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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

maintenance management, Limble, AI integration, work order efficiency, asset tracking, preventative maintenance, troubleshooting, mobile application, user experience, labor shortage, customization, backlog grooming, scheduling, industry solutions, SMRP conference

00:00

Hey, it's Scott MacKenzie with Industrial Talk. IRISS is the global leader in electrical maintenance safety, delivering technologies that let team inspect energized equipment safely using closed panel condition based monitoring to reduce risk and downtime. Their patented infrared and ultrasonic inspection windows make it possible to detect issues early boosting reliability and protect the people who keep the operations running. If improving safety and avoiding unplanned failures is your mission, IRISS has the solution to get you there. Learn more@IRISS.com you

00:41

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

01:03

01:56

Bryan, doing? Well, how are you doing?

01:58

Scott, I'm talking non stop that's always

02:02

going in in the salt mine. I'm having a hard time eating lunch

02:06

that lunch looks very delicious. I'm jealous. I'm just running on.

02:11

There you go, and at least, yeah, anyway, it's all good. You having a good conference.

02:16

I agree, a very great conference. And I

02:20

have to be honest with you, this the first time I really seen limbo. Have you been at SMRP?

02:25

I came last year. If I remember,

02:28

you had to be out. You're was that? Was that role?

02:32

Gosh, I don't know. I don't know. Can't

02:33

remember, because I was there. But last year was Hurricane, yeah, that's right, yeah, I was in Tallahassee, and had to be turned around. It's like, I'm gonna miss everybody. I like everybody.

02:47

It's great. It's a phenomenal conference. It really is.

02:51

This year has been exceptional. Bigger, it seems bigger. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have anything to back that up. All right, before we get going, give us a little background on who

03:02

you are. Yeah. So Bryan Christiansen, founder and CEO of limbo, CMMS, we are a maintenance management solution that's entire mission is to empower the unsung heroes that support Empower what empower the unsung heroes that support the world. And what that means is we're here to help all of the maintenance professionals, facility professionals that keep the world running, giving them the right tools so they can actually how long you been a business? We started the company about 10 years ago, but really got our first customer about seven years ago, yeah, so we're still relatively new.

03:32

Yeah, you are, yeah. And then you're just it. What's your secret sauce? Because, you know, I'm just gonna lay it out there? There are a lot of CMMS systems.

03:44

Yes, there are, I don't know, gosh, like 300 plus. I have no clue.

03:50

Yeah, so, and the marketing is the same. It's like, hey, we get to track your assets. Yeah, a lot

03:55

of the marketing messages are this, yes, it's really hard to differentiate, and like, especially from the marketing message. Now, when you cut through all of that, yes, and actually look at the CMMSs, they're drastically different. And there, there's a whole bunch of different reasons. Some are focused on specific verticals. Some are focused on features over usability. There's a whole bunch of different, different variations of CMMS. Is when you really pull back the curtain and really look under

04:22

the hood, what were you doing before?

04:25

So for me, my background is actually full stack engineering, software engineering, and so doing before is just creating world class apps that will help people with whatever workflows they're accomplishing. So I came across the maintenance world about 10 years ago and was just blown away with how difficult the CMMSs were to use. Like, great functionality. You can track your assets to your PMS, track your parts, vendors, all of that. Like, amazing functionality that helps maintenance professionals really do their job significantly better. However, almost every single CMMS was a nightmare to use, and. I time and time again, I talked to a maintenance manager, maintenance tech, just like, we can't freaking use this. It's like, my techs won't adopt it. And that's when I realized there was a gigantic opportunity if we actually take all that functionality and make it easy to use. The teams love using it versus hate using it. All of a sudden, all that functionality gets unlocked, and corporations and organizations maintenance. Orgs can actually get the benefit from running pm plans get the benefits from running an effective parts inventory system. And historically, CMMS has just not done a really shitty job actually making easy to use software. And that's why I started in this space. I saw a gigantic opportunity to really improve people's lives, and it was just as simple as making it easy to use.

05:44

So how is it easier to use?

05:48

06:29

What secret sauce do you have to prevent pencil whipping? That's a big problem, and what do you do to help facilitate that?

06:40

A lot again, if you actually make it enjoyable to actually fill out a work order and actually put your notes, and you also deliver value for the technicians when they put those notes in, then all of a sudden they start doing it, and they're not just filling in bullshit. And so, for example, being able to easily pull up an asset look at the history and see all your past work orders with clear notes, all of a sudden, the technician is incentivized to leave better notes, because when they go out to fix that asset a year from now, five years from now, all of a sudden, those notes help them do a better job, and it makes their life easier. Where, if you're not making it easy for them, and you don't have functionality for them to uncover, like, the past work orders, then, like, where's the incentive for the tech to actually fill it out properly. And so if you look at the entire like the entire workflow, the lifecycle of a work order, how a technician interacts with it, if you make align those value incentives, so it's beneficial for the tech, all of a sudden the tech starts putting in good data. And that's beneficial for everyone.

07:38

Yeah, because, because once you start to compromise and just pencil whip. It's there it is. It's just

07:45

a problem. It's a huge problem. And you see that all the time with all their CMMS is like, the work orders are not made to fill out. Technicians don't want to do it. You force them to do it. They put in random stuff that's not even helpful. And it's just like, Okay, well, you know, bad data in, bad data out. Yeah. So again, if you go right back to that core problems, like, how do you make that maintenance technician's life significantly easier and valuable for them? The information they're putting in actually valuable for them, then all of a sudden, you're not fighting an uphill battle to get them to actually fill it out. Instead, they just do it on their own, because they're getting the value from it.

08:19

Okay, I have to ask this question, and it better not be 18 months.

08:25

Oh no, gosh, like our average time to value that's metric that we measure internally. So from the second they sign up to the point where they're actually getting ROI in that application, it can be as little as a couple weeks. No way, really, yeah. Now, larger organizations take longer, for sure, but it's very, very, very, very fast. Again, this goes back to ease of use, ease of use, ease of use. We've been hyper focused. How do we make everything just ridiculously simple so that people can actually get set up quickly? If they get set up quickly, they get the ROI, then all of a sudden, everything is justified.

08:56

But I want customization, because we do business differently, our the way we do it in our workflows are, are the best?

09:05

Well, every single, every single facility actually has their own like legitimate reasons to do it the way that they want to do it, not, you know, one mill is going to be very different than a different mill. One plant is going to be very different than a different plant. And also, each organization has their best practices that they need to actually implement it. And so you can't just simply say, Okay, we're going to be super easy to use. So you have to only follow this instead. What you have to do is say, Okay, we're really easy to use. You can configure things on the fly for your own specific workflow. So we specifically do in our software in a couple different ways. So for example, different plants will have different asset types, like some will be tracking presses, some will be tracking conveyor belts, or whatever the case may be. Each of those assets needs different fields on them. Inside limbal, right there on the asset, you can add a custom field within about three clicks and so, and there's role based management to make sure the right people are doing that. So you don't want your text doing that you're different, but that you. Of use with the customizable the ability to configure your assets to have the fields that you want. It makes it so that you can track only the right only the things that you need to track on that specific type of asset outside of assets in the actual workflows, the workflows of the work orders. Same concept, if you want to have a custom workflow where they got to do lockout tagout first, then they have to get approval that they did it properly. Then they follow five different steps to actually do whatever they need to do. You can all build that within just a matter of a couple minutes, inside

10:30

limbo, right, right? Well, yeah, that's always been the conversation. We do it this way. Okay, AI. AI is amazing, yeah, tell us about how that how you're enabling AI in a way that makes sense. Yeah?

10:46

So first and foremost, we don't do AI for AI, like a lot of companies, and I walk around this conference, it's aI enhanced AI. It's like, okay, well, let's look at jobs to be done. What do we need to solve? And then find the best technology to solve that, and we're finding that AI actually can help with that in a lot of different ways. So one core job to be done is troubleshooting. So you go out a technician, maybe it's a two hours worth of work. They spend the first hour just troubleshooting it. When you look at troubleshooting, how do you how do you cut that time down? AI is beautiful for that. AI can immediately go read, basically instantly, all of your past work orders. It can go read the manual. It can go read asset notes. It can go read a whole bunch, and then float that insight up to the technician and say, Hey, instead of spending an hour troubleshooting this, now you spend 10 minutes, because you're floating all that information up to them. And AI is beautiful at taking unstructured data, which are all those comments and notes and all that, and floating those insights up. So when we look at like jobs to be done, or AI, how do we do AI, well, let's find the job to be done and see how we improve that significantly. Another big area back to that time to value how quickly to set up. One big hurdle that a lot of customers have is going from this reactive nightmare to a preventative nightmare, and to get to the preventative you have to set up pm plans. Well, anyone, everyone listening to this is probably personally has read through a 500 page OEM manual trying to pull out those maintenance schedules. It's all written weird. It's a it's a damn headache. AI can automate all that, and we have that in our application. You simply add an asset, go to the pm section, run the AI powered pm builder, and all of a sudden the suggestions pop up for you. Now sudden, instead of spending hours setting up a pm schedule for one or two assets, that can be cut down to like, five minutes, and so depending

12:34

on what jobs pretty significant,

12:37

it's Oh, it AI. AI is beautiful. The the things that you can do with AI, it's,

12:43

it's a very Do you think we're just scratching the surface right now? I mean, I just don't feel like, like, it's like, great, I can, I can

12:51

completely, like, another job to be done is scheduling. So one of like, maintenance planners that you have to go in and factor in tons of different variables. And one functionality we just released is AI scheduling specifically around reducing number of trips that techs have to take. So if I look at all of this week's work, I may find that I have a work order that's assigned to Bob on press one, and then Tom is also working on press one several days later. But we don't, they don't see that, right? AI can detect that. Consolidate those. So now you have one person going to that asset on one day, reducing the amount of trips that they have to take. Now you've walked probably through more plant floors than I have. They're gigantic, yeah. And so consolidating just something as simple as trips, all of a sudden your team has more time to actually do things. And so the AI is that,

13:43

yeah, if AI can help, or if the solution can say, hey, go out to that that motor, that motor has a bearing going out on it. Bring that wrench, that bearing. This, these instructions, whatever it is to know that I'm going to succeed when I go out to that, yeah, that motor, I'm all in. Because what really happens in the field is I got to go out to the motor, yeah, it's, it's got some squeaking going on there. Yeah, that means this, I'll go to, you know, the warehouse and get get the part, and then I got to go get the wrench, and I got it, yep, tick, tick, tick,

14:25

yep, yep. So in theory, with AI, what you can do the work order comes in even before a tech touches it, yeah. Ai reads this, sees. So there's a concept that we have called Four C's, it's, it's complaint, cause, correction category. And AI can read that and read a work order and basically determine that, and what they find is, okay, this is the complaint, right? There's a weird sound or something like on this piece of equipment, inferring from other work orders. AI is red. We can go ahead and say, Okay, well, that complaint most likely has this cause. And so before the tech even goes out, they get cause. Type in. Information and potentially tools that they may need to use to go actually out and fix it. So before the tech even actually goes to the piece of equipment, there can be aI suggestions on what to bring, what they may need to troubleshoot things of that nature. And again, it's all about reducing trips, reducing troubleshooting time, and making sure that your techs are most efficient as possible.

15:19

Yeah, and in this world where we're having a hard time finding skill tech, yeah, skilled maintenance, you've got to get the most out of what you have in place and make it more efficient and allow them to focus on what is important and not just a bunch of fluff.

15:34

Yeah, yeah. So the best AI doesn't replace people, it augments, yeah, absolutely. So one tech can do the job

15:40

absolutely, yeah, and it has to, we have to be more efficient 100% there's no doubt about it.

15:47

Yeah, there's, there's no doubt about it, especially with the labor shortage in trades. It's a huge problem, huge problem, huge Absolutely.

15:56

That's just from, from my perspective. That's, I think, personally, one of the number one related challenges that we have in industry period,

16:04

yep, or not, right next to that is the fact that the a lot of the technicians are older and aging out, and all of that maintenance knowledge is in their head. It's not in a CMMS, it's not in some other system. And so not only is there a shortage of new people coming in, the expertise of the old are leaving, and that is that's kind of like a double whammy, like the new generation coming in doesn't have the all the tribal knowledge that the old generation is unfortunately leaving with.

16:32

How do you How does your system deal with a backlog? Because there are systems of backlog work orders that nobody get to. It generates a work or work order, and it sits there, and then another one, and then another one, and there's, it's just a backlog, yeah?

16:47

17:37

is limbo, nimble enough to be able to to to, let's say I'm a company and I want a certain functionality. There's a third party solution that is out there that maybe the functionality doesn't exist within limbo, just because, whatever reason, you know this is very specific, but be able to connect, yep, via whatever. Still use Limble, but be able to just sort of go, AI, I want that capability.

18:05

Yeah. So we integrate with partners all the time, so there's, there's plenty of functionality that we don't build, like we're the world's best maintenance management solution. And so when functionality gets outside of the maintenance management, it gets into, let's say you're doing a construction build, or something. Like, we're not going to build software to build software to help you do a construction build, but we need to integrate with that team, because once they finish the construction build, guess who's going to inherit

18:28

all those assets? You got a commission and put them on in there, whole thing.

18:32

And so an integration there, and there's a partner that we're just starting to work with called Project mate. So give them a little bit of a plug, phenomenal company. As that building finishes getting constructed, all of that asset information, whatnot, will port over to Limble, and then your operations team, your maintenance team, also has all that, and they can hit the ground running, and they can start doing maintenance from day one the right way, where nowadays, unfortunately, a lot of people are trying to get out of a very out of a bad state, because it gets handed off. No one does maintenance for a year or however long, and then all of a sudden, someone gets hired to come in and fix, you know, things start breaking. And so it's like, Okay, now it's the time to invest in maintenance. It's like, no, no, no. Invest day one, and then everything runs beautifully.

19:15

Are there specific industries that you focus in on, or are you just sort of agnostic, and you can because Limble is a very configurable solution.

19:26

Yeah, so it's funny, the name Limble came from a combination of nimble and limber. So the whole idea was have something very exactly, well, I didn't want to call it like maintenance something or fix that. It's like, you look at the 300 CMMSs out there, and there's just lack of creativity, yeah, and so it's like, Okay, we're gonna make our own what are we gonna be? Well, it's limber and nimble. We're gonna be very flexible. We're gonna allow people to adapt to their workflows. We're gonna be able to go after as as many, as many verticals as possible. Able to try and help as many people as possible. And so what we've found over the years is we have customers in tons of different industries. Manufacturing is probably our sweet spot, to be fair, when things break there, it's very painful. So we see a lot of manufacturers, but we have general facilities, we have hospitals, we have so healthcare, we have hospitality, we have oil and gas. We have a whole bunch of different areas.

20:22

Love it. Bryan, how do people get a hold of you? They're saying, I like what you're saying.

20:26

Limble, CMMS.com, can give us a look, and let's see how we can help you. What about you? Me personally? Bryan, yeah, yeah. LinkedIn, you can get me there email, Bryan,

20:38

21:16

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

21:25