SUMMARY KEYWORDS

industry, data, brent, people, companies, connected, hexagon, connectivity, steel, conversation, specialist, ecosystem, steel mills, industrial, engineer, pipeline, operations, worker, find, humans

00:03

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

As always, thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk. And thank you very much for your continued support of a platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world, you are bold, brave, you dare greatly you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems all the time. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk, we have a great conversation we're going to be it's a bit of a lengthy conversation. So I'm going to make the intro relatively short, however, we're going to be talking about the human condition, the evolving human condition in the workplace. I know, as I point to you, you are always challenged with how do we find the right workforce? How do we retain our skilled individuals? That's what we're talking about. Let's get cracking. His name is Brent. Hexagon is the company. Anyway, it's a it's a good conversation, a lot of meat to it. We were on site we were at, at a conference. And so it's it's sort of one of those quasi conference interviews that we did over the world wide web, the internet. But it was still a great conversation. And Brent just hit it out of the park. All right. One plug for Industrial Talk, you got to go out there, you got to go to Industrial Talk.com. And just get engaged. Just say, Scott, I want to get engaged on this ecosystem. Because we have a expanding group of professionals that want to collaborate, want to continue to educate, you need to be a part of that you need to contribute to that. content development. Of course, innovation is the name of the game too, as well. A lot of conversations wrapped up in innovation. It's happening. And and the only way that I know, the only way is that if you continue to educate yourself, find those individuals, those trusted Sherpas that you can collaborate with, so that you can innovate properly. Yet, it's important for your business, your business resilience. Absolutely. All right. As I said, we have a fairly lengthy conversation. So I'll keep this intro short. We go into a lot of detail so paper and pencil on this conversation. And I know that you and many others in Valmont, my conversations talk about how do I retain How do I tract? How do I get the skilled individuals that I need to just maintain business continuity at a minimum? Brent brings that all to the table. So enjoy this conversation with Brent. Brent, welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining. How are you doing today?

02:58

Hey, it's great to be here. I'm doing well today. The weather is perfect for me. So thanks for asking,

03:04

Where's home.

03:06

Home is Blue Ridge, Georgia. I'm a mountain man half year. And then I'm a beach guy the other half. So I go out and North Carolina out in the beach, the other half of the year when it's warm and the waves are spinning. Well,

03:19

if you're out here on Video listener, then you see that I have some glass behind me. I'm on site here in Orlando. So just keep that in mind. Don't be distracted by people walking behind me. It just is what it is. There. I I've cleared out the room for you. All right, before we get into the conversation, please tell the listeners a little bit about who Brent is a little background.

03:47

Rebecca well, a little background, as you'll hear when I when I talk and I've got a little bit of a accent and it's uh, you know, from 35 years outside of Pittsburgh, I was in DC for a long time. But I grew up in Pittsburgh around the steel mills. I was just doing genealogy the other day. It all my grandfather's all my uncles, everybody that was in my family all worked in steel mills. And so I've got a lot of family pictures of guys and steel mills and even some of my grandmother's working in factories and things like that. So really gave me a love. Give me a love for the working person and what it meant to work in coal mines, steel mills factories, and I did that all grown up through high school and college and finally worked my way out of the smog and the smoke and made my way to DC to start my career doing all stuff human.

04:42

So interesting. I had a fortunate opportunity to take a tour of I want to say to Defasco That would be up in Hamilton, Ontario. What I remember as a young lad, because my uncle worked there was one the heat Heat. The it just was amazing, hot, right? And then to the skill of just what went into just manufacturing steel. And it was just it was just a memory that lasts is just stuck with me. But I would just remember the heat, there was an ingot on a on a rail, just off in a distance, and we're driving by, and I could feel the heat coming off of that ingot.

05:31

Oh, yeah, it's amazing when you really dig into it. I mean, I had an uncle, it's so Brixton re factories in steel mills and my family. My grandfather was a stud aluminum polisher, and you know, laid on his stomach and all kinds of crazy things that when you get into, you know what it's like to work in steel mills and things like that. It's

05:55

it's, it's impressive. It really is, it's impressive, and the quality of the steel and everything else. Before we get into the topic real real quick. I want I want everybody to level set, because we're talking about the, I want to say the human element associated with, with many businesses in industry, one of the areas that I've just it's sort of a, it's an observation, but if you can, you can definitely bring some light. A lot of people still to this day, don't know about hexagon.

06:31

That's Well, that's true. I mean, Exelon has been around for a while. And you know, they really tried to build a connected worker portfolio. And they've done this to, you know, organic growth and a lot of acquisition to, you know, when they find a gap in the industry, they try to acquire that, that capability. And it's surprising most of your audience won't know, but you know, hexagon, that product suite, some of it, more of it, less of it, you know, all of it is used in over half of oil, gas and chemical organizations to help them become more efficient and effective. So, you know, this is one of the things that probably needs to get out there a bit more is how big hexagon really is, in terms of its its density and penetration into the market. Yeah, I

07:22

went to the user event in Vegas this past year. And what jumped out in for D was the innovation that hexagon leads. I mean, they just, there's so much innovation, it's wild to hear about it. And you go wow, I just the future is now you know, that type of statement. But amazing stuff. Yeah, no, go ahead. No,

07:52

08:35

us define connected worker that That, to me is sort of nebulous. But what do you mean by that? Right? Well,

08:41

12:26

see, this is what's interesting. It let's say I'm a I'm Joe manufacturer, I own a company. And it's Joe manufacturing, and we manufacturing things. And I've been in business for 20 years, and I am, I'm feeling the pinch of trying to find people to keep my process rolling. And then I'm being inundated by the fact that I need to be connected in some way, shape, or form. What does that mean to me? Where do I start? What's more important to me? And it's, it's like, a confused mind doesn't make any decision. I'm confused. So I don't know where to go. I don't know who to trust. I know. And then you get the marketplace that you find people who hang shingles out and say, Yeah, we're all about collecting data off of assets. And, and maybe they're not, but I don't have the bandwidth. How do you deal with that?

13:18

See, this is why it's a great observation. And this is why you need people that are more expert and specialized. So for example, you know, the first phase, when they first introduced cyber, physical connectivity, and all these all these abilities, Blockchain, drone sensors, what they did as they wanted to get people out of harm's way, and they wanted to get rid of the doll work, the dirty work, the dangerous work, that demanding work, you know, and the difficult work for humans to do. So, you know, the first thing they did is, you know, vendors would come in and said, Well, we can help you get people out of, you know, heights or confined spaces, or we can help you know, where it's really repetitive, and you really want better quality and consistency and how things go. That's the first level. But then, you know, you get people worrying about automation take over and taking their jobs. And that's where they have to be really smart to learn when to optimize through automation, when to human aid, or, you know, human eyes to really people centric work. And then when the cobalt, and this is the problem we're at now is most companies and this even happened when I was at Shell, you know, people understanding the algorithm to say, When is the flow so when is it what characteristics make work best to automate human aid and Cobots? And that's where there's a lot of lack of expertise in industry. And again, you know, this is what happens because I have this big thing I did. I grew up in the, you know, working in late 80s and 90s. So Business Process Engineering was a big thing back then you TQM productivity management, all those kind of things, those things people could get by doing their day job and contributing to a business process reengineering team or TQM. Team. Today, it's a hell of a lot more complex. And you can't take a person, you can't take Joe and Jane, and say you're gonna give me four hours a week, and we're gonna put in connected ecosystems, it takes a, it takes a bigger village to do that. And so that's why even companies, or if you ask most company, you survey them, you're gonna get that confusing. You talked about, I'll ask people who owns your connected worker ecosystem? And they'll say, Well, I don't know. Is it HR? Is it is it operations? Is it finance? I don't know who owns it? Who's got the hot potato?

15:47

I don't know. I don't I don't. I don't think that there's clarity behind that. But I know that for a lot of

15:53

companies, and they don't have the strategy. Yeah, they've got the tactics. But you know, the tactics are easy, because tactics don't always connect the form strategy. And it's just like, a lot of the vendors, you know, and I know, hexagon, for example, works hard not to sell single point solutions. But here's what happens in this connected ecosystem industry. Because most companies don't have a head of connected ecosystems or head of connectivity. You know, various people have their own little fight thumb. So they can go with a vendor to launch. And the vendor can say, I can give you a single point solutions, take care of your one issue. So then what happens is, all these single point solutions get implemented, because the vendors say, Well, it's a hell of a lot easier for me to push through and sell a single point solution than an end to end solution. And the company say, Well, I don't have anybody that owns and then solution. So we buy all these single point solutions that create the clutter, you talked about.

16:55

Yeah, seeing and just that, that scenario, where you get the single point solutions, and there's multiple types, and it's got these little, it's, it's, it's laying out confusion, it's, it's not optimal by any means. And you're not going to achieve and this is where the bad part comes, you're not going to achieve the the efficiencies that are being touted by having connect it being connected. The other I own it is is the cybersecurity, right? Cyber, it's I've heard stories, Brent of companies, like all right, all I need is this device, I'll stick it out on this asset, it starts, it starts, you know, pinging data. And of course, data is a whole nother conversation. Is it good data, clean data? You know, scrub data, whatever it might be data? And is it delivering the accuracy that I want. But then I'm putting all these devices out there thinking because somebody said, I need to, now I have these multiple points where I've got penetration, that potential penetration, that's not good, either.

18:03

Well, here's the thing. I mean, if you look at, you look at companies, like I'll go to a lot of big companies and work with them, they'll have five different technology platforms for procedure management, you know, they'll they'll have a learning ecosystem has a learning management system of learning content management system, a learning experience platform, you know, you know, a learning data platform. And so they'll have all these different platforms that they have to figure out how they coordinate. And this is what's happening is we're not, we're not integrating with a bigger strategy. And the same thing, when I talk and I get most asked, most companies do that maturity model that I gave you, did it digital integration? Well, jobs that are needed. Integration might be an Internet of Things specialist, a Data Integration Specialist. If I go to companies today, and I say, how many inner IoT specialists do you have? Zero? How many integration specialists do you have? Zero. So what's happening is, as this technology is evolving, we're not creating the jobs fast enough to say, if we're gonna do this, you know, we're gonna we need to have a data scientist, we need to have a business intelligence analyst. And we don't have those roles to do those things. Because people still doing it hobby ism, or just, you know, patch patch work that oh, yeah, we're finding out we need this. See,

19:27

that is an other excellent point. We just don't have the people we just don't have them. They're the speed. There's this velocity that exists in the world of connected anything, right? It's just fast, and things are changing so drastically and every company is looking for that, that leverage that, that opportunity to create greater value in some way, shape, or form. And I know that if my competition is ahead of me in that regard, then I've got a disadvantage and so But with all that said, it's a challenge got it? Right. What what do you recommend companies? Let's say Scott manufacturing, what what do you recommend?

20:10

Well, here's the thing. If you look at our, our ecosystem for our pipelines, our talent pipeline, you know, my son is a process engineer at Eli Lilly, went to Georgia Tech became a chemical engineer doing great. Now, in the world, hey, because of all these emerging technologies, and all this new data, we maybe have out a university process optimization specialists that go a little bit more specialized and just overall process engineer, should we have simulation engineers, robotic engineers, predictive maintenance specialists, you know, AI and machine learning engineers. And, you know, so this is the thing is that if you really need to dig into things deeper, because they're becoming more complex, with a, a sense making of data that you need to, you know, make make sense out of, do we have the people that are specialized enough to optimize what these new technologies are offering? So I sometimes still feel that to disconnect. You. Yeah, because what happens is you take a process engineer or chemical engineer, and that's a big umbrella. But then you ask them, maybe this month, will we be good at more like a robotics engineer, or maybe more of a process optimization specialist? I mean, is that big enough? You know, really? Number one, could we make the industries more interesting and attract more people? If we started to do this kind of specialization, you know, where people could, you know, grow these kinds of skills that aren't growing fast enough?

21:46

Do you think our institutions our educational system is nimble enough to be able to take that into consideration? No,

21:54

Jack be nimble, Jane be quit? No. Because what's happening, if you look at our pipelines today, you know, the American dream was to go to the best university, you go to go to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, wherever you could go to and whatever you could get into, but you've left with debt. Now, the Gen Z are saying I'd rather go to a lesser known University, get a scholarship and leave the university without debt. But then you've got a whole nother set of Gen Z ears that say, I don't want to go to some company and find the gristly ladder to be a leader because most companies that's the only path they give you to progress is started, you know, your basic engineer level, and you become technical expert, you become a technical leader expert, in what the Gen Z is one today, as they say, You know what I might want to because I talked to a guy the other day, and he would, he was a technical person that repaired peloton, equipment in hotels, company gave him a company car, he drove to all his stuff, he had full autonomy, and potentially makes as much as a university, college graduate engineer coming out, I think he only made like $10,000 a year or less. But he had his own car paid for his own expense account. And he didn't even have a GED. And so you know, these kids today are looking at this, I could go into the trades, and I can make just as much money without leaving with a $250,000 college bill. You know, so I think companies in industry need to start saying, you know, you can be a trades person, and you can be an AI machine learning engineer, you know, you can be a smart factory architect, or you can be a cybersecurity specialist or an HMI specialist, you know, we need to have those new channels for people to have new kind of career paths. Yeah, I

23:55

just, you know, is Who am I and I just sort of gaze out in the marketplace and I just the, the speed at which a lot of this technology this innovation is, is happening. I agree with you 100%. Do I need somebody that's, you know, coming out of a university to be able to handle some of this stuff, like, okay, case in point, like, do you need somebody from a university that can clean data? clean data, I mean, you Everything starts with data, scrub it, clean it, make it make it accurate? That's, that's a hell of a job. It's tough, but it's a heck of a job. Everybody needs to say he's

24:39

got all these things. I mean, you know, I mean, this whole idea of potting, do people do we really have a pipeline of talented people that understand the world of how humans and machines interface and if it's big in the future, AI, university, pipeline, or community call was pipeline or a credit, you know, Associate degree pipeline of people that can go and say, look, I can, I can be an expert, a specialist, and getting humans and machines to work effectively together and design those work systems. So, I mean, we started, we just started building fast enough for the world of what its gonna look like in two years in three years. And

25:22

you know, other countries are doing that. I know that they are, yeah, other countries have committed to being able to do that effectively. And they're, they're putting, they're putting a lot of capital behind it too, as well.

25:36

Only if you think about these things, I mean, we talk a lot about the circular economy, or rebuilding pipelines of the years, that are gonna be a specialist in, you know, circular economy, or waste management and industry professions. You know, it's a side hustle and current work today. And I think these things are going to really grow in our ecosystem of industry. We're not building the pipelines.

26:04

Yeah, no, I agree with you, 100%, or even

26:08

27:05

You know, changing I, the only way that I know, that is a, I think a viable option with all of the all of the changes happening in the marketplace, all of the innovation, the technology. I just recommend trusted individuals, somebody that's there, I don't have Scott manufacturing doesn't have the bandwidth to do all of this got manufacturing wants to just keep his business rolling and make payroll, that type of thing. I need somebody that I can trust, and to take along on that journey, because I see the value of it. But I just I don't have I just where's the bandwidth? I can't do it. But

27:46

and this is, this is why you also need these people to make a pragmatic value proposition to business owners like yourself to say, yeah, it's worth me investing in this. So like, for example, the big problem with industry, four is entirely tech centric. I mean, you know, if you think about nine pillars of cyber physical connectivity, now, this industry five that I often talk about, that is the next evolution. So say, Okay, now you've got all this technology, and you're gonna maximize automation, and you're gonna make everything smart and factories that you can, well, what's been missing, and the thing that's been missing is the human element. So like the maturity model for industry, five is you got to prepare for, you know, more tech enabled integration and collaboration between not any humans in tech, but But humans and humans back, then you've got to have this collaboration, but because connectivity is going to spur more collaboration, and I always use the example, you know, Phil used to have a Dean hydrocracker is across the globe. They never talked to each other because they were all in different plants in different countries. But now you have the smart integrative shift handovers. So now, a one crew coming in to deer park and you know, read what happened with the hydrocracker last night and plan for the day working. But now because everything connected, they can collaborate with all the other units across the world to say, what did you learn from your hydrocracker? And so that was never available five years ago. Now it is. But we're not training our people to do that, because we're still thinking in hierarchical organizations that are very siloed. And we're not thinking about the matrix level of connectivity that you know, data and integration can provide us. Yeah,

29:48

and the ability to normalize that data to let's say, I have a I have a cracker in Texas is in and the environment around the Texas it's taught at summer Whatever, whatever that weather component, I can normalize that data and have something similar in another part of the country or the world and say, Yeah, see, I see how they're seeing how they're compared to each other. We're more efficient here, whatever it might be.

30:19

You get this with this greater levels of data. I mean, I really think people have cracked the code yet on what all this new data is going to do for data driven decision making collaborative insights, collaborative decision making, it's going to be a new generation of decision makers, making the can be more trend based longer term, more of these things predictive and prescriptive. But what that also doesn't as industry, five is going to have to have people going to have to have even a greater resilience through collaboration, because operations are going to the resiliency of the people is going to have to be strengthened. Because as we strengthen operations, and always make operations smarter, and there's more algorithms and all these kinds of things, people are going to be have to be more agile and dynamic to respond to those changes, by

31:10

the Sherpa, by a trusted individual find somebody. And the reality is, is that me, Scott manufacturer, as I use that use case, as an example, it doesn't exist, by the way, but I, I need it, I need to find that trusted individual. And, and I always

31:30

think about it, you know, if you play poker, I mean, okay, okay, maybe you might be the you might be the guy that plays with a group, you know, once a week, and you've got a certain level of skills, and you got so much on the line, maybe you're 50 bucks for the night or something like that. And then you've got a whole level of people that go to, you know, many tournaments, major tournaments, then you got the guy and gal sitting in Vegas, their skill set is more requisite with the risk level, you know, and I think we're going to have to get to the guys and gals like yourself that says, Look, you know, the decisions you're making, you know, you might not put a lot of technology in, if you know, you're not going to get a lot of harvest a lot of value out of it because of your scale or your scope. But as that increases, you got to really start thinking about what value can you know, these new technologies, these new ways of working deliver for you? Yeah,

32:26

I don't, I don't see how you can avoid it. I just, if you're a business that wants to be around longer than two, five years, well, you need to definitely look into how you can be more connected. Pull that, on that

32:44

goal. If you think about the majority of my career, I worked with what we call descriptive analytics. So kind of says, you know, what happened in the past with worker performance? You know, safety, incidents, productivity, you know, so what was the historical pattern? You know, and can I make any correlations or causation from that? And then I got to work with what we called diagnostic analytics. So why did it happen? You know, why did work or performance go up? Or go down? Or why did safety incidents go up or down? And, you know, so that was like, looking at root causes? Well, very little of my career has been on, you know, predictive analytics or prescriptive. Now, I hope that my son, you know, 80% of his analytics are going to be more about predictive and prescriptive than descriptive and diagnostic. Yeah, I mean, yeah, because those add much more value, the exponential, is,

33:40

it's gonna happen that way. Yeah. And again, I'm all about that. I advocate education, collaboration and innovation just in those, you got to educate, it's all out there. It's not as if it's different. I mean, it's just up to the individual to find the right stuff. But then to collaborate. That, to me is the, that's the key. And I know that it's a term that's overly used, but I just don't see any other way of getting around it, where you got to find somebody that you can trust. And

34:10

then let's go back to you know, Scott, you as the CEO of your company. So what do you care about you care about, you know, can I keep the lights on? Can I put a paycheck everybody's hand in every two weeks every month? And you know, can I take a little bit home for myself? And you know, in to do that you've got to attract people good people in you gotta keep them. But what's going on today is most companies ever really bad, what I call anatomy of work. And you know, a lot of the research says, you know, 60% of a person's day is doing garbage work that adds no value, and in fact, frustrates people and disengages them. And that's why these disengagement rates are up to 80%. And, you know, discretionary effort is off the table for most cases. And it's because we have these unproductive The unnecessary meetings, you know, we've got decision making and company that is slow and overanalyze, and paralyzed. And your communication channels are terrible. And, you know, you get much email, and it's, you know, all these things and goals aren't clear and your tasks are well defined. And we can use the cyberphysical systems in this connectivity to improve that anatomy of work, because that then engages the worker through the human experience cycle. So they're happier to go and do a task, you know, to finish your task and move move on to either a new task, or repeat the task, because they have a better experience. And so, you know, that's one thing on this anatomy of work. I'm hoping that cyber physical connectivity, this connected worker paradigm, is going to help people have a better work experience. So they actually want to stay. And they actually see channels of growth. And, you know, they don't get bored of being a console operator for 10 years. Yeah. No, no, you know,

36:07

you're hitting on all cylinders.

36:10

But, uh, you know, and that's the thing, though, me, because what happens is people spend so much time complaining about the work because the work is actually not well designed. And it's protecting them from being caged, and it's preventing them from growing. And it's preventing them from having a work life balance, or the flexibility that they want. I mean, these Gen Zers aren't going to put that, you know,

36:31

not even close. Yeah, no, hey, we're gonna have to wrap it up. We didn't? Well, we'll let me go. What about steel? Yeah,

36:41

39:39

Well, that's gonna be a follow up conversation, because I think that's an fascinating topic, quite frankly, before we depart. How do people get a hold of you there, Brent? Let's say hey, I want to I want to talk to Brent, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

39:54

Well, the best way is probably, you know, the channel called LinkedIn. I mean, I'm always receptive to that. You get to kind of buy one best source.

40:02

Good, good answer, because anything else other than that I start to, like, I don't know how to manage it. Just listen to it. Just get on LinkedIn. It's easy. Link it, find it. Stat card. Everything's good. Well, you were absolutely wonderful. I really enjoyed like, Well, hey,

40:21

I enjoyed it, too.

40:23

Yeah, you're an awesome guy. All right, listeners, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Remember, we're going to have all the contact information for Brent out on Industrial Talk. So reach out to him find out more, you will not be disappointed as you can tell. He's got mad skills. All right. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

40:39

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

40:50

burette one word, human condition. Definitely knows what he's talking about. Well, that was a fun conversation. I enjoyed it a lot. I hope you did, too. I hope he took a lot of notes. Reach out to go out to Industrial Talk. You can tell he's an open book, he would love to be able to have a conversation with you and discuss your challenges that you might be having with the resources, what to do, how to retain. It's a common challenge out there. So find your Sherpa. He's a good one to start with. Most definitely. All right, building a platform, celebrating industrial professionals around the world. That's what we are doing. We want you to be a part of it as well. Go out to Industrial Talk. click on Connect with us connect with me. So do it. Make it happen. Let's have a conversation. All right. People will be brave Daring Greatly hang out with Brent, change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. You can count on that. So stay tuned.