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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. All
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right. Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining this incredible platform and thank you for your continued support of a wonderful we just celebrate you on Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for what you do. We are broadcasting on site. It is accruing insights. 2024 we are in San Antonio. That's right, San Antonio, The Riverwalk is pretty cool. I like that. How about you, Richard, I
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love the Riverwalk.
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It's amazing what they've done, all right? And we're going to be talking a lot about what is happening at Accruent and all of the incredible users here at this particular event. So stay tuned. We will get a rolling right now. Yeah, I'm always amazed at the Riverwalk, how much it gets built up. I mean, it's just, it's clean, it's like, it's good stuff. I don't know how big it is. No idea. No,
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never been to the end of
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it. It's true. It may find that individual to get to the end of it, or actually walked around it having a good conference. It's day one.
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Yeah, great.
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What do you hope to gain from this particular conference? What is the sort of the essence of this conference?
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You know, it's amazing. Many user conferences are, are tied to, you know, just, pretty much, just putting information out there about roadmaps and things like that. We have a lot of that going on where we're informing our users, informing the user community, informing our prospects, but what we get most out of insights is actually the insight into our customers, the conversations, the meetings. A lot of our innovation over the last year came from insights last year. So, you know, we gather feedback and understand really what's going on in the customer locations and find common trends across certain segments of our customers.
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Now for the listeners out there, you are the new president of a current what does that mean? What does that mean to you as the new president? Where are you taking this company?
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Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think that what we're trying to do, and what I'm trying to do within the company, is continue to build the momentum behind an innovation culture, a culture that drives with the customer first at the core. And to do that, Accruent has moved over the last several years from being individual point products to interconnected and connected ecosystems. And so part of what our vision is is to become better at that every single day. And we call that philosophy the better everyday way, which is how we put the customers at the center of what we're doing. And that better everyday way is, let's look each month, each quarter, each year, and look back and say, Are we doing things better than we were last week, last month, last quarter. So the whole philosophy is that we can't stand still. Nothing is standing still in our industries that we serve, nothing is standing still for our customers, their challenges continue. So we have to have the better everyday way
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for the listener out there, some of them might not know who Accruent is. So explain a little bit about what Accruent is and and for me personally, the the innovation or the the technologies that that make up Accruent. Can you explain that? Yeah,
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so Accruent serves a very diverse group of customers across the world, but it's primarily broken into two categories. You're either a workplace or higher education. So universities higher education or like a corporate campus environment, where you need space planning, you need facilities maintenance, you need to know whether or not your leases are coming up. Should you renew those leases and so on. So it's managing employee experience through, you know, the lease administration, through facilities maintenance that's really on the higher education and the corporate side, then accruing has a series of products that service asset management. And Asset Management is a pretty broad term. No, it is. So we have fit for purpose within segments, CMMS or work order systems, but tied and attached to that, we have document management systems for engineering documents. We have other services such as IoT and management of predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. So. So the whole idea is, how you operate and maintain your environment is something that we want to bring together in one cohesive set of solutions that service, oil and gas, chemical, health care, just different industries that have a large number of assets. They may be in factories. They may be process manufacturing, it may be pharma and life sciences, but it's where you need the right fit for purpose solutions that are serving your cut, you know, serving your employees, and basically, really, at the essence of it, is making things more efficient and more automated. Back a long time ago, people were just happy to move to the digital age, right? They were moving from paper they would have a paper work order, and they would send it around. And so then people came out with, you know, customer companies came out with systems that automated those work orders so that you would enter it into a system. Well, now that's not good enough, and that's where Accruent sits, which is, how do you bring all these things together? How does a technician get dispatched to go turn a wrench in a facility that could be a retail site, a hospital, you know, whatever it may be, and how do they have the engineering documents and all of the things that they need, including the information from sensors to make, you know, heads or tails out of that to improve the efficiency of how they work. And that's really where we are right now.
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How do you take a company on a journey like that? I mean that that's that's pretty comprehensive, and that is, sounds, it sounds a lot of change management and change change culture. How does, how does accruing apply that? What? How do you do that? Because that seems pretty big. Yeah,
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so several years ago, when I came to Accruent, we had a lot of what you would consider best in class products. They were single point solutions, and we had teams that were very good at that. But to pull all of that together, I called it the desilification, basically pulling together, excuse me, pulling together the different things that we do and combining them into solutions. So combining the ecosystems, it took an internal transformation for us to make that happen. Yes, we called that one Accruent, and it's funny, a lot of companies have a one something philosophy at Accruent, it was very meaningful. It was taking these really good products that we had and pulling together the organization's product engineering, customer support, everything we do so that we're serving a customer with the full set of solutions that we have, and that that took us a couple of years to get to that point. Really insights last year was when we were breaking out from that. And I think we're we're, we have a lot of momentum behind us now in in that area, and I think it's where our customers are, and we want to meet them where they are. They are no longer wanting to get a single solution. They want to solve a number of business challenges they have, and that's where we had to go to meet them there.
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So I can be a company, I have, let's say, a single solution that's being offered by accruing to me. It's been, it's been a part of my my technology stack, whatever you might want to call it, but then I can approach you and say, Hey, here's the deal. We're trying to be more efficient. We're trying, just like everybody else, we're trying to be more resilient and have greater insights into our business and whatever it might be. Do you have internal individuals that would help with that, consulting with that transition, with that painting that whole strategic picture for that company. Or do you work with partners? How does that sort of work for accruing? Yes,
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both,
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there you go.
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We have solution consultants, and we have a very large professional services team that can help you with that transformation, that can help our customers go through that, and they do, and then we rely upon a very good channel partner network and technology partner network, differentiated. Technology Partners are adding value by adding their products onto our products. Channel partners go into specific industries to specific customer types, and do that consulting you're talking about, which is looking at the holistic 360 degree view, installing Accruent products, because they're certified to do that, and then helping the customers move move forward.
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So as we talk to a lot of customers here at a at insight, are you getting or Are you sensing that? Are the is, are they nervous because of the speed at which all of this is happening? That, to me, would be a concern, because the the innovation or the technology is happening so quickly, how do I keep up with it? And then I might have specific needs and and I. How does how does you keep up with that? How do they keep up with it? You
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know, it's interesting. Customers look at this and they look at it in one of three ways, either they're happy with what they use, and we're happy for them, and we will continue to support them and maintain them as they are. I would say that's a smaller number of customers. Now, most of the customers are either adopting these these changes because they have their own business challenges, whether that's consolidation, sustainability, some other productivity or efficiency, you know, mandate, and then there's a group of customers who are keeping, I would call it knowledgeable on the thought leadership of where things are going, but haven't made the leap yet to a consolidated type solution. So a lot of our customers are saying, really, you can manage sensors in a manufacturing facility and look at how many power, how many amps are coming off of a motor on an assembly line, and tell us whether we're energy efficient or not, or there needs to be repaired to that, a lot of retailers are still surprised when we can tell them that we can tell them 72 hours in advance that a refrigeration unit is going to fail, so they can call out a technician and actually fix things Before perishable items are destroyed or impacted. So some of them are just looking at it, and we are helping them make business cases to their executives, to really talk about where the industries are going,
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speaking of where they're going, what do you see in 2025 where? Where are we going?
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Yeah, so there's a number of different things that are continue to emerge, and they're emerging at a faster pace. We all know about AI and generative What? No, yes, really, it's out there. It's there. It's there in a little way that may impact your everyday life, or a rock, yes. Now the interesting thing though, about generative AI, or Gen AI, is that you have to be very careful when deploying it. It's very good where we've deployed it to assist with help on a product and so on. But when you're in a safety and a secure environment, the technology is still evolving so that you have to make sure that the answers you're supplying through AI are not going to cause a safety issue or a risk to the customer. So these things are moving forward very quickly. We're on top of this. We believe the pathway forward is to help maintenance technicians, not just through education and training of what they're doing, but literally step by step, so that if they're working on an asset that they have never worked on before, we can actually walk them through that through, through a more interactive experience, rather than a more bot like or scripted experience. The other thing, yeah, no, no,
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no, I that was me going, huh? Yeah, that's interesting.
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Well, it is. It is where, where the future of things will be. And as long as you're segmenting off the AI so that it's not pulling information from the public Internet, and that's the biggest is you have to put it within an environment. You know, these, these generative AI models, are run off of what are called large language models, which are llms, and you have to segregate and secure those from the internet so that the answers you're supplying are not tainted by bad information. Yeah, and that can be a real risk. And I think everyone is evolving in the area of understanding that when you go out to Microsoft Edge or Google or chat GPT, the answers you get are fairly decent. But are they decent enough to run your entire business and send a technician out to modify an oil rig. Maybe they're not right. So, so that technology in 2025 will continue to evolve. Part of that is that you have to ensure cybersecurity. I think security is emerging as a big trend. It's always been a big trend in financial services, markets, in banking, things like that, but I think it's emerging now in manufacturing. It's been big in healthcare, but it's across all of our segments, emerging as a big trend, something that even higher education has to look out for because things are now so open and these connected ecosystems that we're working on and others are working on, you don't want them to pull in bad data. You don't want bad actors to come in. So security, and cybersecurity is very important to us and our products,
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but I don't want to have a conversation around cybersecurity. That's I mean, I. Yeah, in many of the conversations I have, everybody wants to be connected in some way, shape or form, and they want to be able to pull that information, and they want to great, you know, achieve the insights that they need to achieve from for their organization and all that good stuff. And that makes complete sense, like it makes sense, and it's only going to get better and and more insightful. But I find that although we're having the conversation around cybersecurity, I don't think it's enough. And if you're connected, if you're in a connected environment, I think you can always have more and and I think that if I was an executive, that would keep me awake at night, so like will do I have these penetration points that are they protected? And because things, it's a constant battle. You know, I Speaking of which, how does a crew and keep up with that? I mean, it's, it is a constant battle. It changes daily.
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We have a very extensive, because we're part of Fortive we have a very extensive cybersecurity and information security practice. So we not only have within accruing information security experts, cybersecurity experts, we actually have a broader group that we access within Fortive and Fortive serves a number of different industries and markets that provide services that have to be secure. So literally, every single day, we're keeping up with the emerging trends of where there are hackers, where there are vulnerabilities, what is going on, and staying on top of that very important as all of Accruent, as well as our competitors and everybody have been moving into cloud and SaaS. And most of our products are cloud and SaaS now so and that trend will continue until we're 100% cloud and SaaS. And so it's very important for customers to know and understand and feel that security is important to us, and feeling is more the resources we're putting at it and how much engineering time and so on. We're putting at it to make sure our products stay secure.
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But I want to be I want to be comfortable. And so that just makes sense, that that you painted a very comforting picture Speaking of Fortive, explain your relationship with Ford, if, and sort of, you know, give us an idea of what that is. And as I look at my notes, FAL Yeah, so,
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so Ford is a very interesting company that is made up of 18 operating companies that Ford owns. These span industries, healthcare, manufacturing, different software, safety. You know, Ford, of owns a company. It's, it's incredible industrial scientific, which, you know, makes hardware and software that's trying to end workplace death by 2050 and what that means is, you know, the wearables that firemen wear the people working in mines where and and this overlaps with a lot of Accruent technologies and products. So we work together across Fortive, and Fortive has the Fortive business system, which allows us to build products in a more efficient way, a more innovative way, a set of tools we use essentially to that, to do that. Now within Fortive, we are part of a group that's called facilities and asset life cycle, or FAL Right, right? So facilities and asset life cycle is made up of Accruent service channel and Gordian, and we look at the entire life cycle of facilities and assets, so from build, operate, maintain, so the entire planning process to when you build a facility, when you operate and maintain that facility, it's a series of products that work together in conjunction with, how do I get construction costs? You can get construction costs and pre construction costs from Gordian. You can use Accruent products then to feed that information in to manage and plan for your capital project efforts and the actual project to implement the facility. And then you can use Accruent and service channel products to operate and maintain that facility. So it is a series of companies that are really tied all together around, how do we better manage facilities and assets, and then we leverage Fortive as our parent company, for the tools and practices that they have to help us do that in a better way. Man,
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I feel like I've been drinking from a fire hose. That's amazing. How does someone get a hold of you if they're interested in finding out more about Accruent and you and you and Accruent,
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they can find me on LinkedIn, and they can, of course, always email me at richard.laurg@Accruent.com Easy peasy,
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but I'm just going to have your. LinkedIn stat card out there, that's probably the best way. Thanks. You
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are absolutely wonderful. Never you never disappoint. By the way, he has a podcast. You can tell he feels comfortable behind a mic. All right, we're gonna be, we are broadcasting, once again, from a crew and inside here in San Antonio, Texas. And as you can see, there's a lot of fun stuff going on with the company Accruent. We're going to have a number of conversations. So, you know, stick with Industrial Talk and you will not miss a moment at this particular event. All right, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back. You're
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listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. You I
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make a note of this that accruing insight. User Conference was an absolute bomb. It was fantastic. It was insightful. The energy was off the chart, and the engagement with customers, they are truly at its center, very customer focused. So Accruent is just hitting on all cylinders, and as you know, it's being driven by the leadership, and the leadership is every bit as committed to ensuring that their innovation, their technology, meets the needs of the market and truly solves the challenges of today. Big time I was it was such an honor to be able to be a part of that event. Richard Leurig his contact information will be out on Industrial Talk. I guarantee you he wants to talk to you. They are building an innovation culture, and they're definitely getting better every day. So stay tuned. We're going to have another great conversation coming from this event shortly. So stay tuned.
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