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Cut Factory Maintenance Costs by 30 Percent · Full Tech Ahead

• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to Full Tech Ahead.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Amanda Rizzani.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: And with me today, I have Israel Ortiz.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: He's the VP and General Manager at Accruant.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing today?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great, Amanda.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: How about yourself?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing well.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Good start to the week.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a Monday, but let's get to it.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, can you share a little bit about uh your company?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: What services do you provide?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, accruant.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it really helps shape the world and how it works.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we operate in facility and asset management and helping improve efficiency and uptime for our customers uh through a series of products.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: So wonderful.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're gonna talk about manufacturing teams and the growing retiring workforce and how we can tackle that with AI tools.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, my first question for you is how big a challenge is the retiring workforce right now in the manufacturing industry?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, retiring workforce is something, it's an inevitable thing that is happening across.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I was just visiting customers uh two weeks ago where they're having this exact problem.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they're the the great experience, 20, 30 year, you know, under their belt uh workforce is deciding to move on to a better life.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and that's leaving behind the novice, the newer folks, uh, to try to figure out how to close that gap as soon as possible.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very much a real problem out there.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you're seeing a real gap uh and a need for to bring on new talent?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, they are.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a lot of folks are trying to figure out how to do trading better.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, being in the software space, a lot of what I hear from our customers is how can technology help solve the experience gap that I have?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is very much um something that everyone's trying to solve for.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Got it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So then here comes AI, and everybody's looking at how they can harness these AI tools, and it has advanced quite rapidly over the last few years.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: So, how is the new version of AI offering assistance in this area?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you advise business leaders to use it?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's where the world is at right now.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone is trying to mine their data.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's been a lot of good history out there in particular the asset management tools.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so now the challenge is how do I go and tap that information?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what a lot of our customers are trying to do is uh de-duplicate information, clean the information, grind get the right pattern so that AI can then tell them a couple of things.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, number one is what should I be doing with that asset?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So making that decision of I'm getting some signals from different sorts of IoT devices, what does that really mean?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the history within the asset management tools will tell you that.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh going back to the experience gap, as the newer technicians go out and try to fix something, what should they actually be doing?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so uh AI can help give that information to them.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is how AI is is being leveraged and starting to evolve uh to help replace that gap.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can you share how that is helping with the AI being connected to the Internet of Things and also some of the risks with that as well?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, great.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the smartest and the greatest uh technicians out there, I was actually joking with one of them, and uh, and they always say, Oh, I just have to put my hand on that, feel the vibration, and I can tell what I need to do there, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you take someone who's brand new, there's no way they know if it's even vibrating at that at that moment.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so what does uh the connected you know uh IoT do?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, there's a lot of companies out there that are helping understand vibration, temperature, you know, motor decrease, et cetera, power decrease.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And all those are just signals.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh what AI can start helping do is understand what those signals could mean.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so you're really starting to see, you know, that predictive maintenance get to the place where people want it.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest drawback here is to blindly trust it.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so then one thing is um it's getting really good.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone should definitely start investing in this way.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: However, we should continue to use the folks who are still with us, uh, still have the experience to pressure test and ensure that we got the right thing.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, what it is, what what I recommend for folks out there is is when you get something, take it seriously, understand it, but then go and understand that information, go and do whatever validation you need to, and then go confirm uh that what you are seeing through AI is indeed valid.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's a lot of, you know, the way we would use it to write something today.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: We would, we would, we would ask the prompt to help us think about how to how to be creative.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then we would say, okay, now I'm gonna read it and make sure it's what I need it to be.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh similar to when you're doing reliability maintenance.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we need to leverage AI uh to make sure that we're getting what we want out of it.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's my advice.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: All the legacy technology that manufacturers are having to deal with right now.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: How are they moving to this new A, the new AI tools?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Technology is going to be a slower, I mean, the these assets, these, these, these huge production lines that our food ab or any manufacturing is dealing with, they're starting to slowly start bringing in uh these manufacturers that will have IoT devices installed in them.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll come out of it this way.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so uh in one of the tours I was doing, they said, hey, let's go to our smart manufacturing and let's not let's not go to this way, right?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the the legacy ones will continue to need those inspections, we'll continue to need you know the monthly rounding, et cetera.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but as uh items are being replaced, as you know, 20-year-old pieces of equipment uh come around, those manufacturers will start to embed that intelligent uh assets within them.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so then my recommendation is to start investing in those and ensuring that you're slowly building a modern manufacturing plant for yourself.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, AI tools are advancing rapidly, as we mentioned.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: What do you envision as the future of manufacturing and how can business leaders prepare and harness these tools?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, the future is slowly um being shown to us in different ways.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh, you know, take those same plants, for example.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: One of them needed a lot of human intervention uh within those manufacturing sites.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The other ones was a lot of automation already there.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what the future will be is us supervising that automation.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Again, always having that human element in it because we're gonna get smarter about the way we uh we operate versus be completely replaced.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and so then the the future will be um let's let uh technology work for us, but let's always stay in the loop to ensure it's it's producing what we want.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're more uh in the in that control room, ensuring things are there so that when something pops up, we can then go intervene.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: We can go, we can then go make sure that uh asset doesn't stay downtime too long.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then your second question is uh advice, right?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: That I would that I would give here.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and my advice is that is this is is to hey, you've got a rich set of data within you.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Start ensuring that you're capturing all your information.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so those work orders that you're closing out are it's much more important that you take those notes, that you annotate what happened, that you get that problem cost and remedy in there, uh, and then clean that data and bring it into your data lakes because that information will be what will help you respond in the future much faster.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I just I just say now more than ever, ensure that uh you're you're getting that information within there, and then you can apply AI to get what you need from it.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, from your experience, do you have a particular use case story that you can share about a company?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you don't uh name the company, but is there um a transformation story you can share when they um harnessed the AI technology and IoT and they saw a great result?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I could think of uh automotive uh manufacturing.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and of course, there's there's plenty in different industries, but we we we dealt with one of those.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they definitely uh saw a huge increase in productivity.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but again, it's the reason why I think about the human in the loop is that this uh IoT device got them to the predictive maintenance that they wanted.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they were able to reduce their there's reactive and then this they were able to produce their preventive maintenance uh 30% uh because they were able to look at their predictive maintenance.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then they had every Tuesday, and this is advice for everyone, every Tuesday they would just look at that telemetry data.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: They would look at what the system was telling them to go do, uh, and then they would uh take out things that they knew weren't an issue and then focus on the things that were.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were able to see improve their uptime because of that.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: So uh this is why I'm a big believer.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to see it firsthand and how technology was being used uh for them to get the efficiency that they wanted.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if there was one key takeaway you could share with our audience today, what would that be?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I said don't wait and start now.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, start investing in the small ways.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, start investing in your information.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Start investing, making sure you're getting that intelligence out there because when that experienced workforce leaves, all that information will be in your asset management system.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then you can plug in all the IoT devices uh and have that harmony that you want to have so that the next person that's more of a novice will have the right information.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine a world where um all they have to do is scan the asset in front of them.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this system can tell them, oh, great.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the history behind that asset.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what telemetry did is telling me I recommend you do X, Y, and Z and with these sort of tool sets.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so the more you start investing in your information now, the more it'll play dividends in the future.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights today.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, Amanda, thank you for having me.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited about this.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and thank you to our audience.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions or comments, link them below and I'll respond back as soon as possible.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And meanwhile, have a wonderful week.