Rob Mora with Novate Solutions

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17th November 2021 • The Industrial Talk Podcast Network • The Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie

On this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Rob Mora, Executive Vice President at Novate Solutions about "Applying Thoughtful Engineering to Manufacturing Success". Get the answers to your "Value Creation" questions along with Rob's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview! Get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

ROB MORA'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-mora-81563aa8/ Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/novate-solutions-inc/ Company Website: https://www.novate.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

https://youtu.be/Mq_SP3avpD0

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS conversation, extract, organization, people, reliability, fluke, conference, insight, technology, 29th annual, solution, rob, customer, industrial, curiosity, business, understand, collaboration, professional, culture 00:00 Hey, this industrial talk podcast is brought to you by Accruent Business and Office Management Software as well as Fluke Reliability. When businesses need help in determining whether efforts are leading to a truly connected reliability environment, they call Fluke. Enjoy the conversation. 00:24 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 right 00:41 once again, welcome to industrial talk the number one industrial related podcast in the universe. I don't think I'm overselling that one bit, I think, yeah, well, I am I'm the number one. So it's always good, because I am a unicorn out there. And we are broadcasting from SMRP 29th annual conference here in beautiful St. Louis, Missouri. Looks nice outside, I'm looking out there. And it is chock full of professionals, unreliability asset management and maintenance space AR fantastic people and put this on your bucket list if you are interested or are you if you are a professional in the maintenance space or reliability or asset management space, you got to come to this particular conference be get engaged with SMRP. We are also sponsored by Accruent and Fluke reliability. As I sip on out to their website, I'm looking at a crew and see I had that I had that wrong. Anyway, accrue it. And it's gained the insights to transform how your organization manages its physical resources. That's the solution. That's what they provide. Great company, great people as well as that that are there. Fluke Reliability. They are you look at there, you go out to their website, and I'm looking at it right now. There's tons of information out there to make you a better professional. They provide maintenance and reliability professionals the data to do the job asset by asset wherever they are. How about that? That ain't a problem with that value statement. You can argue with me? Don't. Alright. In the hot seat. A wonderful gentleman by the name of ROB Mora. He's the Executive Vice President of Business Development with no novate novate solutions. There it is, man. 02:22 Yeah, how you doing? Oh, we get to pronounce wrong a lot. So it's 02:28 like a current like I've been mispronouncing that. I try. Yeah, you don't want what's driving all these names? Is the URL. You can't find a URL with. Just like, Okay, let me let me modify the the name a little bit. Oh, there it is. I can do it. That's my name. Now. There's my company name. I got the URL. There we go. So how you doing? Have a good conference? 02:48 Yeah. Good. It's an extraordinary conference. Actually my first time here. Really? 02:53 You've never been to an SMRP? No, either five. I've been it's been fun. A lot of education going on? 02:59 Oh, man, there's so much good conversation. Big time. 03:01 Yeah. And and I'm always into that education, collaboration and innovation, you got to get together, you got to they just have it here. It's all in one spot. You know, 03:11 actually, something really occurred to me as I sit here and listen all this sort of for the first time. So listen to I feel like, at the end of the day, one of the biggest things that you said collaboration, so it struck me is one of the big things that I think inhibits all of the adoption of this technology is challenges with collaboration. And for my purposes, I feel like that the the key source of that is territorialism. Right. So it's, it's different domain expertise, feeling like, hey, I want to maintain my value, I don't want to give up that value. So I'm gonna kind of hold my cards to my vest, I'm going to judge, we're not going to work together. And for me being at this conference, all those barriers are stripped away. You got ot professionals coming here to learn it. Technology, you got it technology, trying to figure out how to make it work within the OT environment, these conversations, they're stripping away all of that which I think enables collaboration. So 04:07 I agree with you 100% When I look at how the pandemic I think pre pandemic, we were really territorial. You know, I'm gonna hold my cars, I'm going to do whatever I need, I'm going to protect my whatever my my fiefdom, but what I, I see a sense of vulnerability, when we start going through the pandemic, and the necessity to realize and come to that realization that I do need help, that I do need to collaborate and and find the individuals that want to reciprocate. Because whether we like it or not, we're in this boat together, we we've got to succeed, 04:41 oh, it takes a village, there is no way any particular group in an organization is going to figure it all out. 04:46 And I believe, especially today, with the level of innovation, the speed, the velocity of that innovation, that technology. I believe that it requires that because you just Can't you just can't keep up? 05:02 Honestly. So I just this is just my perspective. I guess this is I don't we have any specific questions just talking about 05:08 oh, man, this is extemporaneous baby. Okay, around the coffee table, would you? Lowen? Yes, that's all it is. And I really, this is the way because it's, from my perspective, people need that. See that human side, this is real. Okay, so just go. Okay, so. 05:23 So for me, when I talk about those barriers, and the collaboration and the requirements and how it takes a village, it's in, it's really where I live in helping figure companies figure out how to extract that value. The amount of expertise that it takes to grab data, send data, process data, send it again, put it in the right languages, analyze, break it down, send it again, put it up on screen visually, that is a host of technologies and expertise. But then you have to actually get some insight from that data, which is its own expert, yes. Then the ability to do anything with that and understand how you work as an organization. Yeah, what you're going to be able to react to how quickly you're going to be a react to it. If it is even valuable for you. That is, again, all of its own process expertise. So realizing that that entire chain, from data to value is 1520 different levels of domain expertise, you have to work together. And if anybody's siloing, and everybody's trying to figure it out, I it's it's interesting, I sit in conversations where we're about to implement or or a maintenance team or reliability engineer want to implement a solution. We talked about it, we design it, we think about it, we come up with a price, now they have to go sell it, and I get frustrated, because the idea is Wait, where's that guy? Why isn't he in this room? This is a absolutely has to be a conversation that we're all having together. Otherwise, it's two completely separate conversations that have different meaning for different people. We got to be working on it together 06:57 like that. And we we too, we fail at that. And you're absolutely correct. The Is it important when we start talking about extracting value? Why is that? Why is that an important conversation? I see a lot of companies that are just sort of doing the same thing over and over? And do they see that they need to extract value? How do you get companies to realize that extracting value looking at your business and proceeding down that road? 07:27 You know, it's for me, that concept came when so many of the IT companies got really excited about what they were going to be able to sell to manufacturers to the OT environment. But being able to do it being able to derive some insight is its own expertise, the IT companies can't necessarily provide, they can provide a lot of the tools that I mean, let's face it, a lot of the lot of the hardware and software is just tool sets to be able to use together some insight, that insight is very heavily a process oriented effort. And then whether or not the organization can actually do anything with that insight react quickly enough. We act efficiently enough that conversation, to be able to put all that together, I need to put it all together to be able to understand what value can I take away from it, I get that we're trying to measure it in terms of ROI and metrics and so forth, but actually have to go get that value, which honestly, the value will come from the people who are operating the value will come from the people who are on the ground floor, making everything in these facilities. We're not bringing the value the software isn't bringing value AI is not bringing the value. We're all just enabling the value. But it's really going to come from that end user, the person is going to take advantage of it and bring it back to that organization. And just understanding how to extract that from that entire conversation. I just it's complex enough. It's worthwhile to have across disciplines. 08:54 But but it seems big. If you got to looking at an organization, and if I look at an organization, it's it's complex. Where do you where do you have that conversation of saying okay, God, it is complex, I don't want to overwhelm you. I know that you have your your day to day jobs have to you know, you got to do certain things, but we have to have this conversation. How do you begin to broach that subject and begin to have that conversation and then from an incremental point of view, be able to have a say, Okay, let's go down here. How do you do that? 09:28 So different for every organization, right? They're all in different stages of development they have they have i It's funny, I have an idea that came to mind I met with a customer is a global customer. The engineer came in the room and said, so I've got a bought these five VR goggles. I'd like to write I'd like to integrate them into our system. Okay, that was the whole scope of the project. No way. So Alright, so first of all, what we really need to do is take a step back and have a universal understanding of What value means to this particular organization? If VR is the technology for you, we'll sort that out down the road technology is sort of the second conversation to have. That's how we implement whatever value. So let's start by talking about what are you trying to get out of this? And so that particular guy didn't have an immediate answer associated with that. So now that's how we kind of bring other people in the room and start talking about what value beans to that organization. That's where I was. So 10:28 give us an example of what value looks like. It's just in general, I mean, you've had tons of conversations, what does that mean? 10:37 So value. So in certain cases, just an example for a particular customer is you're trying to solve a problem, right? And so in this example, problem, yep, yep. happened so value to that customer. They themselves know what they're facing out of the market, what are they trying to achieve? It's better flexibility. Is it reducing downtime, right? Is it better safety, better compliance, whatever that is, can the value come? Where are the opportunities within their organization, that they can get that value that contributes to that goal, right, it's sort of specific to their corporate goals, then we can figure out a technology solution to go get that value. And if we have to have the right people to extract that value, or the ways to make it easier for them or enable them to extract that value. It's really about meeting corporate objectives. 11:25 So this happens quite a bit, where we're, to your point, we're trying to identify value, where's the value, let's extract that value, and identify what we want to try to solve many times. And it's happened, and I've seen it, and hopefully it doesn't happen as often as it used to. We forget to pull in that frontline individual, one that really understands the real problems out there. Probably the biggest, you know, like, you guys are trying to solve this. This is not my problem. This is not a problem that I think that you need to be aware of. Do you in that effort? Do you make sure that the right individuals who are on the floor are part of that conversation? 12:04 It absolutely has to be in and oftentimes, we find, or at least I find in my role, that I'm doing the translating a little bit. Right. So there's definitely some resistance to say, operational teams making corporate level presentations, there's resistance to corporate teams digging in to operational level details. So oftentimes, I find myself being the translator or the go between or the bridge. But the preference every time we can do it, is that we all have to be on the same team. 12:35 Yeah, right. Yeah. And does it ever stop? How do you how do you maintain? Or how do you continue to slowly improve that? Value extraction? Right? It's not a project where it has a beginning. And end state isn't an ongoing mindset culture. 12:53 I think it's a super, it is absolutely culture, I think you're 100%, right. And it's all about creativity and curiosity. Right? So defining value, right? Thinking about the concept of value, what does it mean to me? How could I possibly get out of this, what are our capabilities, you have to be very curious about each other's domains, you have to be creative in terms of thinking about different ways I can get it if you can create that culture of rested of curiosity and creativity. And to me, the number one thing that underlies that from a lot of the stuff that I research and read is you got to have trust, right? So you got to break down the barriers between your OT and your it and your corporate and your finance groups. Yeah, you got to be able to speak openly, you got to be willing to say, hey, you know, I've got this thing over here, I think it could salt we could get a lot of value out of it, it's exposing weakness I have, but I got to be okay, exposing that because there's real value there. And I know what I'm talking about. 13:53 So some of the things that I love that I love the fact that you got to trust, creativity, curiosity, interesting terms, when it comes to your organization, some of the that the way organizations behave, right, this is an outcomes it has to come from the executive to really establish an environment that allows us to make decisions and not get ridiculed or or belittled if we make a mistake, right, because that, that that's like a cancer in your efforts to try to create a culture that is curious and collaborative and trust. We there's a lot of work and we haven't even begun to solve the problem or extract the value. We're just trying to get the culture right. And to be able to get the curiosity I love that leadership leadership, tremendous 14:46 amount of leadership is needed right now. We have to be able to bring everybody to the table. I like that give people the opportunity to speak up even if they don't know what I mean. I love that fact that everybody here at this conference. There You've got guys that know everything there is to know about a chiller trying to learn what edge computing is. Yeah,...