I'm so happy to have a returning guest with us today. Joining us via the Cat Electric Power Hotline is Magy Kramer. For veteran listeners you'll recognize Magy from our episode on "Connecting Critical Devices". Magy is back with us to discuss some critical items to look for when choosing your connectivity solution.
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I'm so happy to have a returning guest with us today. Joining us via the Cat Electric Power Hotline is Magy Kramer. For veteran listeners you'll recognize Magy from our episode on "Connecting Critical Devices". Magy is back with us to discuss some critical items to look for when choosing your connectivity solution.
Email us: powerbytes@cat.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cat-electric-power/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Caterpillar.Electric.Power/
Lou: Good Day and welcome everyone to Power Bytes! I am your host Lou Signorelli and Power Bytes is your destination Podcast for power generation conversation. As always please know how much we appreciate you, our listeners. We hope you find our topics helpful and interesting. There are several ways for you to get in touch with the show. You can send us an email at powerbytes@cat.com, visit us at Cat Electric Power on Facebook or LinkedIn. If you enjoy your time with us today Please remember to subscribe to our podcast.
Lou: I'm so happy to have a returning guest with us today. Joining us via the Cat Electric Power Hotline is Magy Kramer. For veteran listeners you'll recognize Magy from our episode on "Connecting Critical Devices". Magy is back with us to discuss some critical items to look for when choosing your connectivity solution. Welcome back Magy!
Magy: Thanks, it's great to be back.
Lou: Magy before we dive into today's topic, what can you share with us about Cat's Digital Strategy in terms of direction or developments?
Magy: Our strategy is simple: To take care of our customers. We need our customers to succeed and we will help them by providing solutions with the combination of deep domain expertise and technology. This allows all of us to be smarter, faster, anywhere. We will continue to develop our user's experience within our tools, add more analytics and develop reports to take care of all our customers from a single genset to a whole site with generator sets and multiple types of supporting equipment.
Lou: Thanks Magy! So, last time we spoke, we talked about connecting digital assets. What have you brought us today?
Magy: The last time we spoke I mentioned our Cat Connect offering and the value of connecting generators with our standard offering. This value was focused on customized alerts by text and email and viewing data anywhere at any time with our mobile app of Cat Remote Monitor. Today I want to chat about Connectivity solutions in general as there are a lot out there and it can be overwhelming.
Lou: Magy, that's Perfect! In your mind what are the three most important things to look for in a connectivity solution?
Magy: I believe the 3 most important items to look out for our 1. Flexibility 2. Support 3. Security. What do I mean by flexibility? As you think about your place of work or the site you are building, the generator and the equipment around it is very important effecting how you or your customer manages costs and reduces downtime. It is not just about the generator set. You need to understand the utility breaker, automatic transfer switch, etc. The connectivity solution you choose should allow you to bring in what I refer to as balance of plant and set up alerts on all these important assets. Support means, you need someone who will help train you on the solution and be there to call if you have a question on the solution or on your equipment. Industry expertise/knowledge on not only the connectivity solution but on the product is very important to your operation. Security, you want to make sure the connection is secure and the solution meets certain guidelines with data privacy and security. Who should be accessing this information and how they access it, is very important.
Lou: Tell me more about balance of plant what does that mean to a generator customer?
Magy: That is why flexibility is so important. You need a system that meets your site requirements. So that might mean investing in a solution that only pulls data from the generator and switchgear. Then you would set up alerts on battery voltage, fuel or the switch position and why the switch was tripped on the switchgear. Or it might mean you have a huge site and you need to monitor more like when the utility breaker opens, any type of After treatment , Cooling, Weather stations, PV panels for solar power and any other site and room conditions.
Lou: Wow Magy. There is a lot in that statement. Are you saying I can monitor data from all those devices?
Magy: Of course. It's part of a complete connectivity solution.
Lou: Ok, so tell me more about support
Magy: When you get an alarm, it means there is something that changed its status. You need to know what to do and having someone partner with you on that is critical. That might mean they have the right part for you to fix the issue or maybe that means they come and fix it for you. None of us can get more time in a day, our time is limited, valuable and priceless. You can't get more of it so we will need to be effective with our time. That is where connectivity support comes in. We have a resident fleet advisor that monitors several assets for our customers globally and our dealer network also offers customer value agreements If you haven't yet heard Andrew Haroun's podcast on this topic, that is a must listen.
Lou: Magy, do you have a real-life example of how having a trusted partner monitor critical assets helps?
Magy: Absolutely! I would love to share with you a real event.
Visualize that you are having a cookout with your family grilling burgers. You receive on your phone indicating one of the gen sets is failing a fuel pump. You stepped away for 5min to notify your team allowing them to safely shut the asset down for further inspection and repair. You are only disrupted from valuable family time and your burger for 5min but also saved yourself 8-10 hours of unexpected downtime.
Lou: You mention alerts again, Clearly being connected to our data is important. How else can customers view data?
Magy: Our intermediate Cat Connect offering includes reports while our premium offering includes reports and analytics.
Lou: OK, you got me on that one. How are reports and analytics different?
Magy: Our intermediate connectivity offering is capturing data from the generator set to enable our Operational KPI report where customers can view the efficiency of their generator sets using a calculation of Generator Real Power and Fuel consumption including which units are over or under a certain load or frequently occurring alerts. We also just launched a report for Critical Standby Application which will really be valuable in the healthcare industry to support them with specific regulations like NFPA110 and JCAHO.
Some examples of automated analytics are notifications letting customers know the remaining useful life for air and oil filters. "Hey, be aware that your filter only has 30% remaining useful life, start thinking about replacing it during a scheduled downtime."
Lou: I know we mentioned flexibility, that made me think of customers that have their own connectivity solution but might want to utilize some of the Cat Connect reports or visualization capabilities. Can someone take advantage of Cat's capabilities in this area or do they have to start all over?
Magy: Absolutely Lou! I like your train of thought! That is true flexibility and we do that today. We bring in data from 3rd party solutions into Cat Connect supporting the customer's overall business.
Lou: Magy, this sounds pretty good. Do you have an example of how a user might benefit from these reports and analytics?
Magy: In the past year just looking at one customer who uses Cat Connect. They have a fleet over 40 generator sets, Looking at one full year of collecting data and analyzing it to take proactive and predictive steps has saved a recorded 200 + hours of downtime through 80+ recommendations. Those are conservative numbers. They don’t include items that we stopped so that a complete catastrophic failure from happening. That is 5 hours a year per generator set . . .and like I mentioned in my last podcast. Do you know how much downtime costs you?
Lou Ok, this is all great, but let's talk cost. Is this a per genset cost, a site level cost? What's the catch?
Magy: There is a cost per genset that includes the balance of plant assets and if you take our premium subscription and look at it over time, it is about $2/month or 10/cents a day and even less with our intermediate offering which can save our customer thousands of dollars. I am going to now quote my fleet advisor who experienced that cookout example "like the burgers on the grill, what gets monitored gets managed."
Lou: If we have learned anything from recent events, it's that we all need to invest in things that allow us to be flexible, secure, and profitable. Clearly connecting digitally to our critical assets does exactly that. You know, you really hit a nerve with me when you talked about the cost vs the VALUE one gets from utilizing digital products. I'm not sure one can put a value on the ability to connect to critical assets from anywhere at any time.
So, to sum up what we've been discussing, Cat's Digital Strategy is focused on making products that allow our users to be secure, while proving a the flexibility they need to concentrate on their core business and be profitable. Did I get that right?
Magy: Yes Lou, that is the key takeaway from our discussion today as we support our variety of customers with generator sets and connectivity.
Lou: There you have it folks. Thank you Magy for taking us through Cat's Digital efforts and Cat Connect today and thank you to you, our listeners. If you'd like to reach us here at Power Bytes, please write us at powerbytes@cat.com or visit Cat Electric Power on Facebook or Linkedin. Please remember to subscribe to our Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Till next time, thanks for listening to Power Bytes and have a great day!