April 9, 2025 • 30 mins
Shawn Tierney meets up with Colin Morris of MaintainX to learn about their CMS solution for preventing unplanned machine downtime in this episode of The Automation Podcast.
For any links related to this episode, check out the "Show Notes" located below the video.
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The Automation Podcast, Episode 236 Show Notes:
Special thanks to Collin for coming on the show, and to Maintain for sponsoring this episode so we could release it Ad Free! Below you'll find links to more information about MaintainX:
MaintainX overview
MaintainX CoPilot
Reporting overview
Customer case studies
Implementation overview
Until next time, Peace ✌️
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Shawn M TierneyTechnology Enthusiast & Content Creator
Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the show. In
this episode of the automation podcast, I sit
down with Colin Morris
of MaintainX
to learn all about their CMS product. Colin,
thank you for coming on the show. I
am excited to talk all about, what we're
gonna jump into today. But before we start
getting into that,
could you first introduce yourself to our audience?
(00:21):
Tell them who you are, what you do,
and really give them a feeling for, what
your company does.
Sure. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me,
Sean.
So my name is Colin Morris. I'm the
director of solution consulting for MaintainX.
I've been working within the CMS and EAM
industry for the past seven and a half
years. Spent about just over five years at
Rockwell Automation,
on the fixed product and joined MaintainX just
(00:42):
under two years ago at this point.
What MaintainX does, it's a mobile first, CMMS
and EAM application focused on the end user.
So being able to allow for easy collection
of data, understanding in terms of preventative maintenance
schedules, asset management, and MRO spares.
And, ultimately, we're trying to help our customers
reduce their downtime, their maintenance costs, and ensure
(01:03):
that they're gonna be, running as operationally efficiently
as possible.
Yeah. That's excellent. I think anybody who follows
Rockwell has heard fix, fix, fix. I mean,
there was a big a big purchase for
them years ago. And Yeah. You know, it's
been really promoted. And before that, going way
back, we all heard about a package called
Maximo.
I think I'm I think I'm saying that
(01:23):
right. And that was, gee whiz, that's going
back into the 2 thousands, I think. And
so I think a lot of us in
plant are familiar with these packages. They're maybe
not something
and I'd be interested for the audience to
tell us, are you using packages like these
yourselves,
or are you working with the people who
are using them? The people who you're working
on beside the people who are using these
(01:45):
packages.
Because, I think a lot of times,
the controls engineer, electrical engineer, and, you know,
automation engineer get pulled in to review these
packages to make sure they're gonna be compatible
with what they're using on the plant floor
and to see what kind of synergies can
go between maybe SCADA and ERP
(02:06):
and,
and these type of packages.
But for those of our audience who maybe
aren't familiar with your package or the other
packages we mentioned, could you just maybe give
us, like, a intro to what these packages
do?
Yeah. Of course. So CMS is a computerized
maintenance management system. Ultimately, our goal is to
help digitize existing maintenance practices
(02:27):
and give a extensible,
interface to our end users. So we do
offer things like ERP integrations into SAP, for
example,
as well as integrations into a variety of
OT systems. So we actually have an MQTT
spark plug b agent that allows us to
connect directly into brokers
and surface data to influence the maintenance schedules.
So whether they be condition based triggers
(02:50):
or usage based triggers,
ultimate goal of that is to reduce their
downtime,
understand
the fault classification
and status from their machines,
and ultimately just help to reduce costs that
it takes to maintain equipment.
Yeah. And let's talk about some of the,
just to kind of fill this in. Some
of the more common things people see, like,
(03:11):
I know Sure. You have large motors. You
gotta maintain them. They're very, very expensive.
I think most most people not in this
industry would be surprised
how expensive a large motor is, and, they
can be more than the the cost of
a house.
And so they need to be maintained. Right?
So we're not talking we're not talking engines
like in cars, although those need to be
(03:31):
maintained as well. We're talking electrical motors. And
then, you know, there's bearings. There's even VFDs,
variable frequency drives. I mean, they need to
have the fans and the filters, and there's
all these things that have to be done
to keep these really high horsepower drives running.
Yeah. What are some of the other things
that you may see on a production floor
that people,
(03:51):
that need to be maintained?
It's ultimately any equipment that could cause breakdowns
and cause downtime for,
their,
production lines. So things like air compressors, boilers,
any of the cobots or any other type
of equipment that is directly used within the
manufacturing environment. The other one that some people
forget is, of course, the facility itself.
(04:11):
A lot of our customers maintain the equip
the equipment on the production line, but also,
hey, sometimes, you gotta do maintenance on your
HVAC units, up on the roof. So all
of that is maintained within our application,
assigned out to the appropriate people, and we
provide digital work instructions on how to actually
go through and perform maintenance actions.
Yeah. And for those, older folks, you know,
(04:33):
if you have a bunch of old PLCs
out there, you can replace that battery every
so often. And and I'd like to add
that you should probably
have a regular backup of your if you
don't have an automated system we've had the
automated system people on. If you don't have
an automated system,
you really need to be backing up that
program. Right? And these files are tiny. You
can fit a a a hundred thousand on
(04:54):
a flash drive, so there's no excuse that
you have too many copies. But when you
know, we see machines actually get scrapped when
they can't because they're so complicated. Nobody can
come in and program efficiently. So be backing
up your programs as well.
And, so with that said, let's talk about
so your you said your company, your product
is mobile first, and I think
(05:15):
a lot of people's ears pick perk up
on that because we all have this was
us all day. We we have our Yeah.
Oh, it doesn't it's not showing. Okay. We
have our phones. A black on black, not
good showing. But in any case, we have
our phones with us all the time, maybe
even tablets.
We've had people on who do the ARVR
type of Mhmm. Three d, three d,
(05:35):
extrapolation,
or overlays on top of the the three
d scene. But in any case,
what's better than a text or a notification
on your phone
than having them walk all the way back
to your office and sit down at a
computer? In most cases, they're old. They haven't
been updated in a while. They're slow. So
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about why
(05:56):
you guys decided to focus on mobile first.
Yeah. Ultimately, I think mobile first is we're
meeting our technicians where they're at. You know?
As you said, most people don't wanna walk
back to the office to understand where they
have the spare parts, understand what they need
to do to maintain a piece of equipment.
And so our goal is to allow any
of our end users to be able to
bring out a phone, bring out a tablet,
(06:17):
and actually understand what they need to do
to maintain that piece of equipment.
With that comes, you know, those digital work
instructions. So being able to upload videos, being
able to upload,
different pictures and, other tooling.
About 91%
of our technicians actually use our mobile device.
So telling you how much, that end user
adoption
is. Because fundamentally,
(06:37):
without good data ingest, you're not gonna be
able to have good maintenance practices.
And so we really focus on that end
user experience. One of our cofounders likes to
say, you never receive training on Facebook, so
why should you receive training on a CMS?
And that's how simple we wanna make it.
Yeah. And I'm thinking so, you know, typically,
you think of a CMS, you know, it's
gonna give you the procedure to
(06:59):
change a bearing or to lube a bearing,
whatever you're doing. Right? But can I also
do, like, kinda capture, like, faults? Like, hey.
Yeah. I just don't wanna fix this. I
wanna capture what went wrong, and maybe we'll
discuss it later.
Yeah. We we've seen a lot of customers
use those OT integrations. So our MQTT agent
that I mentioned previously to be able to
automatically push that information into our system, anytime
(07:20):
one of those faults comes in, we have
an automation engine in place, and it can
actually automatically trigger troubleshooting instructions for that end
user.
The other big one that we see sometimes
is having a call the maintenance button on
the HMI. So rather than them having to
be direct users within the application, you hit
that Boolean field on that HMI and it
creates a work request directly within our application
to have somebody come out, do an inspection,
(07:42):
and see if anything needs to be done
ultimately.
So we're trying to reduce the barriers,
to put in those maintenance,
requests and work orders.
A lot of the time we hear customers
are just using radios.
That's really hard to hear a lot of
the time, within loud environments. And so getting
that push notification or email notification that new
request has come in can help to simplify
(08:02):
that process and ensure that we get that
equipment back up and running as fast as
possible. Well and two, if it's if it's
not a emergency, if it's something that needs
to be fixed but it's not an emergency,
you don't wanna call somebody with a radio.
I mean Exactly. They're, like, they're gonna be
able to write it down. And then you
may forget. I can definitely see, like, on
an HMI having, like, a button. Hey. The
light in the panel's out. We need to
(08:22):
get that replaced. Or
we're running hot a lot. We need to
check the filters. Or, you know Yeah. Whatever
it is, you could have all these buttons,
and then it could and you're saying the
OT integration would be to be, MQTT?
Yeah. That's right. We're we're using an MQTT
agent using Sparkplug
b. Why we did that? Standardized messaging protocol.
(08:43):
It gives us all that metadata that's important
to help predict failures.
We are gonna be supporting some additional protocols
in the future, so just flat MQTT, for
example. And we're also building out
a suite of integrations into other OT platforms.
So allowing for native,
connectivity into the tools that everybody's using today,
ultimately.
(09:04):
Yeah. We've talked a lot about MQTT. So
anybody interested, we have previous episodes on that
and and episodes of the automation show on
that as well.
So there's a lot of integrations. If you're
if you're a vendor of choice in the
industrial automation space, OT space doesn't have that,
we've covered different products that get you that
login. A lot of times OPC to MQTT
(09:24):
or other ways of doing that with software
and hardware vendors.
So that's really interesting. So,
I guess from there, I what makes so
besides being mobile first,
what makes you guys different or better than
the competition?
I think, honestly, one of the biggest one
is having that MPC support. We wanted to
(09:46):
have an open architecture, so allowing the ingestive
data from a variety of different locations. We
also do have
a event driven architecture, so webhooks and subscription
services that are available directly within our API
to communicate back and forth.
One of those big ones is the UNS,
of course. So being able to push that
data into different locations, pub, sub, and everything
(10:06):
else that comes along with it. I think
the other big one is just the tooling
that we have and the rate of innovation.
We are lucky that we're, you know, a
newer entrance into the market, but that doesn't
mean that we don't have a robust feature
set. It It also means that we can
develop things a lot faster. We typically release
three to four times per week on our
web client and weekly on our mobile. And
so you see a lot of innovation and
(10:27):
change all included within your subscription.
Last thing I would say is just our
generalized strategy in terms of AI.
We've focused a lot in terms of giving
easy to understand data to our end users.
So referencing OEM manuals, being able to flag
anomalous data through manual inputs or alternatively, automatically
automatically helping to capture things like estimated times
(10:50):
and providing recommendations
to get better,
labor efficiency.
So
in short, we're really trying to make the
easiest to use platform that has extensibility and
connectivity
as well as just ensuring that we're getting
good quality data from our end users.
Excellent. And I'm just thinking as you were
talking, I'm thinking, alright. So we got apps
(11:10):
that get updated. They're they they load on
to our mobile devices.
I'm assuming iOS and Android is what's being
stored. Okay.
Like, there's anything else,
unfortunately.
So let's let's talk about this. What does
an implementation look like? Well, first of all,
could you give the audience the name of
the website?
Because I'm sure some of them are sitting
(11:31):
at the key, but it's like, you know,
I wanna check this out as I link
into these guys.
It's, getmaintainx.com.
Get maintain x
Com.
Okay. And let's let's talk about a deployment.
Let's say somebody. Sure. They they talk with
your people. They decide they want it. Is
this an on premise or in cloud solution?
% cloud offering. So we're hosted in AWS.
(11:52):
We
do everything internally ourselves, so all developed in
North America,
and we have, continuous uptime. So that's one
of the advantages. There's no downtime. Anytime we
put you an update, you're always on the
most up to date version. It's like Netflix.
You sign in. Something slightly changed, but hasn't
impacted your end user experience.
Now I know some people will be concerned
(12:12):
about security by connecting their plant to the
cloud. Sure. How do you guys address that?
Yeah. So
when it comes to our application, it is
standalone. So it doesn't necessarily need to be
installed directly on the network. If we're going
into the MTGT route, we would have to
install an on premise agent. It only has
outbound connections a lot of the time through
port four four three. So you probably already
have that exposed to do any of your
(12:34):
other IoT dashboarding or any other analytics that
you have within the system.
Outside of that, we also have SOC two,
which is a security compliance,
metric where we do continuous improvement as well
as ISO twenty twenty
seven thousand and one. So another one of
those certificates that, kinda show just the level
of security that we have in our application.
All data is also encrypted. So whether it
(12:57):
be in rest or in transit,
there's no concerns in terms of intercepting packages,
for example.
It so, yeah, it's a a highly secure
application working across a variety of industries. So
you get the information going back and forth
to the, mobile app and the cloud encrypted,
so you're good there. We got SOC two,
which which we've heard a lot about from
(13:17):
other vendors, how demanding that is to meet
those requirements.
And if you are using MQTT and you're
sending it one direction
from your control system to the cloud,
you know, that's gonna be encrypted. But, also,
you know, you don't have to worry about
somebody changing the level of, of, an ingredient
in a product or or dosing
(13:37):
because it's just all going out. It's not
it's not coming in. Nobody's it's not like
remote accessing a SCADA panel and be able
to control the whole plant. This is a
very low risk, very low footprint for anybody
to do any harm.
Well, that's very interesting. Now
some of the major features of your product,
I think you've covered a lot of them
(13:58):
so far,
But can you tell us some more about
it? Because I I Sure. You know, we
I think we just covered the highlights, but
we we haven't really dug into it. Right?
Yeah. So, a lot of our customers are
well, they're using a a variety of different
modules within the application. One of the biggest
ones is digitizing their assets.
A lot of the time, our customers have
something within their ERP. It's usually not a
(14:19):
comprehensive list. And so being able to actually
understand the pieces of machinery that are on
the shop floor, the individualized components, the spare
parts,
and helping to surface that data to our
end users, to better understand the maintenance practices.
With that does come a variety of different
enterprise features. So we have the ability to
standardize in terms of naming convention, the fields
and data that we collect to ensure that
(14:40):
we have consistency across not only a single
plant, but multiple plants.
And then also getting into things like our
SOPs and SOWs. So I briefly mentioned that
in terms of getting digital work instructions. Those
instances don't necessarily need to be just for
maintenance actions. They can be operator checklists. They
can be quality checks. And so we're taking
existing documentation,
(15:02):
recreating it within our system with a variety
of different steps, whether they be checklists,
inspection tasks, signature fields, and ultimately trying to
give more information to our end users,
whether it be operationally focused, maintenance focused, or
just general checks that need to be completed
within the business.
Yeah. Would you say I I could see
you have both customers coming from other packages
(15:24):
and from people who are doing manual tasks.
I mean, what are what are some of
the I mean, the manual task, I could
see a lot of that definition stuff you
talked about, especially naming conventions. So important. Right?
And the standardization of the forms so the
app presents everything in a nice concise and
and
and solid way that, you know, everybody can
(15:44):
understand.
But when they're coming from other platforms,
it it it
if that was if the other platform was
implemented well, I would imagine that would probably
be an easier migration.
Yeah. Generally speaking, it's pretty straightforward.
Most of these applications give you the ability
to export that data into CSVs or a
SQL database, and so we can take that
(16:06):
information and
implementation
services is consulting on that data, so providing
recommendations on how we can adjust it, change
it, make it more robust,
and then ultimately import it into our system.
Yep.
That implementation
process can be as little as three weeks
on average.
It can go longer or shorter depending on,
(16:26):
you know, how much data you already have
available.
But, ultimately, we're trying to get our end
users into the system as fast as possible.
Yeah. And that migration is something that we
do hundreds of times,
every year.
Yeah. Yeah. And so can you give me
a range of, like, how many, like, app
users,
like, from low to high? Like, what would
(16:46):
a small company have for how many users?
Because I think a lot of times, people
are doing the manual process because they don't
have, you know, 10,000
techs out there fixing stuff. Right? And so
they're like they're like, you know, I can't
afford the billion dollars to buy one of
these CMS systems. So Yeah. Like like, low
and the high end, like, what does a
small company have for users versus, like, a
(17:07):
larger company?
We see people using a single person. So
it's, you know, a small machining shop. They
have a single person that's gonna be responsible
for maintenance. It could be the plant manager.
It could be the operations manager. And they're
going in and capturing any of that information
to understand their maintenance schedules
to, you know, Fortune 100 companies. So thousands
of users globally,
(17:27):
going in and accessing the system.
Right now, we have just over 11,000 customers
in a 20 countries. So we are global
at this point,
and we'll meet you where you're at. So
ensuring that we have the appropriate number of
people within the system,
anybody that is, you know, executing,
planning, scheduling maintenance are gonna be users within
our application.
(17:48):
So it varies greatly based upon the size
of the maintenance team. We also see people
using it for third parties. So sending off
work orders directly to those contractors to execute
against work orders,
that's included within our package for free for
those end users.
So it can be pretty
pretty big to
very small depending on where we're, what size
(18:09):
company you work for. Yeah. I'm surprised that
you can scale all the way down to
a single person, which is cool. Because I
think a lot of people never even look
at packages because they think of CMS or
CMMS, and they're like, yeah. This is budget.
We only have one or two guys doing
full time maintenance. But if you have a
guy or two doing full time maintenance,
(18:29):
right, going out and fixing stuff and and
and and doing your preventative maintenance and whatnot,
then, yeah, a system like this would be
very valuable to you.
Now can you talk to us a little
bit about so they they they the system's
loaded. It's installed. It's running.
The the the one or two or a
thousand guys
are using it to to do their job.
(18:51):
What kind
of data do I get? So but maybe
I'm in charge of maintenance, and I wanna
make sure my team is is doing good
and they're being efficient and that they have
the resources they need. Like, maybe they need
training, maybe they need resources. Maybe they're sharing
a particular tool that they can't both you
know, two guys can't maintain two different systems
because they only have one of these things.
(19:12):
Can you talk about kind of that data
we get from not only scheduling and having
these guys actually process the minutes, but after
the fact?
Yeah.
So we're gonna be capturing any of the,
hourly wages against the end users. So anytime
that they're completing work orders, they have the
ability to start a timer and actually live
capture how much time it's taking them to
complete those jobs. We'll be also capturing
(19:34):
things like the spare parts usage. So any
of the replaceable components that are going into
a machine to maintain it, filters, belts,
etcetera,
as well as any external costs. So if
we had to rush order and we wanna
capture that additional cost for shipping,
if we have a third party contractor that's
charging things like mileage, all of that can
be attached directly into that work order and
surfaced within our reporting functionality.
(19:56):
That is one area where we can kind
of help to decide those capital asset,
purchases because we can see how much it's
tossing us to maintain and actually,
decide if we should be ripping and replacing
that piece of equipment, or should we be
looking at doing upgrades
or potentially just adjusting our maintenance schedules to
ensure that it's not failing as often ultimately?
(20:17):
So,
can it be visualized in your package too?
I'm thinking shots, Pareto shots, bar chart, all
that stuff was available to kinda give you,
like, the bull's eye of
Yeah. That's right. So we do have global
reporting that gives us the ability to see
across multiple locations. Each individual user also has
dashboarding. So we're seeing things like meantime before
failure, meantime to repair. Yeah. PM key. We're
(20:40):
also seeing completion rates. So we're gonna be
able to drive down into the individualized user
and see how they're actually actioning the system,
all of that directly within the dashboarding functionality.
The information can also be sent externally. So
if you're using something like a Power BI
or a Tableau, we do also have full
CSV APIs. So allows you to take that
information and visualize it within
your reporting structure that you may have in
(21:01):
place already today. Okay.
And you said earlier that, like, let's say
the maintenance guy gets out there and it's
a nightmare. Right? It's not your standard. Hey.
Let's just service this machine, but there's, like,
you know, everything's just kinda like it's gonna
be a nightmare. It's gonna take twice as
long. You're saying he can capture a video
or photos and include that with his report
so that he you know, if somebody says,
(21:22):
why did this take twice as long? They
can go and they can see what he
showed. Hey. This is how it this is
how it was when I showed up. You
know? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So we have the
ability to upload pictures and videos directly within
the application. We also have things like, voice
notes. So you can actually just transcribe the
information directly within the application and send it
off.
For those complex use cases,
(21:42):
it doesn't have to be a single person
working on a particular job. You can call
for friends and help. So we have the
ability within our application to function very similar
to Teams and have messaging. So I can
actually, you know, send a message off to
my supervisor, say, hey. I actually need a
mail right down here to help me do
this job. Can you send somebody over?
As well as, like, a full commenting history.
So very similar to, you know, a post
(22:04):
on a social media website. You can actually
go in and have
within the commenting section
and ask for support, let them know what
you did,
all directly within the application.
Yeah. I can definitely see some things turn
into out maybe it's mechanical it starts off
mechanical, but then you need to get electrical
involved or vice versa. So I could definitely
see how that could be very helpful.
(22:25):
Now I know you already talked about AI,
but can we dig into that a little
bit deeper? How are you guys using AI
today in your product?
Yeah. So we have a variety of different
AI tools that are doing things as simple
as just anomaly detection. So reviewing previous history
and providing recommendations to estimate different times. We
also recently released a,
Copilot,
(22:46):
non Microsoft Copilot, our own internal application.
What that actually does is automatically analyzes historical
information as well as the OEM manuals and
then provides recommendations.
Okay. One thing that we've seen a lot
of the time is somebody will show up
at a machine, may not know how to
actually maintain it, and we can reference data
directly within the OEM manual,
surface it, create it into a procedure, create
(23:07):
it into a work order with two clicks
of a button. So we're trying to make
the maintenance action as simple as possible for
our end users,
and,
AI is a great way to do that
through common language processing and anomaly detection.
Yeah. That is,
especially especially taking the user's manuals and making
those available.
So I, you know, I don't know how
(23:28):
many times I've asked Alexa or Siri for
something. Don't talk. I should have muted her.
So I don't know how many times I've
asked one of my voice assistants,
a question, and I get this bogus answer
or, you know, I search the web and
because there's no context. Right? There's no con
they don't understand the context of the question.
(23:50):
And so AI is phenomenal. So if you're
saying,
you know, maybe there's a manual on how
to a maintenance manual for the machine. They
could say, hey. What is the torque on
this? So what pressure does this thing be
set at on? Exactly. That it can it
can, you know, go through and have that
information available to you.
I just think that's amazing. I think I
(24:10):
think that's that's definitely a reason why people
should be looking at your packages
is because of that feature. And it's also
great. I mean, we use in condition monitoring
a lot.
And so that's kinda how you're using it
to look for, you know, anything that's different,
anything that's not the standard common result. Right?
If there's
any, any outliers, then you it can zoom
(24:30):
in on that, make bring that up to
the forefront and let the people know about
it.
The other thing I wanted to ask you
really was,
so the product is called MaintainX.
Right? And I think you was telling me
it has multiple modules. It's kinda like Yep.
And and and and there's some services that
go with every
onboarding because,
you know, this isn't something like Microsoft Word
(24:51):
that people have been using for twenty years,
and they just know how to use. This
is like the other products in the industry.
If you don't have it, you've never used
it. Right? So,
you know, when people wanna actually find out
more, I'm sure you guys do demos, you
do online meetings. Where are they gonna go
to find out, you know, where to find
out more about your product and if they're
(25:11):
interested?
Yeah. Getmaintainaxe.com
is definitely the best place to start. We
do have a variety of different free resources
available there, documentation, etcetera.
In terms of the implementation, we do have,
you know, over 30 implementation consultants in house.
So they're all engineers by background and training,
and so they can come in, provide recommendations
to help support it. We do also offer
(25:32):
247365
support directly within our application with a response
time under two minutes. So it doesn't matter
where you are in the world. You'll have
somebody there at all times to help you
through this process.
And then lastly, we do also have a
full academy. So you can actually get certified
on MaintainX, go through the courses,
and actually see how the system's gonna be
used based upon your job, role within the
(25:54):
business. That's awesome. Great. So they can actually
go through that and
and so they don't have to fly somewhere
to go to a training class That's right.
Through the snow and the cold weather as
we were talking about in the preshow.
You know, I I did wanna ask and
if you if you don't feel comfortable
going into this, I
understand. But, you know, for we have a
large Rockwell audience.
And could you give me some key takeaways
(26:16):
between you know, maybe, you know, what makes
you better than their product? And I don't
wanna put you on the spot here. Sure.
But if you feel comfortable doing it, like,
just give us some key takeaways of why,
you know, maybe they just think rock will
rock will rock all the time and why
they should give you guys a look.
Yeah. Like, hey. I I can't say anything
bad about Fix. I really enjoyed my time
there. They got a good product. I think
(26:37):
what really sets us apart in comparison to
Fixx is that mobile application. So ensuring that
we're collecting that good data from our end
users. We're driving adoption within it. Having that
event based architecture is also hugely important for
a lot of our customers to have webhooks
and subscriptions
and ensure that we're pushing and pulling data
from disparate systems.
And then I think the last one is
definitely the agnostic aspect.
(26:58):
We're not locked into a particular brand.
We are open architecture, so we can ingest
data from a variety of different systems.
MQTT is definitely becoming a a new standard,
I would say, for different applications. And so
we wanted to make sure that we can
ingest,
data from Siemens, from AB, from Honeywell, from
anybody within the market.
(27:19):
So that's hugely important for us. The last
thing I would say is just the fact
that we're a software company, not a hardware
company with software. We have very much focused
in terms of product innovation, changes, and updates.
And so,
a lot of our development is focused,
core,
our application
versus,
at least in my opinion, I think the
(27:40):
focus for Rockwell has shifted away from fix
to other applications within their overall suites. And
so you don't see the same level of
innovation and change,
that you may see,
at maintenance.
Yeah. It's it's it's I hear what you're
saying, and I appreciate that. I know, it
and I know we have Rockwell on the
show on on a regular basis, and we're
fans of their products. We're fans we're fans
(28:01):
of automation. So if, we've had so many
big and small companies on over the years,
and we have many more coming up in
the coming weeks. But,
one of the thing is with the bigger
the company, it's it's hard to, you know,
it's it's actually, you know, fix is this
whole product group that does its thing,
and it's different than the the, say, the
program controller group, right, that does their thing.
(28:23):
And it's it's it's, it's just a large
company, and and everybody's focused on their their
pieces and parts where you guys focus on
one thing, your product.
So I can certainly see that as especially
if if if you're looking for somebody more
to give you more of a a a,
you know, business to business types relationship
where you're talking directly to the people, and
you're not going through a different layer,
(28:45):
of salespeople and whatnot.
So I guess with that, that's my those
are all my well, I do have one
more question.
Is there anything else you wanted to cover?
I tried to ask a lot of questions,
but do we do we leave anything out?
No. I I think we've covered a lot,
for today's conversation.
I think there's a lot of opportunity to
start focusing in on maintenance. It's kind of
(29:06):
been the forgotten child within the market for
a period of time. It was seen as
a cost center versus an opportunity to save
money, especially as we've seen, you know, some
of the challenges within our
supply chain over COVID.
I think it's definitely somewhere that,
we a lot of folks need to invest
more in. And so,
don't let maintenance be the blocker for continuous
(29:28):
success. And, hey, having good data also could
be a a good justification for you to
do some upgrades and get some new equipment
in in, your your particular facilities.
That's awesome. And, you know, I just I
just wanna say, if there's anybody out there
watching and you wanna come on my tech
talk show, maybe you're a you're,
you're using one of these packages and you
wanna kinda share the day in and day
(29:49):
out. Definitely, if you're using MaintainX,
I'd love to have you come on our
tech talk show and just have a chat
about it because, you know, this is something
that I've always worked with people who used
it, but I was never the person who
actually used it myself. So I'd love to
know more about that day in the life.
And I do wanna thank MaintainX for sponsoring
this episode. You guys who are watching, you
probably just realized this was completely ad free,
(30:12):
and we can only do that when these
companies
come in and sponsor the episodes. So, Colin,
thank you, and thank you for your company.
And I really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank
you for coming on the show.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Sean. I really appreciate
it. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that
episode, and I wanna thank Colin for coming
on the show and telling us all about
their CMS solution. I also wanna thank MaintainX
for sponsoring this episode,
(30:33):
making it completely ad free. Really appreciate that.
Hey. If you do reach out to MaintainX
to find out about their CMS solution,
please mention that you saw them on the
automation podcast.
And with that, I wanna wish you all
good health and happiness. And until next time,
my friends,
peace.
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the show. In
this episode of the automation podcast, I sit
down with Colin Morris
of MaintainX
to learn all about their CMS product. Colin,
thank you for coming on the show. I
am excited to talk all about, what we're
gonna jump into today. But before we start
getting into that,
could you first introduce yourself to our audience?
(00:21):
Tell them who you are, what you do,
and really give them a feeling for, what
your company does.
Sure. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me,
Sean.
So my name is Colin Morris. I'm the
director of solution consulting for MaintainX.
I've been working within the CMS and EAM
industry for the past seven and a half
years. Spent about just over five years at
Rockwell Automation,
on the fixed product and joined MaintainX just
(00:42):
under two years ago at this point.
What MaintainX does, it's a mobile first, CMMS
and EAM application focused on the end user.
So being able to allow for easy collection
of data, understanding in terms of preventative maintenance
schedules, asset management, and MRO spares.
And, ultimately, we're trying to help our customers
reduce their downtime, their maintenance costs, and ensure
(01:03):
that they're gonna be, running as operationally efficiently
as possible.
Yeah. That's excellent. I think anybody who follows
Rockwell has heard fix, fix, fix. I mean,
there was a big a big purchase for
them years ago. And Yeah. You know, it's
been really promoted. And before that, going way
back, we all heard about a package called
Maximo.
I think I'm I think I'm saying that
(01:23):
right. And that was, gee whiz, that's going
back into the 2 thousands, I think. And
so I think a lot of us in
plant are familiar with these packages. They're maybe
not something
and I'd be interested for the audience to
tell us, are you using packages like these
yourselves,
or are you working with the people who
are using them? The people who you're working
on beside the people who are using these
(01:45):
packages.
Because, I think a lot of times,
the controls engineer, electrical engineer, and, you know,
automation engineer get pulled in to review these
packages to make sure they're gonna be compatible
with what they're using on the plant floor
and to see what kind of synergies can
go between maybe SCADA and ERP
(02:06):
and,
and these type of packages.
But for those of our audience who maybe
aren't familiar with your package or the other
packages we mentioned, could you just maybe give
us, like, a intro to what these packages
do?
Yeah. Of course. So CMS is a computerized
maintenance management system. Ultimately, our goal is to
help digitize existing maintenance practices
(02:27):
and give a extensible,
interface to our end users. So we do
offer things like ERP integrations into SAP, for
example,
as well as integrations into a variety of
OT systems. So we actually have an MQTT
spark plug b agent that allows us to
connect directly into brokers
and surface data to influence the maintenance schedules.
So whether they be condition based triggers
(02:50):
or usage based triggers,
ultimate goal of that is to reduce their
downtime,
understand
the fault classification
and status from their machines,
and ultimately just help to reduce costs that
it takes to maintain equipment.
Yeah. And let's talk about some of the,
just to kind of fill this in. Some
of the more common things people see, like,
(03:11):
I know Sure. You have large motors. You
gotta maintain them. They're very, very expensive.
I think most most people not in this
industry would be surprised
how expensive a large motor is, and, they
can be more than the the cost of
a house.
And so they need to be maintained. Right?
So we're not talking we're not talking engines
like in cars, although those need to be
(03:31):
maintained as well. We're talking electrical motors. And
then, you know, there's bearings. There's even VFDs,
variable frequency drives. I mean, they need to
have the fans and the filters, and there's
all these things that have to be done
to keep these really high horsepower drives running.
Yeah. What are some of the other things
that you may see on a production floor
that people,
(03:51):
that need to be maintained?
It's ultimately any equipment that could cause breakdowns
and cause downtime for,
their,
production lines. So things like air compressors, boilers,
any of the cobots or any other type
of equipment that is directly used within the
manufacturing environment. The other one that some people
forget is, of course, the facility itself.
(04:11):
A lot of our customers maintain the equip
the equipment on the production line, but also,
hey, sometimes, you gotta do maintenance on your
HVAC units, up on the roof. So all
of that is maintained within our application,
assigned out to the appropriate people, and we
provide digital work instructions on how to actually
go through and perform maintenance actions.
Yeah. And for those, older folks, you know,
(04:33):
if you have a bunch of old PLCs
out there, you can replace that battery every
so often. And and I'd like to add
that you should probably
have a regular backup of your if you
don't have an automated system we've had the
automated system people on. If you don't have
an automated system,
you really need to be backing up that
program. Right? And these files are tiny. You
can fit a a a hundred thousand on
(04:54):
a flash drive, so there's no excuse that
you have too many copies. But when you
know, we see machines actually get scrapped when
they can't because they're so complicated. Nobody can
come in and program efficiently. So be backing
up your programs as well.
And, so with that said, let's talk about
so your you said your company, your product
is mobile first, and I think
(05:15):
a lot of people's ears pick perk up
on that because we all have this was
us all day. We we have our Yeah.
Oh, it doesn't it's not showing. Okay. We
have our phones. A black on black, not
good showing. But in any case, we have
our phones with us all the time, maybe
even tablets.
We've had people on who do the ARVR
type of Mhmm. Three d, three d,
(05:35):
extrapolation,
or overlays on top of the the three
d scene. But in any case,
what's better than a text or a notification
on your phone
than having them walk all the way back
to your office and sit down at a
computer? In most cases, they're old. They haven't
been updated in a while. They're slow. So
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about why
(05:56):
you guys decided to focus on mobile first.
Yeah. Ultimately, I think mobile first is we're
meeting our technicians where they're at. You know?
As you said, most people don't wanna walk
back to the office to understand where they
have the spare parts, understand what they need
to do to maintain a piece of equipment.
And so our goal is to allow any
of our end users to be able to
bring out a phone, bring out a tablet,
(06:17):
and actually understand what they need to do
to maintain that piece of equipment.
With that comes, you know, those digital work
instructions. So being able to upload videos, being
able to upload,
different pictures and, other tooling.
About 91%
of our technicians actually use our mobile device.
So telling you how much, that end user
adoption
is. Because fundamentally,
(06:37):
without good data ingest, you're not gonna be
able to have good maintenance practices.
And so we really focus on that end
user experience. One of our cofounders likes to
say, you never receive training on Facebook, so
why should you receive training on a CMS?
And that's how simple we wanna make it.
Yeah. And I'm thinking so, you know, typically,
you think of a CMS, you know, it's
gonna give you the procedure to
(06:59):
change a bearing or to lube a bearing,
whatever you're doing. Right? But can I also
do, like, kinda capture, like, faults? Like, hey.
Yeah. I just don't wanna fix this. I
wanna capture what went wrong, and maybe we'll
discuss it later.
Yeah. We we've seen a lot of customers
use those OT integrations. So our MQTT agent
that I mentioned previously to be able to
automatically push that information into our system, anytime
(07:20):
one of those faults comes in, we have
an automation engine in place, and it can
actually automatically trigger troubleshooting instructions for that end
user.
The other big one that we see sometimes
is having a call the maintenance button on
the HMI. So rather than them having to
be direct users within the application, you hit
that Boolean field on that HMI and it
creates a work request directly within our application
to have somebody come out, do an inspection,
(07:42):
and see if anything needs to be done
ultimately.
So we're trying to reduce the barriers,
to put in those maintenance,
requests and work orders.
A lot of the time we hear customers
are just using radios.
That's really hard to hear a lot of
the time, within loud environments. And so getting
that push notification or email notification that new
request has come in can help to simplify
(08:02):
that process and ensure that we get that
equipment back up and running as fast as
possible. Well and two, if it's if it's
not a emergency, if it's something that needs
to be fixed but it's not an emergency,
you don't wanna call somebody with a radio.
I mean Exactly. They're, like, they're gonna be
able to write it down. And then you
may forget. I can definitely see, like, on
an HMI having, like, a button. Hey. The
light in the panel's out. We need to
(08:22):
get that replaced. Or
we're running hot a lot. We need to
check the filters. Or, you know Yeah. Whatever
it is, you could have all these buttons,
and then it could and you're saying the
OT integration would be to be, MQTT?
Yeah. That's right. We're we're using an MQTT
agent using Sparkplug
b. Why we did that? Standardized messaging protocol.
(08:43):
It gives us all that metadata that's important
to help predict failures.
We are gonna be supporting some additional protocols
in the future, so just flat MQTT, for
example. And we're also building out
a suite of integrations into other OT platforms.
So allowing for native,
connectivity into the tools that everybody's using today,
ultimately.
(09:04):
Yeah. We've talked a lot about MQTT. So
anybody interested, we have previous episodes on that
and and episodes of the automation show on
that as well.
So there's a lot of integrations. If you're
if you're a vendor of choice in the
industrial automation space, OT space doesn't have that,
we've covered different products that get you that
login. A lot of times OPC to MQTT
(09:24):
or other ways of doing that with software
and hardware vendors.
So that's really interesting. So,
I guess from there, I what makes so
besides being mobile first,
what makes you guys different or better than
the competition?
I think, honestly, one of the biggest one
is having that MPC support. We wanted to
(09:46):
have an open architecture, so allowing the ingestive
data from a variety of different locations. We
also do have
a event driven architecture, so webhooks and subscription
services that are available directly within our API
to communicate back and forth.
One of those big ones is the UNS,
of course. So being able to push that
data into different locations, pub, sub, and everything
(10:06):
else that comes along with it. I think
the other big one is just the tooling
that we have and the rate of innovation.
We are lucky that we're, you know, a
newer entrance into the market, but that doesn't
mean that we don't have a robust feature
set. It It also means that we can
develop things a lot faster. We typically release
three to four times per week on our
web client and weekly on our mobile. And
so you see a lot of innovation and
(10:27):
change all included within your subscription.
Last thing I would say is just our
generalized strategy in terms of AI.
We've focused a lot in terms of giving
easy to understand data to our end users.
So referencing OEM manuals, being able to flag
anomalous data through manual inputs or alternatively, automatically
automatically helping to capture things like estimated times
(10:50):
and providing recommendations
to get better,
labor efficiency.
So
in short, we're really trying to make the
easiest to use platform that has extensibility and
connectivity
as well as just ensuring that we're getting
good quality data from our end users.
Excellent. And I'm just thinking as you were
talking, I'm thinking, alright. So we got apps
(11:10):
that get updated. They're they they load on
to our mobile devices.
I'm assuming iOS and Android is what's being
stored. Okay.
Like, there's anything else,
unfortunately.
So let's let's talk about this. What does
an implementation look like? Well, first of all,
could you give the audience the name of
the website?
Because I'm sure some of them are sitting
(11:31):
at the key, but it's like, you know,
I wanna check this out as I link
into these guys.
It's, getmaintainx.com.
Get maintain x
Com.
Okay. And let's let's talk about a deployment.
Let's say somebody. Sure. They they talk with
your people. They decide they want it. Is
this an on premise or in cloud solution?
% cloud offering. So we're hosted in AWS.
(11:52):
We
do everything internally ourselves, so all developed in
North America,
and we have, continuous uptime. So that's one
of the advantages. There's no downtime. Anytime we
put you an update, you're always on the
most up to date version. It's like Netflix.
You sign in. Something slightly changed, but hasn't
impacted your end user experience.
Now I know some people will be concerned
(12:12):
about security by connecting their plant to the
cloud. Sure. How do you guys address that?
Yeah. So
when it comes to our application, it is
standalone. So it doesn't necessarily need to be
installed directly on the network. If we're going
into the MTGT route, we would have to
install an on premise agent. It only has
outbound connections a lot of the time through
port four four three. So you probably already
have that exposed to do any of your
(12:34):
other IoT dashboarding or any other analytics that
you have within the system.
Outside of that, we also have SOC two,
which is a security compliance,
metric where we do continuous improvement as well
as ISO twenty twenty
seven thousand and one. So another one of
those certificates that, kinda show just the level
of security that we have in our application.
All data is also encrypted. So whether it
(12:57):
be in rest or in transit,
there's no concerns in terms of intercepting packages,
for example.
It so, yeah, it's a a highly secure
application working across a variety of industries. So
you get the information going back and forth
to the, mobile app and the cloud encrypted,
so you're good there. We got SOC two,
which which we've heard a lot about from
(13:17):
other vendors, how demanding that is to meet
those requirements.
And if you are using MQTT and you're
sending it one direction
from your control system to the cloud,
you know, that's gonna be encrypted. But, also,
you know, you don't have to worry about
somebody changing the level of, of, an ingredient
in a product or or dosing
(13:37):
because it's just all going out. It's not
it's not coming in. Nobody's it's not like
remote accessing a SCADA panel and be able
to control the whole plant. This is a
very low risk, very low footprint for anybody
to do any harm.
Well, that's very interesting. Now
some of the major features of your product,
I think you've covered a lot of them
(13:58):
so far,
But can you tell us some more about
it? Because I I Sure. You know, we
I think we just covered the highlights, but
we we haven't really dug into it. Right?
Yeah. So, a lot of our customers are
well, they're using a a variety of different
modules within the application. One of the biggest
ones is digitizing their assets.
A lot of the time, our customers have
something within their ERP. It's usually not a
(14:19):
comprehensive list. And so being able to actually
understand the pieces of machinery that are on
the shop floor, the individualized components, the spare
parts,
and helping to surface that data to our
end users, to better understand the maintenance practices.
With that does come a variety of different
enterprise features. So we have the ability to
standardize in terms of naming convention, the fields
and data that we collect to ensure that
(14:40):
we have consistency across not only a single
plant, but multiple plants.
And then also getting into things like our
SOPs and SOWs. So I briefly mentioned that
in terms of getting digital work instructions. Those
instances don't necessarily need to be just for
maintenance actions. They can be operator checklists. They
can be quality checks. And so we're taking
existing documentation,
(15:02):
recreating it within our system with a variety
of different steps, whether they be checklists,
inspection tasks, signature fields, and ultimately trying to
give more information to our end users,
whether it be operationally focused, maintenance focused, or
just general checks that need to be completed
within the business.
Yeah. Would you say I I could see
you have both customers coming from other packages
(15:24):
and from people who are doing manual tasks.
I mean, what are what are some of
the I mean, the manual task, I could
see a lot of that definition stuff you
talked about, especially naming conventions. So important. Right?
And the standardization of the forms so the
app presents everything in a nice concise and
and
and solid way that, you know, everybody can
(15:44):
understand.
But when they're coming from other platforms,
it it it
if that was if the other platform was
implemented well, I would imagine that would probably
be an easier migration.
Yeah. Generally speaking, it's pretty straightforward.
Most of these applications give you the ability
to export that data into CSVs or a
SQL database, and so we can take that
(16:06):
information and
implementation
services is consulting on that data, so providing
recommendations on how we can adjust it, change
it, make it more robust,
and then ultimately import it into our system.
Yep.
That implementation
process can be as little as three weeks
on average.
It can go longer or shorter depending on,
(16:26):
you know, how much data you already have
available.
But, ultimately, we're trying to get our end
users into the system as fast as possible.
Yeah. And that migration is something that we
do hundreds of times,
every year.
Yeah. Yeah. And so can you give me
a range of, like, how many, like, app
users,
like, from low to high? Like, what would
(16:46):
a small company have for how many users?
Because I think a lot of times, people
are doing the manual process because they don't
have, you know, 10,000
techs out there fixing stuff. Right? And so
they're like they're like, you know, I can't
afford the billion dollars to buy one of
these CMS systems. So Yeah. Like like, low
and the high end, like, what does a
small company have for users versus, like, a
(17:07):
larger company?
We see people using a single person. So
it's, you know, a small machining shop. They
have a single person that's gonna be responsible
for maintenance. It could be the plant manager.
It could be the operations manager. And they're
going in and capturing any of that information
to understand their maintenance schedules
to, you know, Fortune 100 companies. So thousands
of users globally,
(17:27):
going in and accessing the system.
Right now, we have just over 11,000 customers
in a 20 countries. So we are global
at this point,
and we'll meet you where you're at. So
ensuring that we have the appropriate number of
people within the system,
anybody that is, you know, executing,
planning, scheduling maintenance are gonna be users within
our application.
(17:48):
So it varies greatly based upon the size
of the maintenance team. We also see people
using it for third parties. So sending off
work orders directly to those contractors to execute
against work orders,
that's included within our package for free for
those end users.
So it can be pretty
pretty big to
very small depending on where we're, what size
(18:09):
company you work for. Yeah. I'm surprised that
you can scale all the way down to
a single person, which is cool. Because I
think a lot of people never even look
at packages because they think of CMS or
CMMS, and they're like, yeah. This is budget.
We only have one or two guys doing
full time maintenance. But if you have a
guy or two doing full time maintenance,
(18:29):
right, going out and fixing stuff and and
and and doing your preventative maintenance and whatnot,
then, yeah, a system like this would be
very valuable to you.
Now can you talk to us a little
bit about so they they they the system's
loaded. It's installed. It's running.
The the the one or two or a
thousand guys
are using it to to do their job.
(18:51):
What kind
of data do I get? So but maybe
I'm in charge of maintenance, and I wanna
make sure my team is is doing good
and they're being efficient and that they have
the resources they need. Like, maybe they need
training, maybe they need resources. Maybe they're sharing
a particular tool that they can't both you
know, two guys can't maintain two different systems
because they only have one of these things.
(19:12):
Can you talk about kind of that data
we get from not only scheduling and having
these guys actually process the minutes, but after
the fact?
Yeah.
So we're gonna be capturing any of the,
hourly wages against the end users. So anytime
that they're completing work orders, they have the
ability to start a timer and actually live
capture how much time it's taking them to
complete those jobs. We'll be also capturing
(19:34):
things like the spare parts usage. So any
of the replaceable components that are going into
a machine to maintain it, filters, belts,
etcetera,
as well as any external costs. So if
we had to rush order and we wanna
capture that additional cost for shipping,
if we have a third party contractor that's
charging things like mileage, all of that can
be attached directly into that work order and
surfaced within our reporting functionality.
(19:56):
That is one area where we can kind
of help to decide those capital asset,
purchases because we can see how much it's
tossing us to maintain and actually,
decide if we should be ripping and replacing
that piece of equipment, or should we be
looking at doing upgrades
or potentially just adjusting our maintenance schedules to
ensure that it's not failing as often ultimately?
(20:17):
So,
can it be visualized in your package too?
I'm thinking shots, Pareto shots, bar chart, all
that stuff was available to kinda give you,
like, the bull's eye of
Yeah. That's right. So we do have global
reporting that gives us the ability to see
across multiple locations. Each individual user also has
dashboarding. So we're seeing things like meantime before
failure, meantime to repair. Yeah. PM key. We're
(20:40):
also seeing completion rates. So we're gonna be
able to drive down into the individualized user
and see how they're actually actioning the system,
all of that directly within the dashboarding functionality.
The information can also be sent externally. So
if you're using something like a Power BI
or a Tableau, we do also have full
CSV APIs. So allows you to take that
information and visualize it within
your reporting structure that you may have in
(21:01):
place already today. Okay.
And you said earlier that, like, let's say
the maintenance guy gets out there and it's
a nightmare. Right? It's not your standard. Hey.
Let's just service this machine, but there's, like,
you know, everything's just kinda like it's gonna
be a nightmare. It's gonna take twice as
long. You're saying he can capture a video
or photos and include that with his report
so that he you know, if somebody says,
(21:22):
why did this take twice as long? They
can go and they can see what he
showed. Hey. This is how it this is
how it was when I showed up. You
know? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So we have the
ability to upload pictures and videos directly within
the application. We also have things like, voice
notes. So you can actually just transcribe the
information directly within the application and send it
off.
For those complex use cases,
(21:42):
it doesn't have to be a single person
working on a particular job. You can call
for friends and help. So we have the
ability within our application to function very similar
to Teams and have messaging. So I can
actually, you know, send a message off to
my supervisor, say, hey. I actually need a
mail right down here to help me do
this job. Can you send somebody over?
As well as, like, a full commenting history.
So very similar to, you know, a post
(22:04):
on a social media website. You can actually
go in and have
within the commenting section
and ask for support, let them know what
you did,
all directly within the application.
Yeah. I can definitely see some things turn
into out maybe it's mechanical it starts off
mechanical, but then you need to get electrical
involved or vice versa. So I could definitely
see how that could be very helpful.
(22:25):
Now I know you already talked about AI,
but can we dig into that a little
bit deeper? How are you guys using AI
today in your product?
Yeah. So we have a variety of different
AI tools that are doing things as simple
as just anomaly detection. So reviewing previous history
and providing recommendations to estimate different times. We
also recently released a,
Copilot,
(22:46):
non Microsoft Copilot, our own internal application.
What that actually does is automatically analyzes historical
information as well as the OEM manuals and
then provides recommendations.
Okay. One thing that we've seen a lot
of the time is somebody will show up
at a machine, may not know how to
actually maintain it, and we can reference data
directly within the OEM manual,
surface it, create it into a procedure, create
(23:07):
it into a work order with two clicks
of a button. So we're trying to make
the maintenance action as simple as possible for
our end users,
and,
AI is a great way to do that
through common language processing and anomaly detection.
Yeah. That is,
especially especially taking the user's manuals and making
those available.
So I, you know, I don't know how
(23:28):
many times I've asked Alexa or Siri for
something. Don't talk. I should have muted her.
So I don't know how many times I've
asked one of my voice assistants,
a question, and I get this bogus answer
or, you know, I search the web and
because there's no context. Right? There's no con
they don't understand the context of the question.
(23:50):
And so AI is phenomenal. So if you're
saying,
you know, maybe there's a manual on how
to a maintenance manual for the machine. They
could say, hey. What is the torque on
this? So what pressure does this thing be
set at on? Exactly. That it can it
can, you know, go through and have that
information available to you.
I just think that's amazing. I think I
(24:10):
think that's that's definitely a reason why people
should be looking at your packages
is because of that feature. And it's also
great. I mean, we use in condition monitoring
a lot.
And so that's kinda how you're using it
to look for, you know, anything that's different,
anything that's not the standard common result. Right?
If there's
any, any outliers, then you it can zoom
(24:30):
in on that, make bring that up to
the forefront and let the people know about
it.
The other thing I wanted to ask you
really was,
so the product is called MaintainX.
Right? And I think you was telling me
it has multiple modules. It's kinda like Yep.
And and and and there's some services that
go with every
onboarding because,
you know, this isn't something like Microsoft Word
(24:51):
that people have been using for twenty years,
and they just know how to use. This
is like the other products in the industry.
If you don't have it, you've never used
it. Right? So,
you know, when people wanna actually find out
more, I'm sure you guys do demos, you
do online meetings. Where are they gonna go
to find out, you know, where to find
out more about your product and if they're
(25:11):
interested?
Yeah. Getmaintainaxe.com
is definitely the best place to start. We
do have a variety of different free resources
available there, documentation, etcetera.
In terms of the implementation, we do have,
you know, over 30 implementation consultants in house.
So they're all engineers by background and training,
and so they can come in, provide recommendations
to help support it. We do also offer
(25:32):
247365
support directly within our application with a response
time under two minutes. So it doesn't matter
where you are in the world. You'll have
somebody there at all times to help you
through this process.
And then lastly, we do also have a
full academy. So you can actually get certified
on MaintainX, go through the courses,
and actually see how the system's gonna be
used based upon your job, role within the
(25:54):
business. That's awesome. Great. So they can actually
go through that and
and so they don't have to fly somewhere
to go to a training class That's right.
Through the snow and the cold weather as
we were talking about in the preshow.
You know, I I did wanna ask and
if you if you don't feel comfortable
going into this, I
understand. But, you know, for we have a
large Rockwell audience.
And could you give me some key takeaways
(26:16):
between you know, maybe, you know, what makes
you better than their product? And I don't
wanna put you on the spot here. Sure.
But if you feel comfortable doing it, like,
just give us some key takeaways of why,
you know, maybe they just think rock will
rock will rock all the time and why
they should give you guys a look.
Yeah. Like, hey. I I can't say anything
bad about Fix. I really enjoyed my time
there. They got a good product. I think
(26:37):
what really sets us apart in comparison to
Fixx is that mobile application. So ensuring that
we're collecting that good data from our end
users. We're driving adoption within it. Having that
event based architecture is also hugely important for
a lot of our customers to have webhooks
and subscriptions
and ensure that we're pushing and pulling data
from disparate systems.
And then I think the last one is
definitely the agnostic aspect.
(26:58):
We're not locked into a particular brand.
We are open architecture, so we can ingest
data from a variety of different systems.
MQTT is definitely becoming a a new standard,
I would say, for different applications. And so
we wanted to make sure that we can
ingest,
data from Siemens, from AB, from Honeywell, from
anybody within the market.
(27:19):
So that's hugely important for us. The last
thing I would say is just the fact
that we're a software company, not a hardware
company with software. We have very much focused
in terms of product innovation, changes, and updates.
And so,
a lot of our development is focused,
core,
our application
versus,
at least in my opinion, I think the
(27:40):
focus for Rockwell has shifted away from fix
to other applications within their overall suites. And
so you don't see the same level of
innovation and change,
that you may see,
at maintenance.
Yeah. It's it's it's I hear what you're
saying, and I appreciate that. I know, it
and I know we have Rockwell on the
show on on a regular basis, and we're
fans of their products. We're fans we're fans
(28:01):
of automation. So if, we've had so many
big and small companies on over the years,
and we have many more coming up in
the coming weeks. But,
one of the thing is with the bigger
the company, it's it's hard to, you know,
it's it's actually, you know, fix is this
whole product group that does its thing,
and it's different than the the, say, the
program controller group, right, that does their thing.
(28:23):
And it's it's it's, it's just a large
company, and and everybody's focused on their their
pieces and parts where you guys focus on
one thing, your product.
So I can certainly see that as especially
if if if you're looking for somebody more
to give you more of a a a,
you know, business to business types relationship
where you're talking directly to the people, and
you're not going through a different layer,
(28:45):
of salespeople and whatnot.
So I guess with that, that's my those
are all my well, I do have one
more question.
Is there anything else you wanted to cover?
I tried to ask a lot of questions,
but do we do we leave anything out?
No. I I think we've covered a lot,
for today's conversation.
I think there's a lot of opportunity to
start focusing in on maintenance. It's kind of
(29:06):
been the forgotten child within the market for
a period of time. It was seen as
a cost center versus an opportunity to save
money, especially as we've seen, you know, some
of the challenges within our
supply chain over COVID.
I think it's definitely somewhere that,
we a lot of folks need to invest
more in. And so,
don't let maintenance be the blocker for continuous
(29:28):
success. And, hey, having good data also could
be a a good justification for you to
do some upgrades and get some new equipment
in in, your your particular facilities.
That's awesome. And, you know, I just I
just wanna say, if there's anybody out there
watching and you wanna come on my tech
talk show, maybe you're a you're,
you're using one of these packages and you
wanna kinda share the day in and day
(29:49):
out. Definitely, if you're using MaintainX,
I'd love to have you come on our
tech talk show and just have a chat
about it because, you know, this is something
that I've always worked with people who used
it, but I was never the person who
actually used it myself. So I'd love to
know more about that day in the life.
And I do wanna thank MaintainX for sponsoring
this episode. You guys who are watching, you
probably just realized this was completely ad free,
(30:12):
and we can only do that when these
companies
come in and sponsor the episodes. So, Colin,
thank you, and thank you for your company.
And I really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank
you for coming on the show.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Sean. I really appreciate
it. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that
episode, and I wanna thank Colin for coming
on the show and telling us all about
their CMS solution. I also wanna thank MaintainX
for sponsoring this episode,
(30:33):
making it completely ad free. Really appreciate that.
Hey. If you do reach out to MaintainX
to find out about their CMS solution,
please mention that you saw them on the
automation podcast.
And with that, I wanna wish you all
good health and happiness. And until next time,
my friends,
peace.
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