a look at my assets and come up with a picture. Here's my data. Here's my ERP, here's my all here's here it is.

11:35

Yes, yeah. So the business case is very straightforward, right? Traditionally, manufacturers have been what I would call reactive, they wait for the phone during the wait for the email to come and say, hey, my pump failed, I need a new impeller, my pump failed I need to the shaft or whatever it could be the hypothesis or the thesis, we have a saying look, it pays for you to be proactive in reaching out to your customer base. Because a by definition, the people who come to you will come to you because a they like you or they think they are the only game in town. But be there's a large portion anywhere from 60 to 80%, that just simply goes to the guy down the street, or the competitor or third party product to go to the park now, Mister manufacturing CEO, if you care for this, you may want to set a proactive engine to go after this because there's a lot of money to get made. In fact, you could systematically improve the penetration of your customer base and installed base, you can sell them more parts and services, which by the way, a high margin. So you not only get revenue growth, but you get high profit margin growth. And that if you pay attention to valuations, and most investors pay attention to profit growth, margin growth and recurrent revenue growth, which is really what a puzzle an aftermarket revenue stream does for you. So that's the theory of the case. But what's interesting, Scott is that found out is that convincing, somebody of that is too hard. So what we've figured out is a way to qualify the prospects who are already as making the journey start, and they need technology to make it better, faster, cheaper, right? So I got out of the convincing somebody to go to this game, because it's just a hard game to go, we just have to make this simpler, which

13:09

then segues into our conversation, which is interesting, because what I heard in the past few minutes, is that it's it's a collection of information information is where it's at, right? The data that exists on assets for these aftermarket products. So give us give us the definition of autonomous aftermarket, I don't understand what that means. Right. And

13:40

so autonomous aftermarket is, candidly a phrase, we made up playing on his whole autonomous vehicle idea. But if you take autonomous and break it down at what I'm really proud to say is like, look, most companies need to have some form of automatic, intelligent and independent system that makes life easier for the employees. And you know, Scott, what I can tell you is that manufacturing in the US, like I said, I've been in manufacturing for about 32 years right now in the US. The workforce is not just aging, but it's retiring in droves. And the generations behind us aren't coming into the into the manufacturing industry as much as we'd like them to see. I've seen that now for a good solid 15 years. And I think that crisis is just getting worse. And so how are you going to bridge the gap of the crisis you know, you're not going to go in poor people, you're not going to go retrain people. If you can take work off their off their tables if you can make their lives easier. By automating and making mundane and routine work go away to technology can you can take some data and make it intelligent by predicting certain things that automatically send an email out and so on and so forth. Right? So the idea is to take advantage of technology that exists today and make life easier for the manufacturers so they can indeed continue to thrive and survive and grow. Which I think candidly as a manufacturing guys you are you're probably seeing the same thing I am which is so huge. crisis coming into us right now in the manufacturing world. And so that the idea is make your aftermarket autonomous for two reasons. One is, you know, those customers they bought from you. So it's not like you're gonna go hunt for them, they've already bought from you have the records in your system. And so therefore, let's just automate and make intelligent and make independent, those processes that should just be simple things like reminders, automatic offers, you know, automatic text support these text things that you will see these days where they go back and forth. On our consumer side, there's a lot of this intelligent autonomous autonomous have going on. So that's the that's the idea behind this thing here.

15:35

So you can I understand you're absolutely spot on. When you start talking about the workforce and the challenges in the workforce. And I'm just a manufacturer I've been around, I'm not backfilling, like, I need to backfill but but there are there's automation that can be deployed or effectively put in place to be able to sort of make that happen. So the use case that I hear is, is that instead of me being human being and I'm trying to figure out, hey, Acme, whatever, making that contact, you're saying I'm automating that, is that correct?

16:17

17:58

So I come knocking on your door. And I'm all I'm all in to this autonomous approach to mundane work in a sense. How quickly if I come knocking, I'm sure it's all relative. I got it. Yeah, you know, but if I, if I go down this road, can I incrementally do it? Or do I have to? You know, is it a big bang, and you're coming in, you're gonna look at all this stuff? How does that look? To me?

18:33

That's a great question. So the short answer is that it does not need to be a big bank, but as we see is a small banks. And what I mean by that is, you may say, this is a tire on this product line in the North American sector, for example. And so it's a great, let's get all the data for this particular product line and out of North America, as much history as you can, so you can make sure the models worked correctly for predictions, we've automated the email flows for that product line can go test all these things out. That's probably a two month effort, it's got to get to get the first things working correctly, because you're testing information or validating and you'd be surprised or not surprised, having been in manufacturing, that almost 100% of our customers we work with give us dirty data, which means it's not reconcile across systems had lots of errors in the situation, cleansing deduplication all that stuff. It takes time to get all that done. And let the Eldorado Resorts I'd say two months before you see the first output and then there's always you know, validation Yeah, did this thing work correctly? Did this not retrain people correctly with the model get trained correctly, there's not a month or so. So my estimation typically is from day one. About month three is when it when you should be able to start making the first money for me.

19:41

And for me, Sam, Acme manufacturer, again, and I received these emails. I'm not asking for the my customers to do anything different if they've said, Hey, I've got a pump x, y, z. Looking to replace it, whatever what Never the communication is it all? I don't have it's

20:04

all automated and it's all automated at the manufacturers and so the customer should not have to worry about anything. In fact, the email missile got from Scott saying thank you very much very much Mr. Customer at Acme here's the quote you asked for and you're in the email dated XYZ date. Right. So there's so much intelligence you can build into it these days. It's actually amazing frightening at the same time.

20:26

Yeah, I anything to tool eliminate inefficiencies. And there's, there's there's a ton of inefficiencies out there. There's a ton.

20:41

We're done. I was off the market.

20:44

Yeah. What do you see it going? What are you? But you've been in business for 10 years? Plus?

20:49

Yep. About 10 years now. Yep. Doing

20:53

doing this exact same thing,

20:57

with a version of autonomous without calling and autonomous. So we first started as a predictive recommendation engine. So we would look at all this data and say, Geez, I think Scott McFarlane bought this pump, eight years ago, he should have done these three things. My prediction is in the next 90 days is going to need these three parts, go contact him. So we were basically using some form of intelligence, if you may, to say to our manufacturing customer, here's Scott McFarlane, go talk to him about these three parts, because he should have done a, b and c. And then based on the data, we got back those enough machine learning algorithms and says, that is a wrong recommendation, because XYZ or no, we saw that order in the two weeks ago. So ignore that. And so we've already built intelligence layer, if you may, to make this thing happen. Now, I'm saying well, wait a minute, I can complete the process by taking in jet AI, and some other technology then kind of blend all this together to say, take the email, take a look at the drawing, take a look at the PLM system, take out all this stuff and go back to Scotland saying, Scott, here's an answer to your quality request, for example. So it's an evolution of that journey. If you don't, yeah,

21:58

but you still do that too. Because I would imagine that in the world of digital transformation, IoT, all of that ability to have devices out on assets, to have that intellectual capability of seeing into that asset and say, hey, it's starting to display some degradation, whatever it might be. That's right. And then be proactive and saying, hey, it looks like that pump is beginning to degrade in some way, shape, or form.

22:26

Absolutely. So those are the kinds of things which, you know, it should be something that we should all think about, partly because of the labor shortage, partly because candidly, what's happening, Scott is just like he talked about his son, tooling around Austin, go to coffee bars, and listen, that the generation that's coming back coming into the workforce now does not have the patience to deal with the nonsense that you and I dealt with, in what are called his green screens and this cumbersome system that we have, they're just, they want to pick this phone up and just like, do two things and immediately get a response to it. Right. And so there has to be this investment people have to do to just make it simpler and easier for the user as well,

23:01

I think. Yeah, I think the focus on simplicity, it gets it gets absurd some times where if, if it's two clicks, I don't want to, I just want one click, you know, a click. And it's down to that level.

23:17

It is it is the weakest point. Yeah. But the interesting thing about this is, it's not like I tell people, it's not like I fell out of bed one morning thinking about this and saying, Well, I have this crazy idea. Yeah, we've all been making progress towards this in bits and pieces and fits and starts. But what's interesting, in every situation, there has to be some maybe seminal event or some technology changes, something happens that makes us possible, you know, years ago, for us in the field, it was phone, like GPS enabled phone, camera all so just made it easier for field service. I think now this whole evolution, we started in the last year and a half with Gen AI, we can read and understand and parse to massive amounts of text information to automatically put things together is really those one of those big inflection points. So you have huge amounts of data. Now you have this crazy technology that makes it easier. And I think that's one of those things are unlocking this opportunity, right? Because people have thought about this idea that I mentioned, is like in title and I came up with this idea people had this similar notions, but now technology is making this is making feasible fine. Yeah,

24:21

it was sort of weird. And it was sort of this tipping point. When it came to chat, GBT was just like, one day, everybody's talking about it. This would be great to be able to do and then here's Chet GPT, sort of that tipping point and then all of a sudden it just exploded. And so you know, Gen AI, just just and now how do you apply it? How do you how do you sort of hold that tiger by the tail to make it you know, workable for me that's that's what are the roadblocks, but it sounds like it's the right thing to do. It's it's what I mean, it seems like a no brainer. What's your roadblocks? Well,

25:04

I think a few things right. First and foremost, even though Jen has advanced a lot, it's not it's not good to dig into topia, there's a lot more things to get done. You know, buyer beware. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is, it goes back to something you as you introduce yourself to me, Scott, you've been in manufacturing, I've been manufacturing for a long time. There's an element of what I would call inertia that many manufacturers haven't said, Yeah, that's fine. Let somebody else deal with it first, right. So there's a there's a lag effect of manufacturing, I think that's going to be a big part of the slowdown. The second thing is people will think it'll solve all problems, and it won't. So you have to pick and choose what problems you're a soul, and be pragmatic about them. And the third thing is, you know, as I learned long term over 30 years ago, and one of my early jobs is people said, No moonshots no moonshots, please write. So you can't make this this about this crazy big transformation. But you have a couple of small things you got to start implementing to go along the way. I think if you if you can overcome those, I think you'll see success, but it's not a it's not tomorrow's journey, it's still gonna take time. But if you don't invest today, the progress you should see three years from now, five years from now will be a decade from now, by which time? You know, lord knows it'll be you know, not personal Netflix, Kodak digital camera effect. Right. I mean, there's some fundamental existential issues, I think, yeah, I think

26:25

it's a no brainer. I think you have to you have to pursue innovation. I think the big rub for many is, I think there's an acceptance that I have to have to consider doing business a different way. But who do I trust to help me along on that journey? It's it always gets down to that, because there's, there's a ton of people hanging their shingles out and saying, We can do it. And it might be just a rabbit hole that you don't want to go down to. But But I, I believe in my conversations that I've had, there is this need to innovate, and and deploy the technology in a way that helps me to be more of a resilient business? Absolutely. But I got to trust somebody bad speaking of trust, if I trust you, how do I get a hold of you? What would be the best way to get a hold of you? Oh,

27:21

well, the best way to get a hold of us is on a website, you could contact us at important title.com Or just contact me at the Ric Dojo sheet and title accom. And I think you have my email address. And maybe we can publish it as part of a transcript notes. But it's, it's the best way to contact us as we go out on LinkedIn after the website. I'm on LinkedIn, I believe Joshi such a good find me there,

27:44

I always gravitate to the LinkedIn stack card. Thank you. All right, listeners, we're gonna wrap it up on this side, we're gonna have all the contact information for pay for the bake out on Industrial Talk. So if you're not reach out, you need trusted individuals in your corner to be able to help you along on this journey. So stay tuned, we will be right back.

28:08

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

28:17

There you have it, all about aftermarket. It's just got to find out more you got to reach out to the back and have a conversation. Simple as that go out to Industrial Talk, reach out to him, his contact information, his stat card at LinkedIn is out there. We'd love to have a chit chat with you a couple of action items. As mentioned at the beginning. One, we have a webcasts that are coming up with hexagon, future proofing manufacturing, a roadmap to resilience and efficiency. Be on the lookout for that. And then finally, if you have a podcast and industrial podcast, and you want to get more attention and you want to gain more followers, consider being on Industrial Talk the Industrial Talk platform. It's simple. You have a conversation with me. And then the enemy will make it happen. But you have to be committed. None of this because you're committed to the industrial space. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Vivek and you will change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly so stay tuned.