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Factory Futures
Reliability | Rob Mora on Why Smarter Reliability Is Hard, and How to Actually Get There
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Factory Futures podcast. Join us as we dive into the world of innovation and best practice in manufacturing. We sit down with industry leaders in reliability, operations and production with a mission to uncover new technologies, making a real impact, driving performance, and enhancing profitability. Of your site. We explore the leadership journeys of our guests, learning from their challenges and gaining from their insights. Subscribe on your favorite app to stay ahead of the curve with our latest episodes. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Great conversation this week with Rob Mora, who is the head of Sales at Cohesive. This was a little bit different to our usual conversation, which is either with a domain expert in the world of reliability or a operations leader in a manufacturing site. It was very nice in that it was an opportunity to take a step back, not dive so deeply into one topic, but rather look at the overall picture and look at the wider landscape of things and address really what is the most common challenge that people have when they're trying to go up that reliability curve? The most common challenges, that is. So it was a very, very interesting conversation in that there's a lot of things that will apply to you and your everyday reality, I am very sure. And there was a lot of advice given that is very practical and tangible in its nature. So I'm sure that you listeners will enjoy it as much as I have. It was a good conversation. It was nice to have Rob on the show. As always, we welcome your feedback. So if there's any, any ideas that you guys have, reach out to us on LinkedIn or on Spotify. And thank you very much for listening. Rob, thanks for coming onto the podcast. It is great to have you.
- [01:46]
B
Awesome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is fun.
- [01:49]
A
Yes. Yeah, well, it's fun. We've only just gotten started, so hopefully you think this is even more fun when we get into it.
- [01:55]
B
It's just all the prep and coming up to this. I enjoy these things.
- [01:58]
A
Excellent. Excellent. So do we. So thank you so much for, for sharing that pleasure with us. So, again, thank you for joining us. It's. It's fantastic to have you and love to start. Where we often start is why don't you give us an introduction of yourself and who you are.
- [02:11]
B
Sure. So, Rob Mora, my current. My current role, I'm the head of Global sales for Cohesive. It's a business unit of Bentley Systems. My background is a couple of decades in industrial technology and professional services within the infrastructure sectors. I've really managed essentially all aspects of revenue growth over that time and I've been in the Asset management segment of the market. About four, let's say four years or so. But, but I've always enjoyed working in and around heavy industry. I just, I really like to see how things, how the world works in the background and I just love being a part of that. It's fascinating. Solving problems, complex problems in this particular industry is sort of chock full of them with a wide variety of problems. So it's, it's a great place to be.
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A
Good. Yeah, I feel very much that way, doesn't it? It feels like every day you get a bit of a how it's made type. Type. Yeah, day in the life.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
- [03:08]
A
That's good, that's excellent. And you, you mentioned it there but can you tell us a little bit more about who cohesive is?
- [03:14]
B
Yeah, so, so cohesive is a global maximo system integrator. Are what we like to say is we're dedicated to helping asset intensive industries unlock the full strategic value of their capital investments. And we do this with expert maximum implementation capabilities, deep industry expertise and proven reliability strategy consulting. I think that's good. I think the thing that I think about when I say that is obviously I've, I'm, I run sales and I manage a lot of our go to market strategy. And so you see things like that a lot, you see people say that a lot or you see companies try to say that a lot. And I think what, what sort of differentiates us in that regard is I think we are the best at connecting reliability strategy to real world execution. So what that means is effectively we don't just configure maximo, we help organizations turn asset data into business performance. I think that for me being best in class at that requires bringing world class maximo expertise with decades of operational experience together. So reliability engineers, planners, asset managers, the combination of which all that strategic insight and hands on delivery, I think that really does separate us in the market.
- [04:26]
A
Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, good, good reason to. Good angle to go after really is what I meant. It's, it's really what people want I would think to turn their reliability strategy into. Yeah, into really a system and an approach. Excellent. And that's very much what we aim to talk about today. The topic of this conversation is very much going to be on what currently is the challenge in the world of reliability and what is the common hurdles that are, that are making people, that are making it hard for our prospective customers to transition, make that transition that everyone wants from really, really reactive to a little bit more proactive to completely predictive. So, yeah, and so do you want to talk to us about, in your view, why does that transition matter? You know, why, why transition into. Throughout all these stages, what, what does that help your customers do?
- [05:12]
B
Well, the reality is that's where it sort of unlocks the strategic value of their asset by all the customers we work with. Their whole business model is based on the acquisition, the capital that they've invested into large scale complex assets. That's how they deliver whatever value they're delivering to their customers. So properly managing those assets and getting the most strategic value out of them, that's it. That's their whole bottom line. Not all companies necessarily think that way because obviously sales and marketing and finance, those are critical components. But companies that build their entire value proposition off of operating and executing with their assets, with their physical assets to deliver value to their customers, then the assets to me become sort of the most important thing that you can get really, really good at. So to me, that's why you want to continue to increase your asset management. Mature.
- [06:04]
A
Yeah. Agreed. Very much agreed. All right, so we'll follow the, we'll follow a structure in which what we'll do is we will, we'll address the challenges first, the common challenges that you guys observe, which is super curious to hear about. Then we'll talk about how those are overcome in hopefully in that place we get to explore some, some concrete stories of your customers, which also very keen to hear more about. And then at last we'll really talk about like practical advice and solutions that you've observed typically work. And after that we'll get a chance to hear more about why cohesive. So starting with the challenge, let's dive a little bit deeper into that. That reality that I shared is often reality of the average site, right? Where the broader problem is they, they know they need to move from reactive to proactive to predictive. But in theory, there's a lot of reasons why they can't do it. So why don't you just make a general comment that I love to hear on? It's why is it a journey difficult in the environments that you typically see? Why, why is it difficult to do it even if people know it's it's what they should be doing?
- [07:04]
B
Well, I mean, so, so from my perspective, it's, it's difficult largely because it's not just a technology upgrade, right? It's, it's a, it's a cultural upgrade, it's an organizational upgrade, it's a data transformation. It's. It's a journey, right? It's way more difficult if what you're trying to get to is predictive. So what I like to do is I like to call it asset management maturity because there's a heck of a lot of value that can come from anywhere along that maturity curve that you can get by sort of implementing these methods and the strategy and this discipline. But yeah, getting all the way to predictive is one outcome and it's a pretty far reaching outcome. But across the board, the big issue is it's called a journey. Right. I like to think of it, I use the expression lifestyle. If you are, if you are in a certain shape, but you're trying to get an incredible shape or athlete level shape, like you gotta change everything about the way you think about exercise and food and your relationship to food and how you get your rest. So, so it's, it's, it's a, it's a lot like a lifestyle change. It involves process and data and technology and people and leadership. And companies have a heck of a lot of priorities and they're busy doing their day to day. So you have to, you have to make the decision that you're going to change your lifestyle, you're going to go on this journey and you are going to see it all the way through. And that presents just a ton of challenges with these big complex businesses that are managing as many assets as they are.
- [08:22]
A
Yeah, that's a very good point. And I love the metaphor as well. It's, it's very accurate, I think. Who was it? There's a smart man that said, you know, go as far as you can see and when you get there you'll be able to see further. Yeah, I think it's one of those where it's, you know, there's, there's problems that you can't, you can't portray are going to happen because you just, you just don't know. If we get a little bit more specific into you started your answer by saying, well, it's difficult because it's multifaceted, it's cultural, it's data, it's multiple things. So if we talk about like those common hurdles, what categories of hurdles do you think there are and which ones tend to be the bigger ones in those.
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B
So right off the bat, if you talk to anybody doing this, either on my side, the vendor side or on the customer side, it's legacy systems and fragmented data.
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A
Right.
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B
That's, that is, that is huge. Organizations tend to have decades of maintenance history. It's stored across multiple systems. It's maximo It's Excel, it's homegrown databases and, and even with some of these large multi billion dollar companies, it's, you know, it's even paper. So, so the problem is inconsistent, incomplete or unstructured data liability. You can't really train a reliability model if you don't have the right failure codes. You don't have asset hierarchies. And, and that's just, that's a big undertaking. Companies have to decide that they're going to, to fix that.
- [09:38]
A
Right.
- [09:39]
B
It's a cultural change. Maintenance teams, typically you're rewarded for fixing problems quickly. You don't spend a heck of a lot of time worrying about how you're going to prevent it. You're worried about can I deal with it quickly when it occurs. And so you have a lot of teams in firefighting mode and you have to begin to start to change the culture and the mindset that we, we just don't want these things to even happen. That the idea that maintenance, in essence, the more you touch the equipment, the worse off it's going to be long term. And so you have to sort of get a cultural change going. You have to get, you've got skills gaps, right? So in order to be able to get to where you need to go, you have to blend maintenance, data, science, you have a lot of IT integration now to get all the technology in place. Most maintenance organizations weren't really designed for that. Right. So the people that know the assets the best, they're not IT guys, IT guys, they're not operations guys. I think we spend a lot of time focused there. I think we spent a lot of time focused on demonstrating roi. So you know, I talked about the fact that it's a journey, right? So, so at the end of the day you're going to see value, but you're going to see value only after you've taken a few. I love the quote that you used earlier, right. You're going to take, you're going to get to the end and then you can see how much further you can go. Well, that's important to understand. You're going to see value only over time and where and how you're going to measure that value. It's. Sometimes it's not so obvious. It's a little bit like when you mitigate risk. So if the event didn't happen, success. Right. But it didn't happen. So it's hard to measure what the actual risk would have been. And so calculating roi, I think is a, is a big hurdle for a lot of companies to get the funding and get the funding approved and communicate upstream. Sort of where the value from all this investment is going to come from. Lack of process foundation. Technology overload. Leadership. You got to get leadership involved early on with a lot of these ROI discussions, I think. I mean there's a, there's a long list of reasons why it becomes very difficult to even begin this journey. But I think lack of process foundation. I mentioned that at the end, you know, if you don't things like planned work and failure analysis and asset criticality, those are foundational processes that you need to have in place for anything like a long, like a long term asset management journey to be effective. And a lot of times, like I said earlier, maintenance teams are busy doing the job of the day to day, not thinking about the future as much as, as much as they could be.
- [12:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. And that makes it particularly hard when you're asking that person who's doing the day to day job to then also be a salesperson to leadership to present a business case with an roi. As you talked about, I wouldn't mind getting a bit more of your perspective here. So ROI in an asset management, there's a lot of levers, which is the good part. Right. You can make a case that if you have better practices, well, you'll be able to reduce a lot of work that gets done unnecessarily, like reduction of PMs. You can make a case that there's probably wasted materials that are happening. If you don't have great processes, you're probably changing your belts, your bearings too often. You can make a case that some failures could be caught and would never occur. How do you guys like to approach this with teams when you talk about roi?
- [12:50]
B
Well, I think that's a great question. It's one of my favorite being in sales and business development for 25 years. Show me the money from a maintenance perspective. I think most companies historically have viewed it as, as a cost center. And so my goal is to reduce the cost, make it as efficient as possible and they really don't see it as a, as a strategic advantage. Right. So if I'm competing against a number of other companies that have large scale asset investments, companies that are using those asset investments to deliver value. If I'm able to manage my asset investments better than my competitor, in essence I have a strategic advantage. So I can, I can use advanced asset management and reliability practices to mitigate corporate risk. Right. There's ways to show from an ROI perspective how you're going to mitigate overall corporate risk and insure and deal with insurance. You are obviously dealing with cost, but then you're also dealing with corporate strategy and capital investment. Right. So the finance side of things, a good asset management program isn't just about reducing costs and getting more efficient maintenance practices. It's about the total asset life cycle. Right. And all that asset life cycle planning is a capital management question mark. Right. It's a big time finance commitment. So, so, so from my perspective, I think the big hurdle for, for companies is to realize you're not just trying to reduce maintenance costs and have like less breakdowns. You're really trying to make it into a strategic advantage. And if you can do that, you can really understand where the ROI is coming from. You can understand the greater impact of the ROI and you can help justify the investments that in, in a lot of the discipline that this requires.
- [14:27]
A
Yeah, good, that's, that's awesome. It is difficult for sites, I think, to fully embed that like, it's a really like take it into ownership and go like, yes, that's what we're going to do if it is, if it is successful like that. Absolutely. That's, that's fantastic. It's exactly what you want.
- [14:42]
B
And I should say if I, sorry, if I, you know, one thing I want to say just I think it's useful for, for a lot of companies out there. Look, it's a big, it's a big pill to swallow. Right. And companies are already stretched with competing priorities. So most of them, most companies are already doing maintenance quite well. Right. It'd be hard to even be in business if you were really bad at maintenance. So most of them are doing maintenance quite well. And they're also normally relatively good on the compliance side of things. Right. And so those things, when you're doing those things well, it's hard to decide. Well, let me take this other chunk of capital and time and resources invested in just getting even better at maintenance excellence and really getting up that asset management maturity curve. You know, that's why in essence, when you're struggling to try to figure out where that ROI is going to come from, that's where I feel like, yeah, that's why you'd hire a company like Cohesive, for example. But in essence, I think it's a little bit simpler than that. My guess is all companies, somewhere along the line they're already doing something. I've never been to a company where there isn't some engineer somewhere wondering how we could do something better where there isn't a Maintenance technician questioning why they keep servicing equipment that hasn't been used in a long time. Right. Why is it that the same thing keeps breaking down over and over again? They've probably documented it somewhere. They're probably researching RCM and strategies and asset management. They're probably asking for funding to join associations. Like it is probably happening no matter where you are in your journey, even if you do think it's a big thing to swallow, you probably are more advanced than you. Than you think you.
- [16:15]
A
Very good point. And then it's about bringing together that momentum into, into one, maybe more. Yeah. Collated act. This would be a good time actually now that you, you've talked a little bit more about, you know, examples of what actually is happening below the surface. But if you can share with us a few examples from, from some of your customers. Like what? Typically, you know, rather than speaking at high level, like specifically a customer, what was the problem they were facing and how they were able to overcome that problem. So happy to for you to take that wherever you'd like.
- [16:47]
B
Yeah. But if I'd love to just pull out from my marketing department all of my use cases and just. Yeah, up on the screen. But yeah, so you know, a few different examples, sort of common problems that actual customers have faced right now I talked a lot about data earlier. Right. So what happens is you, you start with data chaos. I have a utility client. They'd been a maximo user for, for nearly a decade. They were, they were mostly reactive. They had tons and tons of maintenance data, years of it, thousands of work orders. The problem is that none of it was consistent. Right. Different technicians use different failure codes. Some assets weren't classified correctly. Reporting was sort of basically meaningless. So the foundation that you would need to be able to develop a mature asset management strategy, the data was just what we call data chaos. Right. So the answer to that is you start small. Your first step is in you, you don't just start throwing a bunch of technology at it. Right. It's about getting your data foundation right. So we worked with their reliability and their maintenance teams to clean up the asset hierarchy, to standardize their classifications, to implement a consistent failure coding structure. Those things that were things that we can do with different types of staff. It's not about buying technology, it's not high level consult strategic consulting work. It's just within a few months they could already visualize which assets were driving the most downtime and the most cost. And that was already the foundation for what we needed to do going forward. So just getting over the hurdle of the data chaos. That's a common problem and you solve it just by taking some of those non technology things on, head on.
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A
No, I'm just going to say that's a very good example. Data chaos probably coming at so many sites and good way to overcome it.
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B
Yeah, we sort of talked about, we sort of talked about building a business case. So, so that is a very real issue. We have customers all the time. We have an energy customer more recently that they wanted to invest in an asset management maturity model and strategy and policies but it was hard for them to justify the spend because it's difficult to see exactly how the ROI is going to surface itself. Right. So again how do you overcome that? None of this is so it's sophisticated in that you have to be deeply entrenched in this world, but it's not rocke science. Right. It's a reliability maturity assessment. Right. And I, it's funny, I, I say assessment and I hear in the back of my mind customers saying oh yeah, I've been, I've had a lot of assessments. Well, getting an assessment from a company that knows how to execute after the fact is the key. Right. So getting a reliability maturity assessment from a company that lives and breathes asset management maturity, looking at their current processes, data quality, failure costs, it wasn't that hard for us to show them what the opportunity looked like. And in millions of dollars we built a business case. We showed them how to improve their facility data, we showed them where the sort of the work process breakdowns were happening. 10% easy off the top line of all of their maintenance costs. It was a pretty easy case to make. But again, building that business case and justifying the roi, that's not easy for organizations to see. And so helping them see exactly where it's going to appear downstream, that's an important part of what we can do. And I would just, I'd say the other example that I wanted to bring to the table is that cultural change. You know, you've got customers that have all the right stuff, they've got all kinds of sensors, they already use Maxima, they have tons of dashboards built out. But their teams, they just don't trust the data. They've got alerts coming in but the planners, they just don't trust them and the technicians don't have time to react. And so you know, that was a manufacturing company we were working with and so the key there was bringing the maintenance and operations and reliability teams together. Our, our background helps a lot in that regard. Because we live in both universes. We live on the operations side and we live on the IT side. And so being able to bring all of the teams together, review all the bad actors together in meetings, help them align on terminology and priorities that help them put trust in the system and that was, you know, overcoming. That's a good example for me of overcoming cultural challenge when it comes to these types of programs.
- [20:50]
A
Yeah, probably the least often talked about one. Right. But often like the biggest one and hardest to overcome. And yeah, all the examples you shared are super relevant. Thank you very much for them. The second one you mentioned there is also super interesting to hear. You know, 10% shaving of maintenance expenses, significant amount. Also very good that you use this as an opportunity to say that you're in your business model, you would be the ones delivering on that work. I think why a lot of the other big consultants don't do that is because they fear that they're going to deliver the work and it might not justify the result. And, and so you're telling us indirectly that, you know, you're there through it all to help the customers see it through.
- [21:28]
B
I think it's. It's what in the professional services business, I think that is key to have if you own something from end to end. So I'm going to, I'm going to advise you on the right direction and then I'm going to be personally responsible for implementing that solution. And then after the fact, whatever results we get, I am responsible for ensuring that it went off Right. And that it's warrantied and that it's properly serviced and you have good ongoing support. You're not escaping, right. As a service provider, you're not escaping any of that. You make sure it works. And I think that's where our investment as a company has been is in making sure that all of this asset management maturity conversation and all of the maximo implementation work that we do, that it is specifically directed towards value outcomes.
- [22:10]
A
Excellent. Now next one on that we wanted to talk about is, and again, this is like naturally, as you create these, these conversation arcs, just something you cover already. But do you have any, anything else you'd like to share on? You know, some lessons learned? You talked about small wins, doing, doing things, running small, quick wins, change management. Does there anything else here you'd make a comment on? What can a site expect if they go on, on such a journey?
- [22:36]
B
Yeah, lot, lot. Definitely lots of lessons learned, I would say. You, you mentioned a good one. You know, so data is the foundation, right? That's key. You gotta get started there, start small. You don't really have to take on the whole enchilada right off the bat. You could start small. You can prove the value. You can scale that pretty fast afterwards. I think culture matters as much as technology. Again, like I said, I feel like this is a lifestyle change. If you're not currently doing anything, it's a big move. If you're currently doing something, people get it, but not everybody gets it. So I think culture matters as much as technology. And then I would say you got to get that leadership buy in. And that's where the business cases and the ROIs and really knowing where the ROI is going to surface because you're looking at value that could, that could surface in months or years. Right. And so it's a long term commitment. A lot of these companies operate quarter to quarter. They don't want to hear anything about two year investments. And so you have to do a very good job of showing, hey, this is significant value that will pay back many times over. So those, those are some, some key specific lessons. If I was to group them, those are all the most important ones.
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A
Excellent. Moving on to the next section about practical advice for the average listener. Our average listener of this podcast is a reliability engineer based in beautiful Australia. As we talked about before.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Who is under a significant amount of time pressure but certainly also as you talked about before, has a desire to improve, you know, maybe looking at the associations, looking at the, what are the classic RCM books which can actually read before falling asleep on page one. So what is your, you know, taking a very high level here? What, what advice would you have to this average listener?
- [24:19]
B
So, okay, sorry, I have to go back to the sort of the standardized language. So I think of it as a lifestyle change. But the thing to remember, and if the average user is a reliability engineer or the average listener is then they're going to understand all the language I'm going to say next. But it is very much a journey, so, so doing it in small incremental steps is key. Step one, get control of your asset data. We've kind of talked about that a lot throughout this podcast and if you just make sure your assets are structured correctly and maximo you proper hierarchies and locations and classifications and naming conventions, that's huge, right? That to me, in my mind that's half the battle. That's, that's the foundation. You can identify and rank your critical assets. So again, talking to reliability engineers, they're going to clearly understand this language. It's not going to be new to them. But if for whatever reason I'm trying to get my company to get started on something like this, just understanding that these are the small steps you can take. You identify 20% of your equipment that causes 80% of your downtime and or safety risk. So you know it's critical and you prioritize your preventative and your condition based strategies associated with, with those assets. Like I like this one. I and I heard this sort of coming up to this, I was talking to a few different people preparing for this. Get your current PM practices organized, right? If you know before you go to the, to the point where you're trying to predict failures, right, Are you preventing the ones that you already understand? Have you reviewed your current maintenance practices? Are they, are they effective? Are they just routine? A lot of PM practices are redundant or they're outdated. So you can take a step there. It's pretty straightforward. Just looking at your current maintenance practices and making sure you aren't just doing things for the sake of doing things things and you aren't just reacting to the, to the most imminent problems all the time. You have a strategy, engaging your people early. A lot of times, JP they will, companies will. I've seen this where reliability engineers aren't even talking to operations managers or aren't even part of maintenance conversations, right? You got to get all these people in the same room because the idea of enterprise asset management and asset management maturity is that yes, it executes in the maintenance level, but it operates all the way through engineering planning and reliability studies and getting finance involved. It's important that you get, get everybody involved early. Even if it's just discussions. It doesn't have to be. I'm launching a formal program. Let's just start talking, right? Start small, pilot, proven scale. We talked about that. We do a lot of pilots for customers. You don't have to decide that you're going to engage in this journey. You can a particular type of asset and focus on that. You can maybe pick a single site and you can focus on that. Make sure that you measure success along the way, right? Pick your KPIs early on to make sure that if we're going to do a pilot or a single site that we know what we need to be able to defend the ROI calculation down the road. So get those KPIs in place and make sure you're measuring even simple reliability dashboards that have one or two KPIs that could be enough to justify every, everything that you're looking for from a funding perspective, then again it's cross cultural and cross functional collaboration. If you are a reliability engineer, you understand that just you talking amongst yourselves about what needs to be done differently in organization, that's tough. So you have to take some ownership, you've got to go around, you've got to get people engaged. It is a science, right? So it's when you're getting outside of the maintenance practices and you're getting into reliability strategies and asset management maturity and you're trying to think about predictability and going all that way, all the technology, there is a lot of technology and there's a lot of science to it in some respects. And so you're going to have to do some educating and you're going to have to do that amongst a bunch of groups that are busy doing other things. So I think getting kind of making sure you get that initial buy in and cross functional collaboration that yeah, we are going to do this together and there is some value. I think those are some really, really key steps to getting started.
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A
Yeah, you gave us more than we bargained for here. So quite, quite a fantastic journey. Thank you.
- [28:22]
B
I was preparing.
- [28:24]
A
Yeah, clearly, clearly. Excellent. Another question that we sometimes ask our guests is, you know, things about making it as simple as possible. If say you were at an event and you met someone at a lunch break, you know, what would you, what would be that conversation? Like what would you ask first and then suggest first?
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B
It's honestly, it is how I've lived my whole life. Like let's just what is the smallest, I can't remember who said it, but you know, what is the smallest bite of something that you can take on to make sure that you're successful? Right. So let's just, let's just say so if we go back to data, you just pick one data set. Maybe it's critical pumps or compressors. You just make sure that I get all the data right there. You get the hierarchy correct, you get the locations correct, you capture consistent failure codes. Let's just pick one and take that little bite sized chunk and see what happens. Right. We'll get some insight just from that exercise. I talked about reviewing your PM work. Just review PM work on one particular asset, right? On one particular, say problem, type of asset. Just make sure your PMs are fully optimized. A really simple way to approach this is just go talk to your technicians and take notes. They know everything about what's going on with all of your assets. They know, you know it by the sound, right. Like it's a fascinating thing to talk to technicians and maintenance guys. They know everything about your facility. Just nobody's coming and talking to them. So if you just start conversations, take notes, make sure you're going to measure and share wins. I would say for me in general, just getting started, like just the act of saying, all right, I'm going to get going and taking that first step and look at one data set and start talking to some technicians. Unbelievable value just by getting started.
- [30:12]
A
Excellent, excellent. And then at last, before we move on to that final section, is a bit of a reverse question, like what, what mistakes should people be wary of and what are the pitfalls that you see people sometimes fall into when they're thinking about a project like this one?
- [30:29]
B
Well, this has a lot to do with market pressures, right. A lot of companies will jump straight to the technology. So if I can buy my way in to an asset management maturity level, that's great. And there's a lot of vendors that would love to sell things to say that they can do that. Right. But if you have a bunch of sensors and a bunch of dashboards and you've implemented AI, but you don't have your data processes, you've spent a lot of money, you're not going to get the value and it's going to kill your ROI immediately and you're going to get a lot of unhappy leadership also trying to do everything at once. So we keep talking. So this is sort of like you said, it's sort of the opposite of the recommendations, right? What we, what we see as killers is we don't just pick one small pilot project or you don't just pick one asset class. You say, okay, we are going to be foundationally, we are going to be an asset management mature organization across the board, that is tough. It immediately exhausts everybody because the amount of data that you have to collect and the conversations, you just won't be able to do it in the scheme of or during your normal day to day life. And so it's just going to exhaust everybody pretty quickly. And I would say we talked about this a little bit earlier, but, but don't treat it as a maintenance project. The idea of getting beyond maintenance and even maintenance excellence is that we are now talking business strategy. So if you treat it like a maintenance project, they'll immediately zero in on costs and where my cost saving is going to be. But it's much bigger than that. It's business strategy, it is risk mitigation, it is long term capital planning, asset life cycle Management. If you treat it that way and you stay away from treating it like a maintenance project, I think you'll get a lot further. Don't ignore change management. We talked a lot about that. A lot of cultural changes need to happen in an organization to make all of this work from a lot of different groups. So that's huge. And then I would say, you know, you failing to measure so a lot of companies will get approval for something and you spend all your time implementing which takes so much energy. So much energy. But if you haven't been thoughtful about how you're going to measure success along the way so that you can keep those regular reports going, it's easy to die on the vine very quickly because like I said, it's, it's long term value but companies operate on short term profit profiles and so if you don't show them those interim value steps, you're going to have a hard time getting long term buy in. So those would be some of the things I'd avoid.
- [32:47]
A
Excellent. So we went, we talked about this as we went along. So perhaps there is a little bit less necessary for you to say. But at last we wanted to talk a little bit about why cohesive and talk a little bit about where you'll be next week. But yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit more about like why you guys stand out as a, as a maximo integration consultancy?
- [33:09]
B
Yeah, differentiators. Sort of my favorite subject in any company I've ever been at. It's, it's, I would say as, as a system integrator you, you sort of have to decide how much of the solution you want to go after. Right. So you get, you get the smaller regional firms that the idea is I have strong technical expertise and I can deliver it sort of super cost effective. I've got boutique firms that focus in on a particular industry and they just go very, very deep in that particular industry. And then so the other end of that spectrum is you've got sort of complete business and digital transformation agendas that much like a lot of the global SIS go for. Right. So we're all in the same industry competing to provide sort of similar services. But in our case I think we're focused on a few key industries and we are we on being the best at connecting reliability strategy to real world execution. I really want to drive that home because strategy, strategy is easy to get lost in strategy and it's difficult to put these long term programs in place and see the value if you don't have a company like ours, that works to bridge the gap between reliability strategy and maximum execution. I think a lot of the large scale projects are going to get lost very, very quickly. So that is what I think makes cohesive special is we don't just deliver systems, we deliver reliability outcomes.
- [34:27]
A
Excellent. And where, where will people find you next week, Rob?
- [34:33]
B
Sydney, hopefully. I'll be somewhere near you so we can go grab a drink somewhere. I'll be in Sydney at Maximo Live, one of the events where, you know, this is a pretty small community of Maximo expertise and there's lots of ways to learn about it, but Maximo Live is one of them. I'll be in Sydney next.
- [34:52]
A
Fantastic. Darling harbor, fantastic location as well. So those of you who are not yet convinced by how amazing the agenda is, well, the location's one more point to add to it because it's amazing there. Rob will be there. A lot of people will be there. As you said, not, not thousands of people, but in the realm of hundreds and a small and very powerful community that's eager to learn and collaborate. So it's going to be a good one. It's going to be really fun.
- [35:18]
B
For sure. For sure.
- [35:20]
A
Yeah. Looking forward to it. Fantastic. And if, if somehow listeners catch this after the fact and they've missed that opportunity to, to find you at Maximo Live, where could they learn more from you and where could listeners connect with you?
- [35:32]
B
So, I mean, I've been, you know, obviously in sales a long time. You can always call me directly and I can help you out. I'm on LinkedIn. But, but the reality is probably the smarter way to go is to cohesivesolutions.com that's a, that's a great starting point. A lot of education there, but it's a, it's a place where you can find exactly the resources that you're going to need from us. And we'll get a hold of you right away.
- [35:53]
A
Yeah, fantastic. The website that Rob just mentioned will be in the show notes as well as the, as a link to the event that will be there as well. And Rob's personal profile on LinkedIn will be there too. And yeah, so I want to say, Rob, a big thank you for this. This was fantastic. You were great, as you said, you know, it showed that you, you are passionate about the topics you talked about. It was so easy for you to naturally speak of them. Learned a lot from you and a lot of the answers that you gave really ring true to me. The very, very core to our philosophy here. Having interviewed now dozens of reliability experts and just people that are interested in this space. Yeah. A big thank you to you for sharing your knowledge, man.
- [36:35]
B
Thank you for this opportunity. It's fun to prepare for these things. It's fun to really think about real true answers to these questions, not just sort of marketing language. And he wants to hear but this is practical execution advice. It's. It's fun to think about and be a part of. Thanks for having me.
- [36:52]
A
Yes, our pleasure. Fantastic. Thank you for coming on and see you next week at Maximal Live.
- [36:58]
B
Yeah, see you there. Looking forward to it.
- [37:00]
A
So am I. And that's it for this week's episode folks. Thank you so much for listening in and tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode and think it would be valuable to anyone else, feel free to give it a share on LinkedIn and feel free to subscribe as well on your favorite app. Enjoy the rest of your week.