Reduce Downtime by Creating the Right Maintenance Strategy for You

Transcript

Day, everyone, and welcome to our webcast, Reduce Downtime by Creating the Right Maintenance Strategy. Today's presentation is sponsored by Limble. I'm your host, Daryl Proctor, senior associate editor with Power Magazine. Today's discussion is about how a true maintenance strategy is one that will help your business reduce downtime and improve maintenance operations and provide a big impact for your organization.

Today's speaker is Miguel Ramos, cofounder of Limble, a company that provides computerized maintenance management systems or CMMS, technology that helps companies manage assets, schedule maintenance, and track work orders.

Miguel will talk about strategies that will enable your business to make even small improvements that will yield big results.

Today's webinar is scheduled for one hour, and that includes time for a question and answer session that will follow the presentation portion of today's program. Before we get started, I'll run through a few housekeeping items. In the webinar platform, you should see a chat area and a q and a area. If you experience any technical difficulty, you can ask for help using the chat function, and our production staff will assist you. Please take a moment to answer today's poll questions, which are located in the polls tab.

There also are handouts available under the handouts tab.

To submit questions for Miguel, please enter those in the q and a section rather than in the chat area. You can enter questions at any time during today's presentation, and we'll answer as many as possible at the end of the program.

Any that we don't get to during the live session will be answered via email after the webinar. Today's presentation will be archived on our server for up to one year, and future viewing will remain free of charge. You can use the same web address to reach the archived program as you did to reach the live program. Now let's hear from today's speaker, Miguel Ramos. Take it away, Miguel.

Thank you so much, Daryl. Let me, get my screen going here.

Perfect. Alright. So today's presentation is on reducing downtime for creating by creating the best maintenance strategy for your plant, for your facility. So before we get into that, just real quick background on myself.

Just like Daryl said, I'm one of the cofounders here at Limble. We make maintenance management software. Before that, I was working in production and did all sorts of things with maintenance and making sure that our production lines were up and running. And this is something that I'm really passionate about, so I'm excited to be here today.

We have two big goals for this presentation. The first one is I want every attendee to have a plan to improve their maintenance systems in some way, even if that plan is just one step above what they're doing today. And then the second goal is to teach a repeatable process so you have the right mindset to continuously improve your systems. We're going to get more into that.

So how do most people try to improve their maintenance systems? Well, they go to Google and they ask Google, how do I improve my maintenance systems? And they typically get results from Google that say things like industry four point o, sensors, vibrational analysis. Google, of course, is going to tell you the things that are the most exciting and the most up to date, all of the new things that are coming out in improving maintenance systems.

So when somebody searches Google, then they're going to end up with a project proposal that aligns with that typically. They're gonna say, hey. We need to go to industry four point o. We need sensors.

We need this vibrational analysis. So they put that proposal together, and then they put together all the needs. We're gonna need a project lead. We're gonna need to have all this money to go into this project.

We need to create a good scope and get maybe outside experts to come in and help us. And typically, they take months of work. Let me turn off my notifications there. So that's typically what happens when you do this.

And because of that, many months later and later, you get your final project finished, which I'm showing here by an engineered fork, which what I mean by that is it is definitely a lot cooler, more technologically advanced. But is it that much better? Is it much more practical than what they had before? And this is a common problem that I see that people go to these large expenses to make their systems better.

But when you ask them later, was it really worth it? They go, you know what? I'm not really sure.

The problem wasn't that it was industry four point o or sensors or vibrational analysis. I don't think any of those are bad ideas. In fact, I think they can be really great things for many companies.

But the problem was the approach. You see, they put the cart before the horse. And one time I was given this presentation and a Zillennial rose his hand and was like, what does that mean? So I explained, oh, well, they did it backwards. And he goes, oh, so he said it was like using the toilet or flushing the toilet before you use it. And I was like, well, that's that's one way to look at it here. So the approach was wrong.

The question was wrong. It wasn't specific to the needs of that company.

It wasn't asking what is it that we need the most. It was just asking a very general question. What what do you recommend, Google?

The other big problem is it wasn't iterative. If you remember, the project was very big on how they were gonna make all these improvements. And because it wasn't iterative, they couldn't learn along the way.

So there is a much better approach. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. This approach is going to be able to give you faster results. It's going to take less work, and you're going to see bigger benefits.

This is the lean methodology or continuous improvement. Some of you may have heard about this in manufacturing. Sometimes it's also called the Toyota method. We're going to be applying a few of those principles to maintenance systems.

So getting into this, we need to find out what is most important for us. We need to ask ourselves what the biggest challenges are that we are facing at our facility.

Now, when we do that, we can ask ourselves a few questions, such as what are we spending the most time on? Where are we wasting the most money?

Now you can ask this to your team. You can talk through this with other people in your management, but these are great questions to start with. Another good question to ask is where is the communication breaking down in our maintenance systems and how our team works together?

And great another great question to ask is, are there processes or systems that are slowing down progress? Some typical ones that I see are how we alert about downtime of machinery, replacing part inventory, coordinating between manufacturing and maintenance. In the energy sector, can be a little different depending on your business model.

But if we ask ourselves these questions, we should start seeing certain things float to the top, the things that make the biggest impact.

And another good question, though, is what if we don't know the answers to these? Well, one is you can go off your memory. This is what we're talking about before where you ask people, and you can get a variety of ideas from everyone.

Now there is a downside to this. Typically, when I see people just ask people, what what is it that our biggest problems are? They tend to have some biases. They think about what the biggest thing was that they recently saw and it kind of creates some indecision or kind of creates some bad data to go off of.

So what I typically recommend is that you get a way to manage all of this information and to go off of actual data. And that's why, of course, the CMMS is the industry standard way to know where your biggest problems are.

When you have a CMMS, you'll be able to see the biggest problems and the trends of those problems. We're going to talk about some examples of that later on.

You're going be able to see which machines are having the most downtime or costing you the most amount of money or where you're spending the most amount of your time. You'll be able to see your breakdown frequencies, your frequencies as well as improved processes that could lead to other problems.

One thing that's great about a CMMS is it should give you instantaneous downtime reports and other reports that can demonstrate these biggest problem areas to your company.

And it can definitely help with the replacements of your inventory parts and communication between teams.

Okay. So getting back to our process here, we talked about first, we need to identify where the biggest problems are. And it's interesting that when I work with companies, I have found that every time people are able to really identify where their biggest problems are, the solutions become obvious to them. And they are the ones that are really excited about that because they can come up with that on their own. And it's going to be individual to each company.

One problem I see though is that oftentimes they come up with a pretty long list of what to improve.

So where do you start? And this is where I find it helpful to go back and talk about the lean methodology for continuous improvement, where you understand your problems, you create strategic plans, and then you make little improvements. And I like to emphasize this little improvements because again, we're trying to iterate, we're trying to make improvements as we go along and not make giant projects where when you learn how well things turned out was is at the end of the project. And that can actually lead to a lot of unnecessary work and inefficiencies.

And if you follow this method, this is where I see companies make the biggest results.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the Pareto principle. And to talk about what Pareto is from, it comes from this guy. This is Vilfredo Pareto. I love how his name rhymes. He must have been like the Shaquille O'Neal of his time.

He discovered something interesting about his peas in his garden. He found out that eighty percent of the peas were coming from only twenty percent of the plants. And he started noticing this eightytwenty rule show up all the time. He noticed that twenty percent of the people in his village owned eighty percent of the land.

And this phenomenon started showing up more and more. So we often call this the Pareto principle or the eightytwenty rule. You may have heard of it.

How I like to use the eightytwenty rule when it comes to making improvements in a company is to think about how can I do the least amount of effort to get the most amount of results?

So if you remember when we talked about that example at the beginning where they did everything, they made the automated plant, they put in the sensors, they made it industry four point o.

I look at that method as putting one hundred percent of the effort in. But sometimes that leads to more problems or not solving all the problems you have. Whenever you add technology, you're gonna have some additional problems that come with that. Not that the technology is bad, but again, it was that approach of we're going to do everything and see what sticks doesn't always result in the best outcomes.

So once you know your biggest problem, then you ask yourself, how can I partially solve it? I like to say partially solve, because it's really easy to get hung up on how can we fix everything all at once. But if we can think of something like how can I improve it partway?

Oftentimes, we're going to get creative and come up with some really big, improvements with a lot less effort.

Again, how can I put in twenty percent of the effort and get eighty percent of the results?

So to give you the kind of go circle back to our goals here, I want every attendee to have a plan to improve their maintenance systems, and to teach the repeatable process.

The plan is going to come from what is individual to your company where you think the biggest needs are. And then the second goal is to teach that repeatable process. We kind of went through that. I'm going to share a couple of examples that hopefully will help you solidify in your mind how to apply this.

The first example is from a company that we're not going to name here. And they wanted to purchase sensors, specifically vibration temperature sensors. They had a big piece of equipment and they decided we're going to put all the sensors on this piece of equipment. Cost them about three thousand dollars worth of sensors. They had to hire a specialist to come in and connect all those sensors.

And then they decided to monitor the sensor readings from that.

And when we met, I remember asking them, are these sensors going to be placed on the piece of equipment that is breaking down the most?

And their answer was, we don't know.

And that was the number one problem is that these sensors weren't to solve a problem that they identified. Sensors sounded really cool. Maybe this came from a directive from above or maybe somebody googled and said, oh, sensors would be really cool. But was it really solving the problem that they had?

And then I asked them if you could see the vibration amplitude on your equipment, would you know if that looks normal or if it's high or if there's a problem from looking at the information from those sensors? And again, they said they actually don't know.

And then I asked them, do you have preventative maintenance schedules on this machine? Just the basic things that the manufacturer would recommend.

And they said, no, we're not doing any preventative maintenance.

And that's when they looked at me and said, you know what? We kind of did this backwards. I think that's where we should start. I said, yeah, let's let's start there.

It's not too late. Maybe we can use those sensors somewhere else. But they started seeing huge improvements when they started out with the most important things. The big thing for them is that piece of equipment was breaking down on a regular basis.

And it was due to the fact that they weren't doing anything to prevent those breakdowns.

Now, of course, in hindsight, this looks so simple. And some of you might be thinking this is a really obvious presentation. And I actually kind of hope it is. But one thing I've noticed is that it's really easy to get caught up in these things in our own plans. We might want to build something that is really cool or very exciting or it could be a pet project. But we always need to come back to what's going to make the biggest impact to solve the biggest problems that I have.

So I want to give you another example of a company that will be named because I'm really impressed with what they did.

This is Joe. And he works at a company called whiskersh and cheese. It's based out of you guessed it, Wisconsin.

And they were doing great with their maintenance systems. And I remember meeting with Joe, he uses our CMMS. And we asked him what he wanted to do next. And he said, you know, I want to reduce the downtime in this plant.

We said, great. Well, how are you going to do that? What are the biggest problems? And Joe said, there isn't a specific machine, there isn't a specific problem.

We would have to fix the entire plant to improve our downtime because it just seems like there's a bit of everything going on. And we asked him how many problems he sees in a day. He's like, I probably see different about fifty different problems every day. And I just feel like I'd have to fix them all to make improvements.

And that, of course, seemed really overwhelming. So we said, know what, Joe, our memories aren't perfect. So let's use the CMMS. And let's pull up some old data to see what things are looking like there. Maybe we can come up with some interesting ideas.

So again, we thought let's use the Pareto principle here.

These are some screenshots of our software. Now for those of you who use Limble today, you might recognize that things look a little bit older. We've improved our user interface to be more modern since then. But this is what it looked like at the time.

So what we did is we pulled up a list of all of the machines that had issues. And we realized that there was these feta cut machines that were accounting for eighty percent of the downtime in the plant.

And when Joe said saw this, he looked at us and said, Wait, I had no idea because I see problems all day long. I had no idea it was the same machines over and over again.

And that's just the problem with memory. And this is why it's so great to have access to data. So once we did that, we realized that we could go in and we could show him all of those problems so he could start identifying repeat issues. And those repeat issues surfaced right away. The first repeat issue that we saw is that there were these low temperature issues, whether it was cleaning the heaters or the low temperature alarm went off, there was something going on there with the heaters.

And when he when Joe looked at this, he immediately knew he was like, oh, I think that the heaters are going out on those machines. I can fix those. I can just replace a new heater and put a new heater on. And again, this is the power of being able to identify what the biggest problems are.

People almost always know what to fix once they can see the problem.

The other thing that they saw is there were a lot of these activities where they were adjusting the mold.

And as soon as Joe saw this, he realized, oh, I know what's going on there.

The locking mechanism for these molds, it kind of drifts over time. And he said, I've been thinking about this for a while. And I'm thinking about talking to the machine shop about making an additional part to our clamp. So it just has a little bit more strength and doesn't shift over time.

And he said this is an easy fix. In fact, what he realized is that if we fix these two things, it's going to take care of eighty percent of the downtime for these Veta machines, which again, are resulting in eighty percent of the downtime for the overall plant. So that means that that's sixty four percent of the downtime with these two fixes. Again, we're doing twenty percent of the effort to get eighty percent of the results.

So he said, Okay, it only took us five minutes to identify these solutions. It's only going to take four days of work to completely resolve this.

And he was able to see that within this short amount of time, he was able to almost completely remove sixty four percent of the downtime of his plant.

And this is why data equals money. If we know what the problem is, we can usually find out a great solution for it.

And this goes back to one of my favorite sayings, you can't improve what you can't measure.

And again, if you are not using a CMMS or have some way to have good data, that's okay. You don't need to start with data necessarily.

Because even if you talk with people on your team, you're probably gonna start coming up you're gonna be able to come up with some major issues that you can solve.

Alright, everyone. That's the end of my short presentation here. I really want to give more time to us to be able to discuss things, maybe some methodologies on how to solve these problems or how to identify them.

And thank you so much for this. I'm going to stop sharing my screen so we can get to questions.

Okay. Thank you, Miguel, for your insight and the information you presented today.

Let's get started with our q and a session. And everyone, please remember to enter your questions in that Q and A tab at the top right of your screen. Also, don't forget to answer the poll questions.

Miguel, do we want to take a look at the poll questions really quickly here and see what people are saying about the way they conduct their businesses?

Yeah. That'd be great.

Great. I love to see that thirty two percent of people are using a CMMS. That's wonderful.

I see a lot of spreadsheets and paper out there. That's actually when you add those two together, we're getting close to fifty percent. So almost half the people here are using spreadsheets and paper. The reason why I lump those two together is I typically see that people either use those in conjunction together or they're about have some of the same capabilities. You you're keeping track of the data, but it's not as interactive. You're not able to use all the benefits of having a fully computerized system.

And then we have some others. I'd be really interested to know what people are saying when what is the other for them.

All right.

Great. We got a lot of people from the gas industry. I love it. There's huge need for that.

Coal. My, my dad worked with coal all growing up. So that's great.

Nuclear, great.

And renewables.

Perfect.

One question I'll ask here, Miguel, with regard to renewable energy, I know in talking to a lot of owners and operators, they talk about how they're, you know, using remote monitoring because obviously, a lot of these installations are in rural areas. They don't wanna have to be sending people out there on a regular basis. So they want but they wanna still get data from the performance. Can you talk at all about with the renewable energy installation, how your company's product can help those owners and operators of, say, a solar farm or a wind farm?

Yeah. Definitely. And I think that that's a great use case, Darrell, that you mentioned is having these remote installations. You don't you can't have somebody on-site on all of these.

So our software is designed to be interactive with other monitors or any sensor really that's out there because all these sensors today have some sort of cellular connection that communicate with the Internet somehow. So some of you may be familiar with the term IoT, the Internet of Things is the big term used today. And our software is designed to be able to pull information from these sensors.

A great example that I've seen is to know if there's current flowing. You want to see that, for example, if you have whether it's solar panels or wind turbine. And of course, there's a lot of others, temperature, vibrations, those things.

And if you can monitor those constantly, hopefully, you can not only make sure things are working currently, but you can see any problems that could be coming up in the future. A great example of that is temperature. If some temperature is starting getting too hot, maybe that means that the lubrication system needs, some time and attention. Or maybe it means that there's something else that could be causing those increases in temperatures, because increase in temperatures typically result in faster deterioration.

So one thing that's great about Limble is you Limble is you can set alerts to say, okay, if it ever gets above this temperature, we're gonna get a notification right away and get somebody out there. So that's one way that I see it used that's pretty helpful with remote installations.

As a follow on to that, obviously, there's a lot more energy storage that's being used today, both at substations along the grid with renewable energy products.

Does your company's product work with energy storage? Can you capture data from, say, a battery energy storage system?

Yeah, definitely. And I've seen people put data in like that. They want to see, you know, their histories there and make sure that they can have a place to have that data. Limble in many ways is seven softwares in one is what we often say because there's scheduling of PMs, there's parts management, there's the work order request system.

There's communication between team members. You have a reporting system. So the business intelligence system as well as financial systems within there. So to answer your question specifically, Daryl, is this could be a great situation to use our business intelligence tools to be able to graph out this information, use this data in ways that is more applicable and and helpful to whoever's analyzing it so they can get used to to make some good results.

You mentioned about the the response from those in the gas industry and I know a lot of people say, well, you know, fossil fuel fossil fuel plants are being closed But actually, in terms of natural gas plants, a lot more of those are being deployed.

And we're seeing that as as a strategy for decarbonization even though, you know, there are emissions, from from gas plants. Can you talk about maybe some of the issues that a gas plant operator would see that your product could help them fix?

Yeah. I've had the opportunity to spend some time on gas plants and there are there's a ton of equipment as anybody who works in gas knows. Depending on the plant, of course, you have your turbine and where where the actual movement's coming from.

And there are so many systems there that need to be maintained on a regular basis. And then on top of it, you have your cooling systems and every other system that supports those two main systems.

There is a lot of preventive maintenance that can and should be done, that's going to be much more cost effective than fixing problems as they come up. And so this is where having advanced maintenance schedules is going to be very helpful. When it comes to a gas plant, you're going to want to schedule some things based on a time or a calendar based, such as a monthly replacement of filters or lubrication. Or you might have something that's based on a sensor, like we've been talking a lot about sensors today. So maybe when the temperature goes above a certain amount, it's time to do a service. And then another type of schedule that I think is really important is based on a unit count of some sort.

In manufacturing, you see this a lot of if we produce a certain amount of widgets, then it's time to do a maintenance or a certain number of cycles. But you can also do that with with like a turbine or something else, the amount of hours that it's been in use. And that gives you a lot more granular information. So you're not having to do maintenance when you don't need to or rather it's based on the actual results of the machine.

Thanks for that Miguel. We had one audience question here that how do we place and I think they mean how do we schedule a downtime created due to a delay in material delivery to carry out maintenance of equipment. And I think this may be something that we've seen more of in the past few years with some of the supply chain issues. So you're at a power plant, you're waiting for a piece of equipment to arrive so you can make a fix. There's a delay.

You know, how how do you account for that? Or how how how does your system help an operator account for things like that?

Yeah. This is this is actually a really important topic. And this the topic of downtime and how you prevent downtime, how you manage downtime, it's quite big, like you mentioned before. It's also has a lot to do with the availability of the parts that you need or the replacement implements that you need to use. So this is going to be very individual to the company and to their systems. But one thing that I see that's really important is making sure that you have the parts on time or parts on hand when you need to replace them.

Let me give you a couple examples.

A lot of times with these parts, you want to keep a few on hand. And so if you ever if the equipment goes down, you have something or if you need to schedule downtime, you're not waiting for an order to come in. And it's really important to start creating a list of these really critical items that could result in some downtime that as you guys know with power production, downtime isn't very acceptable. That's why you try to have some redundancies built in.

And it can get a little scary if you're are dependent on the redundancy because there could be a chance where or an opportunity for needing a second redundancy that of course is much more expensive. So one thing that's really nice about Limble is and other CMMSs do have some features along this route, But you're going to have an inventory management. And in Limble, you can identify which ones of which inventory items are critical to have on hand. And you can set limits to say we always need to have this amount on hand.

And if you ever go below that amount, it starts a process to make it really easy to just order more with your respective vendor.

And this is what's going to allow you to make sure that you have everything you need on hand and that you can set that limit. And one thing that happens over time is that you might need to adjust. A great example that you also brought up, Daryl, is supply chain issues. In this day and age, it's actually really hard to get suppliers to get things delivered on time. And that's been a big problem since twenty twenty.

So I've seen a lot of our customers start adjusting how many to keep on hand to account for these delayed delivery times. So maybe they kept three on hand before, and now they're keeping four or five or six on hand just to make sure that they always have that backup. And then, of course, we have the ability to manage inventory counts that are much higher than that as well. It's just that is that's the general principle of making sure that you always have those replacement parts. So when you do schedule downtime, you have what you need and you're ready to go.

That was gonna be the next question I was gonna ask is is how does your system help with inventory control?

Yeah, there's a few items on inventory control that I think are really important. You know, let's touch a little bit more on inventory control because I think that this is an overlooked opportunity for many companies to make really significant improvements.

When it comes to inventory, I find that many companies are sending people out on a daily basis to do a store run. A great example is I was visiting a facility not too far from where I lived. And I just said, hey, can I just watch your maintenance team? I just wanna watch today, see how things are going and and see if I can give any inputs.

And a maintenance technician came into the manager's office and said, I need to find this fuse. Do we have any? And the manager is like, sure, I always keep someone else my desk. And it turns out he was out. And everybody looked in the facility, they couldn't find any more of those fuses.

And so he was sent up to Salt Lake City, which is the nearest large city to where their facility is. And it's a half hour drive.

Plus, he needs to get in line, go through will call and everything and buy the parts and then drive back down.

After that whole cycle happened, it was actually almost three hours later before he was able to come back to the office. And I asked the maintenance manager, how often does this happen? He said, oh, all the time. We find a part that we don't have, we thought we did, we send somebody out.

If you have experienced this, it can be easy to overlook it because it's kind of common practice. But that was three hours of that technician's time, almost a full half day that he was not productive at all. And so if you're going to run into this situation, that's why it's so important to have an inventory management system. So I showed them how they can we should place a spot that's labeled for that fuse, And we create little labels within Limble that can make it really easy to put on there.

There's a QR code so you can scan it and look it up, order replacement parts at any time.

And then when that part goes below their minimum threshold, it sends an automatic reminder to the purchaser to purchase more of those. So that's just one example of how parts make such a big impact to companies, and it can get overlooked really easily.

So to follow on that, had a question, how can I make sure my CMMS captures useful data? Obviously, inventory is is part of that useful data.

In use a CMS is only going to be as productive as the data put into it. And this is a big challenge for a lot of companies, especially coming from older systems. I saw somebody in the chat say that they use a couple other well, there was a few other systems I saw SAP was one of them. And when it comes to SAP, a lot of the people that are using SAP are on another system that doesn't have a mobile app.

And that was one of the biggest innovations, over the last ten years in CMMS is to put everything in a well designed mobile app. So when a technician sees a problem, they update it. When they need to know what the next thing is, They don't radio into someone, they don't call someone, it shows up on their mobile app. So they go to do the next project and they log everything accordingly.

Getting good data on a CMMS really comes down to how your team is using it, how your technicians are using it.

And that can be a bit of a challenge for some teams because it's new to them or they're they have people that maybe aren't as technologically savvy. And this is a great opportunity for you to rely on some of the materials that Limble provides or there could be some other consultants out there that can help with this to make a transformation to get your team using the software in a way that it becomes their bible is often what we say. And we see that that really turns teams around to say, oh, before we had miscommunications, we didn't know what to do, people would double work. All of those issues can be solved if you start using your mobile app of your CMMS as the way to get everything done throughout the day.

And a reminder to the audience, please submit your questions in the Q and A tab. We still have time to answer more of those. I'll get to the next one here.

And this may be one where you have to maybe give an opinion more than a straight answer. But how do I get management to give me the budget I need to make improvements? And I'm just looking at that and thinking, okay, obviously, you have to do the cost benefit analysis for something like that. But is that a discussion that you have when you go out and talk to, you know, operators of power plants and and say, this is why this is of value to you?

Yeah, I can actually give you a great example of that. From a power plant local to Salt Lake City, I don't want to call anyone out, but this is this is what happened.

One of the technicians was going through and did a check on a certain section of the plant.

And he had a paperwork order. You know, this is a little bit old school. This is some of you might see this as pretty common. And after they finished, they went back to their desk and on their way they just happened to glance over their shoulder and they saw somebody else doing the exact same check.

And he went over to the guy and said, hey, I just did this and he goes, don't know. Was given this paper. I'm just doing this. I'm just doing what I'm told.

And so that first technician went up to the main guy who does all the scheduling and said, hey, this is a problem. And that guy was just like, don't have time to talk about this. It's not a big deal. And that guy was in management, wasn't able to get them on board.

It's a really big issue and it's really important to get management on board.

When it comes to working with management, management typically speaks the language of dollars and cents. And it makes sense because they need to make sure that they're getting enough money coming in to pay for everybody's salaries and keep the plant going.

So this can be a little bit frustrating for people who work in maintenance because sometimes there's some things that are a little bit hard to get the dollars and cents across. And one thing that we do is we provide some tools if you ever reach out to our customer success, even if you're not a customer, they would be happy to help you kind of come up with some ways to do the math and show that.

But in this particular example, that first technician who saw this issue of redo doing the work could have said, Okay, well, if it took me thirty minutes to do that, then I'm going to see the other technician would do thirty minutes of work, we get paid roughly this much an hour, and it happens this much a week.

And once you start doing the math on multiplying that out for if it's happening five times a week, and that happens fifty two to fifty week, two weeks a year, those numbers start getting really large.

In fact, I don't know if Stacy's on, but Stacy, if you are on Stacy's from our marketing team, we have a calculator in our on our website. If you could drop that in the chat or provide that, that could be something that could be really helpful for a lot of these people to just do some, have a step by step process on how to do some easy math. And you just put in your data, the calculator spits out how much money you might be leaving on the table here.

So that's one thing that's really important with management. The other thing that's important with management is to understand their goals and their needs. If you understand their goals and their needs, you can frame the issues in a way that makes a lot of sense to them and helps them achieve their goals. It's allowing them to see how what you're doing improves what they need.

One big complaint that I hear often from people in accounting and management is that maintenance is a black hole. They say, I don't know where the money is going. I don't know why they need all of this. I can't predict any problems.

Those problems can be resolved with a CMMS. In a CMMS, you're going be able to see where all that money is going. You're going be able to go to accounting or management and say, this is what we spent, and this is why.

And if we had a better tool, if we had newer equipment, if we had more resources, we can reduce the costs. So now you're able to say, give me a dollar here, I'll save you two dollars here. Whereas before there, it's hard without that data. And you just say, I just need that dollar. And unfortunately, management doesn't typically respond very well to that because it's important for them to be able to know where that money we're going and how it's going to make improvements.

So this is a great way to do it. And again, we one thing with Limble that I think makes us unique is that we have a team of people on our chat systems or other people that you can reach out to, and they're just going to want to help you solve your problems. Our goal is to help stop the world from breaking, help people like yourselves who we consider the unsung heroes of the world be great at your jobs. So if there's anything that you need, feel free to reach out to us. We'd be happy to help think through that with you because that's what we do every day.

Thanks, Miguel. And I just want to take a moment to to tell everyone the link that Miguel was referencing to the calculator is in the chat area. So copy that and go use the calculator and see what you come up with. Next question.

There is a question on sensors. Is it okay if I respond to that one, Daryl?

Yeah. Go ahead. That was where I was gonna go here was, what would be an example of when it would make sense to purchase sensors for my equipment?

Great. I love this question because I think it hits right on the topic that we need to hit, which is it depends if that piece of equipment is going to if it's causing one of the bigger problems and if it's one of the easier solutions to do. So a great example for this that I've seen is there was I'm trying to think about a couple because I want to come up with something that's more energy related.

I don't know which piece of equipment you're looking at, but there's a lot of needs for fluid flow in equipment. And one sensor that I've seen that could be really helpful is it measures the pressure on either side of a filter.

And I've seen companies have to replace filters on a regular basis and they find that sometimes when they replace the filter, the filter still looks clean. And so it was kind of a waste of time. And then they have other situations where the filter was so dirty that they should replace it a while ago and it would have prevented other problems in the plant. And that could be a great example for a sensor to measure the pressure before and after the filter. Because if you have a big differential on those two sensors, that means that the filter is very dirty.

So that would be one example where if you saw that problem happening a lot, maybe it makes sense to get a sensor so you can replace those filters when it's needed and not just based on a calendar basis.

So if you have a piece of equipment where that sensor is going to give you information that you don't have and that you need to make better decisions, maybe that means it's time to get the sensor.

If you're getting the sensor in the hope that it's going to fix problems that but you don't really know if it's going to work, I've found that a lot of times people buy sensors just to start monitoring things and see what happens. I don't usually see that to be as successful because if it were if there were a really big issue there, you probably would have already noticed that you need some sort of way to manage it. And and and the sensor can be a stepping stone into getting a solution. So hopefully that solves your or answers your question. If not, please let me know. I'd be happy to get further in-depth.

So we had another question come in, I I think this obviously varies depending on the project and the power plant. But please, what is the average cost for Limble CMMS?

I think that's a fantastic question. I'm glad that you asked because is it okay if I share my screen again?

Yeah.

Let me see.

So I'm just gonna go to our website.

And one thing that I love about Limble, and we try to do this throughout every step of the process, is to be very transparent. So all of our pricing is online, so you can see and make a decision for yourself. For the basic features, it's actually free. You can get started for free. Use it for as long as you want for free. If you start needing additional features, that's when you get into some of the other price options.

And I won't go into every single feature because that wasn't your your question, but I did wanna show that you can have a fully set up maintenance management system for free.

And that's why it's kind of a no risk thing. And we have a lot of resources that can help you get set up and started because that is the bigger challenge for most people is they get the system. But how do we actually get that making helping us save time and making great decisions? And that's why we have a full team.

You can see here that this chat popped up. This is Noah. Noah is based out of California. These are real people.

You can ask them questions at any time. And if you guys even want to try it right now, you'll see that they'll respond within ninety seconds because they're here to help you.

So we had another follow on question. You referenced the person that was said they were using SAP earlier, and this audience member says, currently, we're using SAP, and they'd like to know if the Limble system will interact with SAP.

Yeah. The answer is one hundred percent yes.

SAP is a fantastic system. It's become the industry standard for a reason. And one of the big benefits to having SAP is its ability to connect with other softwares. And that's one thing that Limble does as well. There's different versions and there's different setups such as an on premise install versus a cloud install. All of those details do matter on how to get those set up and and the path to do that. So depending on your specific needs, again, you can reach out to us and we as having done this many times, we can help you get that set up correctly.

And not only when it comes to SAP, but there are many other systems out there. You have your NetSuite of the world and many other accounting softwares and ERPs. And Limble is designed to be interactive with all of those systems to send information over to pull information from them. And that's a really important part in having a up to date system in today's world, where for a time there was a lot of work into how do we get these individual systems working by themselves. And I think the big challenge in twenty twenty four for most companies is how do we get them all talking together? And that is something that Limble is very, very good at. And that's something that we try to make sure that all of our customers have access to that.

You know, there's a specific example that I wanted to give that is helpful on when it comes to talking about sensors that I see a lot of people running into.

Most power plants and and most people in renewables, they have to have a fleet of vehicles. Those vehicles are important to get people places to deliver equipment. And one system that I have seen a lot of people go to is Samsara. Samsara provides these little boxes that connect into the vehicles to let you know where the vehicle is and manage that fleet.

There are other systems out there beyond Samsara. I bring that one up because I've I've had more experience working with them, Limble integrates really well with them. Samsara is really good at helping you manage your fleet to know where people are, but it doesn't have a lot of features when it comes to how do you do proper maintenance on that fleet of vehicles. And this is where Limble works in conjunction with Samsara to make sure that you have both capabilities and that your equipment is running.

Your vehicles are getting the proper care they need so they're reliable when you need them.

So one more thing before we wrap up today, you mentioned the vehicle fleet. Obviously, a lot of innovation in the power generation power plant sector, a lot of new equipment that's coming online.

What are the the steps that you take at Limble to be able to work with power plant operators when they're installing this this new equipment which in some cases may simply be running a pilot or a test program of something that, you know, they may be the first plant to actually install this equipment. How do you work with those folks?

When you say installing new equipment, can you give me an example of what type of equipment you're Well, I was trying to think, you know, I I was thinking originally of of like coal plants because they're having to install emissions control like selective catalytic reduction, SCRs, and things like that.

You know, upgraded turbines that that people are installing. And how are you guys able to keep up with the innovation that's happening in in power generation and power plant equipment?

Yeah. I think that's a fantastic question. One thing that is constant is whether the equipment is old or new, maintenance still needs to be done on a regular basis. And our software is designed to do that for any type of equipment. That's why it's used not only in power generation, but we see it used in zoos and in manufacturing and in pretty much every type of space you can think of where there's physical equipment.

So when it comes to installing new equipment, there's some things that I've seen with Limble that are some great practices. One is you're gonna wanna keep track of all the data on that piece of equipment. So you have your manuals that are Limble allows you to upload the manuals to put links in if needed.

And so when you have this new piece of equipment, instead of saying, oh, I don't I don't know what to do here. I'm gonna have to go to where we keep all of our manuals and look that up. Instead, you can be right in front of the piece of equipment. You can pull up your manuals. You can pull up any videos that come with it. So you can see that all from your phone where you're going to be doing the maintenance and not back at your desk.

And that's one of the things that I find to be really helpful. And then another thing that I see that's really helpful is you can leave an unlimited amount of notes and conclusions that you make while you're working on the equipment. A great example of that is a company that's based out of the Minnesota region. I remember working with them.

And what they did is every time they got an error code, they made sure that that was written in the notes. So at any point, you could do a search to say this error code and somebody has fixed that problem in the past. And you can see everything that they did to fix it last time, you're not reinventing the wheel. And this is a great way to standardize how you solve problems at your facility.

You know, I find that where companies usually start out as they say, oh, you know, Tom's really good at this and Gary's really good at that. And they have their own methods for doing things. And then when they start really making big improvements is where they have those people document how they're doing it, why it is that they're good at it. And if you make that standard practice, you'll find that the entire team becomes better adept and faster at their work and more efficient with their time.

Alright. Thanks, Miguel.

We're approaching the end of, today's program. As mentioned, if any other questions come in, we'll address those individually by email. I want to again give a big thank you to Miguel Ramos of Limble for his insight, during today's event. Big thank you to all of you in the audience. We hope you will benefit from the presentation. Go forth and have a great day. Thank you.

Thank you.

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