Discover more on how IoT for Service drives better business results
It is no longer a question as to whether companies should connect their products. The question is now how fast they can get to desired value. Today we are going to talk about how to think about implementation and how to get the faster time to value and reducing total cost of ownership. It is no longer why? or whether? or if? It´s how to start and speed to value? In a connected service strategy, the best smart connected products will ensure improved efficiency, faster time to value and lower cost of ownership.
Discover more on how IoT for Service drives better business results
It is no longer a question as to whether companies should connect their products. The question is now how fast they can get to desired value. Today we are going to talk about how to think about implementation and how to get the faster time to value and reducing total cost of ownership. It is no longer why? or whether? or if? It´s how to start and speed to value? In a connected service strategy, the best smart connected products will ensure improved efficiency, faster time to value and lower cost of ownership.
Welcome to Speaking of Service, the podcast that uncovers practical ways to grow service revenue, control costs, and improve customer satisfaction. If you're looking to innovate, gain a competitive edge, or just learn about the latest service trends, you've come to the right place. Join Chris Wolf. VP of Strategy Partnerships as she speaks with Anthony Mafa, senior Director, smart Connected Products and strategic initiatives at PTC about how companies can make the most out of their connected service strategies. Welcome back to speaking of Service. If you were with me just a little while ago, you heard from Laura Estee, who's our program manager for the Smart and Connected Product Accelerator program. Talk about how we're working hard to give you better, faster time to value, and to improve the effectiveness of your service organization. I'm thrilled today to have one of her colleagues, Anthony Mafa here with me today. He's an expert from industry, particularly in how healthcare organizations are capitalizing on. delivering smart and connected service to their end clients. Uh, welcome to speaking of service, Anthony. Thank you very much, Chris. It's good to be here. My name's Chris Wolf. I invite you to call me Wolfie if you like . Okay, thank you. Uh, tell me a little bit about what you do for ptc and if I could, maybe a fun fact that our team may not know about you. For the first five years here at ptc, I worked in the product management. Dealing with iot. So I was helping develop what Thingworks does and how it does it. Um, now I am in a role of supporting all of those things that I've built and helping the sales team, uh, sell those to customers. And it's not just the selling of it, it's really describing to customers what they can do with it and how they can achieve, um, the art of the possible. With, with Thingworks and I o t, uh, let's see. As, as far as a, um, thing that a lot of people don't know about me, I am a part-time professional. So if our sales people and customers don't keep you busy enough, you've got that on the side. So I have that as a side gig. Well, that's terrific. Welcome. It's great to have you here. Uh, one of the things that I've heard you talk about, Anthony, is, I kind of alluded to this in the opening, uh, I've heard you say it's not about counting connections. meaning the number of connected devices, rather, it's about making connections count. Just break that down for me a little bit. When we connect things, the idea is that we would get information from those things and as a service organization we could be more efficient. Mm-hmm. in resolving issues.. Well, if we connect things that have no problems, , all we have are connections and a lot of data. Yeah. So there has to be this balance of, I really do want to get information, but I also need to be able to react to that information. And then, and when things fail, then I can really build out an ecosystem of how to go forward with that. So the big challenge that you get, That most customers have is deciding, do I connect my old equipment, my brownfield equipment, or do I connect the new equipment? And typically connecting the new equipment is great because it's going out, it's new. You have an opportunity to put some new sensors and everything. But the problem with that is it's probably not gonna fail as often as the older equipment is. And then you get into the discussion of how old does that equipment, how long does that equipment. Because the longer the equipment lasts in the field, the more likely you have a large population of Brownfield equipment and a very small population of Greenfield. So there's this balance of trying to make the right connections, to get the data to do the job. We were talking about this earlier. I come from the IT world where a customer might refresh their infrastructure every three to five years. So for an oem, that means that, you know, 20 to 30% of their backfield is in motion at any time. You can refresh that infrastructure with innovation much more quickly. But for your types of users, they have equipment that's gonna be decades old. It really is. And that, that's because a lot of this equipment tends to be, um, high value, uh, it's capital purchases. So they're gonna be 10, 15, 20 years in, in, or longer in business. And if you're only selling a few hundred to a few thousand assets a year, it could take you 10 to 20 years to actually re completely replace. The entire population of assets in the field. Now you said that the younger devices kind of phone home and say, I'm okay all the time. So there's a lot of useless information or I guess helpful information if you're a parent, but maybe not so much if you're trying to reduce hair pinning and telco costs. But then with these older pieces of equipment, what's the value of connecting them? Are you extending their EF effective, useful life? I. What's the best benefit that you get from that? Well, in certain cases, you might be able to extend the useful life. I would probably draw back from that and say, eh, not as much. But what you're really going to, able be able to do is take care of the, the meantime to resolution. And there's three. The three Rs is meantime to response, meantime to repair in, meantime to resolution. They all matter, uh, to customers. You know, how quickly did you get back to me? But the, the resolution piece is how can you get somebody from a break? Back to up and running. And so monitoring this equipment is really helping shorten that timeline, right? Getting them back up and, and running faster. I got a real kick out of an analogy I've heard your team use where they talk about the bathtub curve. Maybe you can share that with listeners who aren't familiar with that expression. Well, well, that's part of the reason why I, I think, That you may not change the useful life of a product. So the bathtub curve is a reliability issue. It says that in the very beginning of the life of a product, uh, it, there will be some infant mortality, some early out of the gate failures, and then it will run for an extended period of time. And at the end, the failures will start to come up. And so there, there's literally a bathtub on that reliability. Now, engineering owns the first half of that for most ca in most cases. If they design the product right and it's assembled right, so on, it shouldn't fail out of the gate, but it's the service organization that actually owns the back end of that curve. And if you can do maintenance and you do proper maintenance, then you can extend the life to an extent to, to some level. Now why? You know, why would that be? Well, most maintenance is, , right? If, if maintenance is planned on a time schedule, then if you're on schedule, your maintenance is perfect. But if you use it more than that schedule, your maintenance is behind. And if you use it less than that, then your maintenance is ahead. So doing maintenance when it's really needed can extend that life so that it meets it to the full and even maybe beyond., and that's where an IOT program can really help because you're gonna start to do condition-based maintenance rather than time-based maintenance. Now, I've also heard you say that if you don't connect your machines, the voice of the equipment is service, meaning the service technicians. Uh, however, I'm thinking if you do connect your machines, are you in some way diminishing the voice of those valuable service technicians and maybe blunting that circular feedback loop that might provide between human. Well, besides the fact that most technicians are colorful on their own, um, they do really get a, a lot of information directly from customers, and more importantly, they get information literally with working on the equipment. So they can give you feedback on how a piece of equipment is installed in a facility or how it might be difficult for them to do specific tasks. For example, you put an access panel on the back of a product, and in most environments it's pushed up against the. And if that piece of equipment's heavy and now you get a pallet jack to move it. So they can certainly give a lot of information about how that equipment is used, not necessarily what the current draw is or the vibration like an iot system does. So the combination is of those two things really balances out the view of what's going on in the field and is there data coming off of these machines through IOT systems that can help those machine whisperers. Uh, be even better at their jobs. Certainly it, it there is. Um, and, but that all really comes down to your engineering team working with service to add those sensors into the product because, um, if you don't put the sensor in, obviously the data's not gonna come out of the machine. And, and that's one of the bigger changes you'll see.. 20 years ago when we first started connecting equipment, we had what we had. And when you start to get information back out of the system, now you can go into engineering and say, Hey, by the way, you know, we're seeing this particular problem. If we had this type of sensor in the equipment, that would help us predict it sooner. And that's really where if you look at the, the story of the, the digital thread. When you start to take information coming out of, out of the edge and you can drive that back into engineering, you literally are now providing that capability to, to get the insights like that. And when you refer to the Edge, again in my IT background, I'm thinking about maybe a server on a factory floor, but you actually mean the far edge, the, the sensor that item that's collecting raw data. Yeah. It, it mean in the iot sense, the, the server is going to live in a cloud somewhere or at your facility. And the edge is truly all of your end user customers that the equipment at their location. So that's what. By the edge in the IOT space. And when I think about, you know, my first instinct is to say, let's slap cheap and cheerful sensors on every bit of equipment. That brings me right back to your, your mantra, which is it's not about connecting devices, it's about making the connection count. It is. And. There are sensors today that, that you can buy. Uh, there are great technologies out there like Laura Technology, which allows you to put sensors in a room and pull all that back into one location. But the, you know, the prospect of sensitizing everything just for the sake of getting data, uh, you know, there's, there's a problem of just. the cost of that. Yeah. Secondary, pulling all that information back. There's a cost cuz you have to store it somewhere. The data that's available and the software to make that data meaningful is really game changing, um, when you have the time to use it well. If I have the time to use PowerPoint to all of its capabilities, I can make an incredible presentation, but I don't always have time for that. Our customers are under a tremendous amount of pressure, particularly in the service world with major manufacturers margin pressure, the silver tsunami. What kind of work is PTC you and your team doing to help give time back to our customers or help them at least get value from their investment faster? We've. Presented thingworks as a platform, and it is still a platform to this day. Uh, but what we found is that a lot of our customers were really relying on the same content. They were doing the same job. Um, so even though you might be servicing an MRI machine or servicing a pump, there were requirements that you had that were very similar in terms of how you wanted to create your system. We have now Skip a or the Smart Connected Product accelerator, which is a framework for customers to very quickly start up their process rather than write services and create mashups. What they're going to do is configure that system. so that it serves their purpose. So I'm gonna hit rewind on you, and you use this word skip a just rolls right off the tongue. When I think of Skip A here in Boston, I think of that 1970s TV show with Gilligan and the Skip A. This is a US TV show to my international watchers. This stands for Smart Connected Product Accelerator. Yes. Tell me a layperson's term. What is one of these accelerators? If I used one, how would I know? What will it? So, so the accelerator has a, a group of components with it. One of the components, for example, is, um, I need users in the system, right? So identity, access and, and management. I want to create a user that has access to something in the platform. You would literally have to create mashups and services and configure that to do what you want it to do. So, for example, Chris can have access to everything, but Anthony can only see this type of.? Well with the, the accelerator, all of that framework's there. What you're going to do is create users and then those users can be either put into groups or given access to specific equipment. So there is no more of this programming the system out. It's literally configuring the system. So you're providing both the pre-coded framework. What about the cosmetics around the user interface? You know, can you assure me that whatever is built in this accelerator is gonna be usable by my class of users? It, it really is. There's a great view of the world that we love to show people, which is, here's all my stuff, and we call it dots and people refer to it as dots on a map. Yeah. Um, now, Management loves to see that because it shows them the status of things around whatever location the United States, Europe, Asia, and they can see the, where their assets are deployed. But a technician really is not worried about that so much. So at a click of a button, that user interface can change from looking at a map view to looking at a table view. And then there are very quick, simple buttons to filter. I only wanna filter on the things that I need to.. If you have a hundred thousand assets in the field, you don't wanna look at every asset searching for the ones that need to be worked on you. You just wanna see the ones that have troubles or alerts that are in the system. So there's, you know, quick buttons like that to select and filter down that list. So it is very, uh, user friendly. Um, the user interface is complete for them to do that work. They're not having to go through and, and go through all types of gyrations. The equipment and look for the things that they wanna work on. So let me push back on you a bit, skip apa. Um, I was talking to John Carroll from the service council, and he talked about the tension with service becoming a revenue stream as opposed to a cost center. And yet there isn't board level representation of the service mandate and the innovation mandate up at the senior levels of a lot of organizations. How do you. Lay people or business people to understand that what they think is readily available and say a consumer grade tool or Excel even, you know, why can't I just use that to perform these same tasks? Why do I need a purpose-built system to address this need? Well, the way I address that with a lot of people is, uh, in an organization, did you build your own CRM system? Did you build your own e r P system? Did you build your own r p or CAD system? And the answer to that is no. We have not built those things. The reason you haven't built those, that's not your core efficacy. That's not what you do. Now we have had customer. Who have said to us, we're gonna build our own thing, now we're, we're gonna move forward and build our own thing. And after two or three years, they come back and they say, this is a lot harder than what we thought it was. And that's really the, the reason behind this, right? This is what we do. We don't make MRI machines, we don't make, um, pumps or compressors or blowers or any of that equipment, but what we do is. The equipment and the software that can monitor those and do it very well. So I guess this comes back to our time to value discussion, that it's not about innovating by creating a platform. It's taking a platform and putting it to work for your business against these macroeconomic challenges that we face. I've actually told customers, I call this the three to five problem. It's gonna take you three to five years at three to $5 million a year to solve this particular.. And at that point you're probably, you've bought into this, this is yours forever. Right? Um, we were talking earlier about, you know, kids and, you know, our kids are graduating from college and at some point your kids move out. Well, no. When you build your own software, it never moves out.. You have to maintain it forever. You're paying the bills all the time. And that's, that's the challenge in, in this environment. by the way, the world of security has, has exploded so much in the last five years that most organizations today are finding just the security alone. Is is a daunting task. Absolutely. Uh, I know that our, we have a large installed base of customers who are delighted to hear that we've modernized, advancing the use of the acce, a agent that's widely deployed in very successful many customers alongside the modern core server capabilities of Thingworks. Could you just expand a little bit on. Sure. Um, and just to delineate, uh, we have two parts of every product, right? The, the Exceed A product has an edge or an agent, and it has the server just like Thingworks does. The server side of the ACC exceed A system is definitely going to be sunset. Now, as a result of that, we built a very capable interface from the acc, exceed a agent into Thingworks. Couple years ago, we were like, well, you know, the entire exceed a product was going to go. But we realized that exceed a agent has a lot of capabilities, uh, capabilities that don't exist even today, uh, in competitive products. And by that what I mean is that core agent has the ability to do basic monitoring, remote access, and software content. So without any development work, again, this is the whole theme of providing more of a solution to the process because we know most, our, most of our service customers do not have r and d personnel on staff. Mm-hmm.. So they really can't write software or develop software. They have to either hire a third party or beg, borrow, and steal from engineering to get those people in. So a product like the acce, a agent affords you the opportunity to get started. on that edge, just like Skip is providing you the faster approach on the backend. So really we're trying to compress our time to market for you, for for the customers as quickly. To get it as quickly as we can. So I was teasing you earlier that I was gonna call you Mr. Accelerator rather than the skipper. Um, , tell me a little bit about what, uh, smart connected product accelerator roadmaps are looking like in the coming year and then beyond. What's, what's the gleam in your eye for the types of time to value we'll be able to enable and in what ways service starts to take on, um, a, a different role? When you become proactive, so you, you look at a problem and then you start to predict when things are going to happen. And that's, that's part one of the next piece, right? Can we get you to the proactive stage? So we'll start to do more work with our analytics team to integrate the analytics component to make you, uh, to give you a roadmap to be more proactive. Uh, but there's also other things that w that service doesn't quite realize yet, and they'll start to realize that this is good for them. Utiliz. We typically think of utilization as, um, a metric that we, we measure our technicians on, right? Because utilization rate tells me if I have too many technicians or not a tech, not enough technicians. There's that Goldilocks zone for that. Well, the same thing happens with equipment. If equipment is being overused, I can tell by a utilization rate. If it's being underused, I can, I would really. Know that as well. Now, if I, if it's underused, I want to go to my customer and know why they're underusing, that particular piece of equipment. If it's overused, I want sales to go in and say, you probably need to either get the next version of that or a parallel system in place. So it really provides now a revenue stream for you, a, understand why people are not using it, or B, help sales bring in new product into the. I know you're gonna be, um, a person who's highly sought after at Liveworks coming up in May. What are the types of questions you're hoping that people will ask you, and what types of interviews are you looking to conduct while you're there having lunch or circulating with our clients? You know, I, I would've thought by this time that people would be asking for the second, third, fourth generation products. But what I'm hearing still within industry, and I was just at a, a meeting a few weeks ago, uh, for the med dev world, for services in med dev, and people are still having issues with connectivity. It, it's not that they don't know how to get data out of their machine, it's that they're having these conversations with the IT. And, and the challenge of course is that let's say that you're a med dev manufacturer, you have 5,000 hospitals in the United States, now there are some consortiums or IDCs that have come together. So maybe you only have to talk to 3,500 IT departments to get your equipment connected. And, and that's a, that's a challenge for them. So I know that's been a pervasive question. Um, and so now that I look at what we've done in the smart connected products world to say, Com, you know, solutionize the Edge, let's solutionize the backend. We have some work ahead of us now to help solutionize the answer or the conversation with the IT department, so we can really streamline this whole process all the way through. But that's what I'm anticipating. It's gonna be coming up as a conversation set this. Well, if you're planning to attend live works, particularly if you're in a highly regulated or privacy concerning industry, look for Anthony and maybe get a Birds of a Feather group together at a table to discuss how could we bottoms up, accelerate this ability to resolve the fears and concerns of the IT organizations while we continue to improve the customer experience? The effecti. And frankly, the cost effectiveness of the service we deliver. Anthony, I'll toss to you for the last word. I've been very pleased with the opportunities I've been given here at ptc and I'm really happy to see as a, as a business where we have been headed with this, the support that we are giving our customers, uh, and our, I'm really hoping that people understand. Right now. I, I would've thought 20 years ago, I thought I was the last person to get into iot, and I'm realizing right now there is a large opportunity for people to really change their businesses. And this is, this is the time to do it. So please come to us, talk to us more than happy to share what we know about this process, about deploying these systems, and hope you see you at liveworks. Hope to see you at liveworks. Thank you Every. Thanks for listening to the Speaking of Service podcast brought to you by ptc. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating or review. And be sure to check out other episodes to hear new perspectives on improving life for aftermarket professionals, service teams, and the customers they support. If you have a topic of interest or want to provide feedback, email us at speaking of service ptc.com or visit us at ptc.com/speaking of.