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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial talk podcast, asset management, maintenance reliability, autonomous vehicles, energy utility, SAP implementation, OPEX reduction, EMaint, pipeline company, water business, hydraulic fracking, AI capabilities, operational excellence, vibration analysis, Fluke Reliability.

00:00

Scott, 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 once again. Welcome to industrial talk. Thank you very much for joining this number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems each and every day. You are making the world a better place. Bank on it, we're here at Xcelerate, early morning conversation. I don't even have my coffee because Curt got up real early and decided that he still wanted to talk at 7am Xcelerate, brought to you by those wonderful people at Fluke reliability. Check them out. Go out on flukereliability.com find them out. Find out more. If you're in the world of asset management, maintenance and reliability, check them out. You will not be disappointed. As I said, Curt is in the hot seat. He's having a great conference, hopefully. Let's get cracking. Oh, that's good. Yeah, you having a good

01:21

conference? Yeah, I am. It's good. It's cool. It's about, I can't remember, it's my third or fourth one to be here. I think it's the third, but, yeah, yeah, it's good, good, good to catch up with people. It's a great thing,

01:31

really, is I enjoy the collaboration that everybody's like, yeah, let's get together. Let's talk about these challenges. Let's, hey, how about this for a solution? Yeah, I do. I can truly appreciate it. Have you ever been in an autonomous vehicle?

01:48

No, but I would like to take one to the airport today. Will they go that

01:51

far? I don't know. I took one to a cigar

01:54

shop last night. Oh, there's one, a cigar shop right across from the Marriott. Is that where? No, I went to

01:58

another one that took me in a way, Mo for 10 minutes, which was just absolutely spectacular.

02:06

Did you carry on a conversation with the invisible driver? It's so funny

02:10

because you jump in the car and you just realize that you're just, there's nobody there. I know

02:15

it's kind of weird, right? It is fantastic. I don't know if I can take one to the airport or not. But if I can, I'm going to, it'll be interesting. But, you know, the only thing about the driverless cars, I just don't want to be killed by one.

02:28

I felt safe, safe as a baby in the mother's arm.

02:32

Yeah, it's fantastic. It's where we're going. Man, ain't no doubt about it. Yeah, I'm glad I lived through it. So, yeah,

02:40

that is so cool. Okay, for the listeners out there, give us a little background

02:44

on who Curt is. Yeah, I am a consultant, and I've been doing a lot of consulting in the energy and utility business. I spent a long time in the actual electric utility, electric and gas utility business, and a lot most of it was doing maintenance. A lot of it was doing process improvement and implementation around SAP Maximo now e mate and I've been doing this for a really, really long time. It's I started in the utility industry doing it in the mid 90s, and I'm still

03:18

rolling. Who would you work with out of the utility space,

03:21

the utilities themselves. The first one I started with was OG and E out of Oklahoma City. They were the first person to actually implement SAP for everything that they did. We were doing it in anticipation of deregulation, you know, trying to separate them different business units. And they wanted to, they need to completely change their systems out and how they do business. So we brought in SAP, and was actually able to implement that whole thing from, from the very beginning, payroll, all of it, and obviously SAP, PM, which is a maintenance part of SAP. It was the first one. It was, it was a good deal.

04:01

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's a heavy lift. Yeah, it

04:04

was. And so I've been in a lot of other major utilities doing stuff recently. The most recent utility thing that I did was with a large utility in the Northeast, where their goal was to cut a billion dollars worth of OPEX out of their operating cost. And that was a very interesting thing too, to actually look at what they wanted to do, how they were going to try to achieve that, and how bringing in, again, it was SAP. SAP was kind of dominating in the large utility space, because they actually offer everything, including billing. And so it was, it was very interesting to try to understand how we were going to do that and kind of make that happen so, but that's that's been my

04:45

career. I've done key on on utilities. That's my background, and is it really? Oh yeah, I was a journeyman transmission lineman. Oh California, Edison climbing towers. Don't ask me to climb towers.

04:57

You didn't do the helicopter thing, did you? I did, oh, really, dangle from helicopter. Awesome. Man, that's great.

05:05

Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's yesterday. Long time yesterday.

05:10

So recently, what I've been doing, I been working with E mate and I had a friend of mine who became the CIO at a pipeline company, a crude pipeline company, and they were going to implement some kind of asset management system. And he called me up. Said, Hey, man, I need you to come do this for me. And I said, okay, and the company had already selected e mate. And so we started that process implementing e mate for them. It was, we are under a very tight deadline, and we had, it's always the case. Well, it was a spin off, right? And it's very interesting, this whole spin off, you know, a lot of the oil companies, and this oil company was a was now pretty much a major oil company. They weren't necessarily as major at the time. They've made some giant acquisitions, but, you know, they're kind of getting out of their things that weren't core to their business. And their core business is drilling for oil and selling oil. And they had a pipeline company, and it was a fairly substantial pipeline company. Actually moves 5% of US crude. Wow. And they decided to get out of that business, sold it to an investment firm. And so, you know, it's kind of like we had, they gave us five months to get off their systems. I said, you're on our systems. You got five months get off. And I was like, All right, so being the fact that they were a crude pipeline company, highly regulated, right? So you you have to keep history. We had 389,000 historical work orders that we had to bring over. I mean, the numbers were astounding.

06:46

And a common problem with companies, yeah, gone work orders.

06:51

Yeah. I hate it when that happens, you know. And you know, work orders are great, but the fact that they were regulated, we can't get rid of them, right? I mean, they could go back, theoretically, they could go back 10 years, or something that nature fems regulations, I forgot exactly what they were, but reality is, if they think there's weird weirdness, they can go back forever. So we weren't really allowed to delete anything, but we were successful at doing it. It was, it was a heck of a road. It was a heck of a road for E mate to understand that what we were doing, because we are rather large client for them at the time. And but we, we were able to be successful and bring it in, and, and, and went from there,

07:34

you, you deployed the CMS. It did. We did in five months

07:39

and five months, jeez, yeah, well, you know, it's been, it's been my career, doing implementations, right? And, and, you know, I'm

07:49

still, but that's, I don't care what it is, been there, done that.

07:53

Yeah, it's a lot of work. That's big time, heavy, yeah, well, it's a lot of work. And it's not the end of my story of doing another one fast, but so, you know, so we implemented their x4 product, and it turns out that we were too big for it. It structurally couldn't deal with a company of our size and the complexity of our size, and we, we were trying to make a lot of the regulatory stuff very online and take away the paper, because the paper was incredible. We had two terabytes of paper storage that you have to do. And a lot of people don't realize when they talk about crude pipelines or pipelines in general, they're all like, Oh no, it'll leak or whatever. I've worked in the nuclear industry, and I've worked in the pipeline industry, and I think PHMSA regulations are probably tougher. I mean, everything that you do on that pipeline, you have to have documentation. So totally incredible. But then we So, we decided to make the move to x5 and that was a interesting experience. X5 was new, and it hadn't been tried, and

08:56

they rolled it out last year. I think it was at least, yeah, we

08:59

kind of have, we kind of pioneered that for them, yeah, and it was, it was a great learning experience. I learned a lot about email in general. And, you know, the product was on the market, but nobody really used it that and then all sudden, here we are with giant company coming in say, Okay, we want to do this. And we ran into, you know, a lot of issues, things that didn't work, like they thought. It wasn't sized, probably the way they wanted to. But I will tell you this about E mate and the guys I work with. You know Bill Green, who's now the vice president, he was awesome, right? So he did whatever it took for us to be successful at making that happen. And I think it laid the groundwork for everybody that's doing next five today, because we fixed a whole lot of issues coming out of that. So that's good. It was good. And that one was it. That one took 18 months. Yeah, typical

09:53

18 months.

09:55

11:53

of what we've been doing. What does the business do? The Business Deep Blue

11:57

Water is in the water business, and they're the headquarters, actually in Houston, but all the actions in Midland, Texas, if anybody's never been to Midland, it's a, it's an oil place. There's no ifs ands or buts about it. The Permian Basin was God blessed it with a bunch of oil. There's no, no doubt about that. But what we do, and again, it's a spin off, and this was owned by a very large oil company, and most of them out there have their own water scenarios, right? Hydraulic fracking takes a lot of water to actually do it about roughly anywhere between seven and 13 million, depending gallons, depending on whatever the conditions are on the ground. And not only that, when you produce oil, when you're when you're got oil flowing through the pipeline, it carries a lot of water with it. And so they have separators, where they separate the water, then they send it to us. And so we, we actually get paid, send the water to you. Yeah, they send us the water. So they separate it out. They send you the water. They send us the water, but the water is not truly 100% separated. So we do some separation again. And and so we have two different scenarios where we can either treat the water, we put in big retention ponds, big giant retention Oh, yeah. And so we can, if we can treat the water so they can reuse it. That's what we do for hydraulic fracking, yeah, for hydraulic fracking, if they can't do it, if there's some reason there's something in there that they can't do it, then we send it down whole through what we call a saltwater disposal well. And that, that's, that's the core business, the the companies out there, you know, because it's pretty much a desert. West Texas is a desert. I don't know if you've ever been to Midland or not, but so water is a scarce commodity, and contrary sometimes to popular opinion, these oil companies want to be agreeing about it, and they want to use 100% of treated water. That's what their goal is. We're not quite there yet, but that is their goal, to be able to do that. So that's, you know, we're trying to get there to help them, you know, get to that process. But right now, it's not all 100% and and that's kind of where

14:07

they get to 100% I mean, it just seems like that

14:10

would be a filtration systems are getting smarter better. We actually, the company actually made an acquisition of this company that had these air filtration systems. I'm not smart enough to know how they work, but I think that's the key. Filtration has to get better and and cheaper, not you know, you can't use things like reverse osmosis. Probably doesn't make any sense, and we're not treating it to drinking water. But I think in the long term, that's what the goal is. I think, if I'm not mistaken, that's weirdly, what they want to do, be able to use it for four use it for farming. Yeah, right. All this. I mean, let's use this water. It's coming out of the ground, so we might as well figure out how to use it. So interesting. So I think when filtration systems get better cheaper, it'll all kind of work out so, but that's where we are right now.

14:58

So with all that said, what. Where do you see it all going? I mean, you've heard about the world of AI and, you know, everything is that something that's on your radar.

15:09

You know, it's funny, the CIO is obviously reports of the president company, who's who loves the thought of AI and loves the thought of gadgetry and things of that nature and and I think, you know, AI will play a role in the long run. I, in my personal opinion, now, what I'm about to say is my Curt Chamberlain's personal opinion is that it's a fairly hype scenario right now that I think people don't fully understand the capabilities and how it works. I think for, a for a company like, like deep blue, that I'm working with right now, you have to have depth of data for AI to understand, or AI to try to learn patterns, because basically, it's a pattern recognition kind of scenario. When you strip away the onion, I mean, it's not really something that's ever going to think like a human. It's going to think like it's programmed and and you need a lot of data. And since we're brand new, I don't see a giant need off the top in what we do to be very helpful at this stage of the game now, five years from now, that may be different, because we'll have a bunch of bunch of data, but I think, you know, in order for it to develop learning patterns, there has to be patterns for it to recognize. So it means you have to, you have to have a ton of data. And so, you know, I think in general, in the maintenance business, I see a lot of a lot of possibilities for AI in the maintenance business, I really do, and I think that, I mean, especially for you, like big refineries and stuff have been collecting data with PI systems from God knows where now. They have data, right? And they have a lot of data. So I think the possibility exists for industries that are a lot more established, or companies that are more established that have more more data for it to look at. That's kind of my personal opinion.

16:58

What has got you outside of the obvious of x5 as you look at this floor has were on the reliability Lab Floor. Is there anything that just sort of jumps out that says that's pretty cool?

17:12

Yeah? Well, I think, you know, I think all the Fluke tools are pretty cool. Yeah, the Fluke tools, and I think there's a lot of stuff that we can do. See one thing I've learned, it's very interesting, both the last company I worked at and this one were spin offs from oil companies, and they spun them off, I think, for several reasons. Number one, it wasn't core business, and it was kind of a knit I mean, these are big companies, but the oil companies are really big companies, and so when I look at that, and I look at the one we do today, it's everything is pretty much run to fail. I mean, there is some preventive maintenance kind of stuff, but a lot of it is run to fail. And they've always kind of operated under this run to fail scenario. And what I find challenging is trying to try to understand, get them to understand operational excellence, why? Sometimes you need to spend money you don't know really why, to try to get better run and then using run to fail, so to speak. So, I mean, we, we spend a ton of money at the company I'm at right now on electrical, you know? And I am not 100% sure that we can solve that with thermography or some of that kind of stuff. But I wouldn't be surprised if we couldn't, but it's hard to get people to kind of think that away. So I think all of this stuff is pretty cool. And you know, West Texas is a pump area. I mean, oh, there's probably 30 million we were trying to figure that out one day. How many pumps you think you're in the whole Permian? 30 million, 50 million. I was talking to a pump guy, and we're laughing, right, right? So I think a lot of stuff they do around vibration analysis, and I think that whole, that whole stuff, is just, it's amazing. It doesn't quite fit our bill, but it's, it's pretty amazing stuff. I like that kind of thing.

19:01

Well, I enjoyed this conversation in a big way. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. How do people get a hold of you there?

19:07

Kirk, well, you can get a hold of me, but I'm on LinkedIn. Curt Chamberlain, you can find me, and I'm just an individual setting out there, but more than happy to carry on a conversation or talk to anybody about anything.

19:20

19:53

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

19:59