Podcast: Stories of real AI adoption in manufacturing maintenance

Dennis Scimeca: First question, Jason, I'm going to keep starting with you because I know you. Supply chain volatility looks different in all your industries. What are three things that draw supply chain issues?

Jason Hahn: So, COVID seems to be like this weird thing we talk about in your industry a lot in the on-load manufacturing industry. Pre-COVID, you can set up a system set up min-maxes, and feel pretty comfortable with lead time and pricing, it would go up to 3% per year. And that was pretty much an expectation.

Post-COVID, and then we got into the chip shortage. Right now, the price of our steel, the price of some of our tooling, and in some instances, I'm seeing things increasing 40%, 50%, 60% on some, and lead times are just literally all over the place.

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So, all our expectations for managing like a parts credit for MRO, good luck with that. It's a huge challenge for us right now. Essentially, what it forces us into doing is any PIR he's written for expectations of pricing or even people who still distribute those items you basically have to start over post-COVID is what we're seeing.

And so, don't exactly staff up or we don't have a plan for what that is. So we're basically taking and, you know, look at your critical equipment list. So you both sewn the most critical parts burst and trickle your way down.

DS: All right, Nathan, you're up. What are three things, 3 main supply chain challenges. Anything in common with Jason?

Nathan Kibert: Believe it or not, as large as a company we are, we have 90,000 employees, what we're finding going into clients, if we do not have a robust MRO system at all, not standardized, that's not, in fact, we're seeing Excel spreadsheets, we're giving up and we're contracting out to vendors like Ballin and Motion.

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If you haven't dealt with them, it comes at a high premium. So, we add those staff your crib and they'll charge you 30% and you'll buy all of their spare parts. So, they happen as a captive audience at that point. So that’s probably the weakest part is not adding the system.

One of the things that actually attracted us to the eMaint system is that ability and that ability to do it in the mobile function and for cycle counting. Because we want to create, our goal is we really love the global function on spare parts, but where it really pushed us is we don't have a standard naming convention for parts and a standard way to purchase.

If you go to Germany, you buy direct from the manufacturer. If you buy from the U.S., you have to buy from the supplier. right? And we don't have a standard part number. So, we saw a different supplier part number. Grainger might change their part number. McMaster-Carr might change their part number. Some, maybe to keep you as a captive audience, I would know that for sure.

But what we're finding is we needed to come up with a standard mainly convention for spare parts. And so that global list meant something because We feel like that we can then leverage our buying power, then leverage downtime, then leverage stock quantities that we have to carry on hand because we will have the visibility of where those are.

And the new functions where in MRO, where you're able to transfer site to site is big for us as well. But it just takes that next step, that next question we were going to ask and answered it in advance. but he maintenance.

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So, MRO is big for us. In fact, we see, I think when we looked at it, the industry average, if you don't do MRO, you're going to save 38%. And so even in our less aggressive model, we're planning on saving point percent off our MRO just by not doing it and doing it with the system and cycle counting. So that's what I, our biggest thing we see from that.

DS: All right, Lee.

Lee McClish: Hey, in fact, I heard about the big boom in data centers. So, we're going to add six more data centers in the United States just this year. And when you got like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all these big players, it's really a chore for people. They get our name in the loop there somewhere.

You know, so we're looking out a couple years, you know, planning on what markets we're going to break into. So, it's just a challenge just for that, to go buy generators and UPSs and batteries and all that stuff. So much, at least like in one site, we ended up splitting, we got half Cummins generators and half Kohler generators.

Sort of liability point of view that you got to have double spare parts, you know, you got different skill sets, people learning two different things. So even though we met the need, you know, the impact on our liability isn't always seen by folks.

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Another thing in data centers, there's a lot of electrical equipment, right? So, obsolescence is a big deal. You look at PLCs, VFDs, you know, power supplies, make it 10, 15 years.

Our oldest data center is 25 years old now, and you can't go in and like just change all the UPSs in one year. Because you have, well, some of our newer sites, we have like 45 generators, UPSs, a lineup, so you get up to 100 megawatts of power. So, you got to really plan all that out. So, that's another big supply chain thing that we deal with.