Assets CollABorative January 2024 - The Role of Safety & Permitting in Asset Management

IFS Assets CollABorative – Think Tank: The Role of Safety & Permitting in Asset Management

Date of Meeting: 30 January 2024 09:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Bas Beemsterboer Presentation:

Slide: Fatal and non-fatal work-related incidents

• We wanted to make you aware of this asset management trend report which has some links to safety too and that is available to download if you didn't do that already. There's a link at the end of the presentation that you can find. It doesn't cost you anything and there might even be one chapter written by me. That's not why I ask you to download it, but there's a lot of expertise in it and it's the results of a questionnaire of 430 asset managers in our ecosystem that could always be interesting to get additional ideas. And that does not only related to safety. It is related to basically anything asset management.

Slide: Fatal and non-fatal work-related incidents

• So, I did a little bit of research that I've done before and you may be aware of these numbers or you may not be aware, but I find them concerning that this is still the case. And the numbers, of course, you may be wondering what they are, but here they are. So almost 3 and a half thousand fatal work incidents in the European Union in 2021, and I thought that this is enormously high. There's 2.88 million nonfatal incidents. And of course, everything that is reported to the authorities, I'm sure that the actual amount is a lot higher, but these are the ones that are reported through regulators and workers associations and what have you. And that 22.5% of that is actually happening in the construction industry. A lot of it is in asset centric industries of course, but since IFS moves a lot in the construction industry, I've put that number there too.

Slide: Fatal and non-fatal work-related incidents

• If you look at it from a let's say country by country basis, you can see that the average in the EU is around 1.7 or something like that. I'm happy to say that the country that I'm sitting in is probably the lowest. Sweden is very low too. Latvia, Lithuania are on the high side, but also France and Austria for example, Italy, there's room for improvement. If you want a little bit more global context, then only EU, you'll find that the EU average is, as I said, 1.76 I think is the number in 2021. In the US, it's actually 3.6, so that is kind of on the level of France, more or less. Interestingly though, it's increasing. So, what I read, I think it's 2022 or 2023, where the number was actually 3.7, which is fatal accidents per 100,000 people employed. That's the number. That's what it represents. And in the EU, that translates to 3 1/2 thousand. In the US, similar number I think if you apply that to the people that work. So somehow when we apply safety in our organizations and maintenance and operations and safety are sometimes maybe even a little bit opposing, at the same time we all work with assets and tools, we all work in asset environments. And I think at least our clients do. And of course 1 industry is more hazardous than the other, but typically what most of the IFS customers have in common is that we are asset centric or asset intensive industries and with big assets you can also have larger risks. So of course this is mitigated and with safety measures, with permit processes, with the lockout tagout procedures and many other tools and processes that we implement, and this is really a little bit what I would like to discuss today.

Slide: Trend Report

• But before we do that, I wanted to call out as I said, your attention to this trend report. Trend report is about asset management. It's about maintenance. It's about the future, the past. It's about what people think is important and where they want to take their asset management. Safety is an important element of that.

Slide: Cooperation between departments

• I mean traditionally in the asset management or maintenance world, it's not really funny, but it's somehow funny, the opposing views and the almost competition between maintenance and production and maintenance and safety. I think production of course, production departments have a different aim. They need machines that are up, that are running and maintenance very often needs machines to be down so that they can be maintained properly and somehow, even though we have the shared goal of providing revenue and margin optimization and capital and all of those important strategic objectives of the organization that we work to, we do need to collaborate with these opposing views and traditionally, there would be Chinese walls between maintenance and production. So when we asked our 430 asset managers, what is the level of cooperation, conversation and collaboration between maintenance and production on the left hand side, average and better is approaching 80%. This is not what it always has been, and I think the world is improving on that level, and it's a little bit similar if you see the maintenance and Safety Department communication and collaboration and cooperation. So these are good, but not everybody says great, 14% says needs improving and 15 on the left hand side. So, I would like to have, when we have a discussion later your views or where you think that in your organization would you qualify as good, very good average or no little bit. What is your view on that.

Slide: IFS EAM

• There's our colleagues from the IFS, Ultimo and product lines. They talk about the circle of collaboration. I like it a lot, actually. You'll find it also in the trend report. These relationships between operations, health and safety and maintenance departments and of course maintain assets, operate assets and make sure that everybody does so safely, or the key drivers in this context and somehow the margin improvement or cost reduction, asset availability of revenue improvement, quality and efficiency, health, safety and environment. Those are the typical business drivers. I think I would always add capital to this one. This slide was made by the colleagues of Ultimo who have a more operational view of asset management. Then again, we are all kind of involved in asset management and I'm sure that you can appreciate these even though I think that there are a few more business drivers that are important in this circle of tension between those 3 views and three departments.

Slide: IFS EAM

• But then of course, I know how people have to communicate from a maintenance standpoint on the left. Projects, preventative work, order management. But on the safety side, there's permits, lockout, tagout management of change, incident registration and incident follow-ups. Autonomous maintenance, what they call a concept that comes from TPM and lean to shift handover in downtown registration on the operations side. These are the kind of activities.

Slide: IFS EAM

• But of course, in order to do those activities, we need to collaborate with everybody else, from an operation standpoint you see the arrows going to maintenance and safety. But of course, from the maintenance standpoint and from the health and safety standpoint, there is a lot of communication that needs to happen. A lot of collaboration that needs to happen and for companies and organizations to achieve those business goals and those drivers, we need to ensure that this is the case that this is actually happening. And I'm really curious to see when we have in a couple of slides our little discussion on this topic. So that's the circle of collaboration.

Slide: EAM Maturity Model

• Now we apply that typically to maturity. The typical maturity that I mostly talk about when I evangelize is about maintenance 1.0, 2.0 and whether it is a journey like you see it here or whether it is more like a way to frame innovation. Whenever I present this, people ask me, what are you doing in maintenance 4.0? Well, we have asset performance management and we do all these kind of interesting things with algorithms and AI and data and IoT. And there's even a trend to make the human a little bit more important in industry 5.0 maintenance 5.0. But when I ask the audience, where are you? I know that you want to be in four. You want me to tell you what we do for 4.0 and they say, well, actually, to be honest, we're in a 2.1 or something like that. They give me a number that is somehow on the left of this maturity scale.

Slide: EAM Maturity Model

• And the interesting thing is that in the trend report, we have a different maturity mental model that goes from reactive, to in control, to proactive, to smart and to ultimate. Again, you'll find this in the trend report when you download it. But, when we ask our constituents again, our 430 respondents on the trend report and on the questionnaire that we do, so where are you? The same. So even though it is not maintenance 1.0 to 5.0, it has different names and somehow maybe even a little bit different descriptions. But if you see the maturity of the majority of the people that we ask, where are you? They all want to be in smart and ultimate. They all want to have predictions. They all want to have risk based. They all want to do digital transformation to reach that 4.0 – 5.0 dream or ideal. But at the same time, where are they? They are here. The majority, 62% says they're in control, and that sounds good, and I think in control is where everything starts, but there is still a lot to be desired, and a lot to become proactive and smart and ultimate. I thought this was interesting to see that when you ask people where are you? Well, we're not where we should be is the answer. We want to and we're looking for help to get us there.

Slide: EAM Maturity Model

• This is basically the 62% that you that you saw in the previous slide and how satisfied are you? Well, pretty satisfied. This is not great for us because we want people to mature. I think somehow when organizations acquire a systematic way, like a new tool or a new platform to do maintenance with, they have a lot of ideas of how they want to improve, what they want to improve. But then to do this digital transformation, it's not so easy. And somehow, I think the world needs to push a little bit to make us include those newer levels of maturity. To go from in control to ultimate and smart.

Slide: Implemented or Planning to do so

• When we ask what have you done already and where are you wanting to take your implementation, your tools, your systems, I do find health and safety and environment is a topic that people want to invest in. It is not a top of mind. The top of mind topic that people want to invest in is, asset investment and predictive analytics. So, I mean, we talk a lot about predictive analytics, we have in the previous year already talked about asset performance management as a concept that brings predictions and digital transformation, data, artificial intelligence. Those kinds of tools are probably the most top of mind in the things that companies are starting to plan for, but still health and safety is an important one that also is mentioned as worthy of investment and worthy of implementing further and worthy of innovating into. So that was the little introduction and now I'm hoping to get a little bit of opinion and discussion going.

Slide: Discussion – Safety in Asset Management

• So we have today SSAB. They were kind enough to propose to talk a little bit about their situation. And so did Jotun. I actually didn't send you these topics, but I think what I would like to get to some discretion about is, what's happening today. What do you think of the statistics that I shared, especially the ones on the incidents in the EU and in the US. And what you think, whether technology can help do something about that and to improve even further. And then maybe if you have future plans, hopes and dreams, then I would like to hear about it too.

Customer 1: Jotun

• Q: So maybe I can ask you, what are you doing? What is your role in your company?
• A: Jotun is the global paint company. We produce in four segments including Marine, protective, decorative and powder. So, we have the advantage of only making 1 product. And of course, we have also the challenge of having a very widespread geography. We are in 40 factories in quite distant location. A lot in Asia and Middle East, but also in other places.  So, my role is I'm actually responsible for operations all over, but that includes production, logistics process and also maintenance which is which is the topic here today. I was hoping my maintenance responsible with join me, but he was busy today so he couldn't. So, but I just wrote down a few thoughts and comments when it comes to this about the asset management and safety and how we run it. So, for us, I think firstly, it's very much about where in the lifetime of the asset are we. For us we build our own factories. So, the first challenge is when you're doing a factory project. We have the project ownership and management, but we don't manage day-to-day on site. So of course, that is a separate problem for us. It's a much less controlled environment than within your own factory. All our requirements are in our health safety environment system and also within the main system. While project work is a separate chapter in that where with all our requirements for external contractors. So, there's a lot about managing our suppliers, but also thinking through all safety issues that can happen on side later with the hazard analysis and those kinds of things. And of course, when it comes to installation on new equipment, then already existing factories, we of course use management to change (MOC) as a key tool. Not very sophisticated, we are using some simple computer tools there.
• Q: Sorry that I interrupt you, but the management of change that can mean many things to many people. It's a lot of process, of course, a lot of approvals, maybe also documentation maybe. So, you said you have a simple system for that. Do you integrate that somehow with IFS Cloud?
• A: No, not at the moment. It's quite a simple kind of a discussion checklist where people come together and sit together and run through all the possible questions and issues and work it through as a collaborative exercise actually.
• Q: And you only invoke that kind of group when you install new assets or create new assets or new factories?
• A: Yeah, this is more especially on new the new installations on, but they could also be new raw materials or new processes, that's not to be assets but also assets. So going through the systematic level possible risks and mitigation of those risks. So, that's the early phases. One things are planned and installed and also early startup is of course one thing then you have a kind of stable, actually low risk period where we have over a controlled environment in our factory, and then again at the end of the lifetime and maybe the risk increases a bit again. It's especially on those assets that you don't regularly use like firefighting systems and things that are harder to control on a day to day basis. Request for maintenance of equipment, routine work which is most of the maintenance organizations job view more and more shifted to Preventive maintenance, of course, turn base maintenance and also some condition based maintenance. We are actually starting to test out for some condition based maintenance. All maintenance jobs are based on work orders in IFS in addition to our standard operating procedures. So, maintenance don't do anything without the recording IFS. When it comes to non-routine work and external contractors, we have work permits, slash list local tagout. These kind of tools that you always use that's more paper based, something we would like to move into IFS.
• Q: Yeah, I get that. And is that mostly because of the contractors that you have these permits or do you use the permits and the lockout tagout also for the internal?
• A: Also, for internal lists. Everything that needs a lock out tag out of course, and everything that is non routine. We also always use work permit.
• Q: And when you look at those geographic differences in these statistics, is that something that you can validate? I mean, since you have like 40 locations around the world, I'm sure that some locations may be more hazardous than others. Or is that not something that you can confirm?
• A: There's no obvious differences I would say with location, meaning that Western Europeans are not better than Middle East or Asian actually. I mean, maybe the strictest and most of the ones are China. They have been very, very tight in in legislation over the last years, but for us everyone runs the same system. So, it's only a matter of how skilled are the local organization and that is kind of a bit stochastic. So some sites are slightly better than others, and maybe the larger sites normally have more competence and more resources than the smaller sites where people need several hats. So, I would say, no, really not the geographic difference. But of course, for us, the big difference was water based paints is less dangerous. The powder operations are somewhere in the middle because of a more complex process, and solvent based operations is of course much more high risk environment by nature.
• Q: For Flammability or for health reasons?
• A: Yes both. But mainly we are concerned with the flammability.
• Q: And hopefully your safety statistics look good?
• A: Yeah, we have good numbers and follow up this very carefully. Of course I focus in good management and in board of directors. So  a lot has happened over the years there so I think we are quite good without having the numbers in front of me.
• Q: Thanks for that. If you if you look at last question from my side, if you look at yourself like an assessment of where you are, or where you want to be from a maintenance or asset management maturity standpoint. You mentioned that you are starting to look into condition based maintenance that is 3.0 if you will. Is there a trend that you can see that is actually management and or safety in this case, but that you would start to look at artificial intelligence to help you in certain cases maybe to predict incidents or risky situations or just looking at the role of technology and where you see yourself in this kind of journey?
• A: Yeah, it's of course combined. We started with mandatory thermography for all our sites a couple years ago, that is of course both for maintenance, but also for safety to prevent overheating from electrical installation. Same with the leakage. Those kinds of things. That that is ongoing. We are starting now with the arrange of automatic sensor based maintenance, mainly because we have a frame agreement with Emerson for automation, and on US installations now we are testing out all this console vibrations involves some, which in the way is most little predict when we need to do maintenance but that was of course the same there. There's always a safety factor in that, but this is quite new to us, I must say we are starting that that now, so we are limited when it comes to that  sensor based on artificial intelligence. We're starting out that now, but we have we have a range of factors. We have a quite manual ones where this is not relevant and we have a very advanced factories where this is highly relevant so it will always be a combination of that.
• Q: I was in a conversation with the company yesterday. It was actually a shipyard and they wanted to be the digital shipyard of your future kind of thing. It was in the Middle East and so no lack of money there. But interestingly, from a safety standpoint, there were looking at investments in drone technology and smart cameras to do many things. Ones that you mentioned, but also to have AI algorithms to check whether people wear helmets, whether people are smoking in restricted areas, apparently that's a problem because he specifically mentioned that, do you see that kind of stuff? I mean, I've seen that before in a previous life where indeed drones can be trained to see if people are not holding a handrail when they go up stairs, whether they have the helmet on and stuff like that. And I'm not sure whether you see that as a thing that you consider or would it be a nice to have?
• A: I don't think we would want that. It's kind of crushing it a little bit with our corporate culture and maybe with GDPR and other things, we don't want the monitor people with cameras and so at least not from a from a group perspective, we don't want that. We use drones for inspection for instance, and we know our customers do. We have used it for water tanks and other things. So that's quite interesting technology that we do a little bit testing.
• Q: Yeah. It's a digital transformation, right? Once you have it, I think you cannot go back, but it's not so easy to include new technology. It's easy to buy it, but maybe not so easy to integrate it into your day to day of how you do work as a corporation, right? I've dealt with clients in the petrochemical sector before and they had the exact same comment that you had, like GDPR and privacy. So they did not monitor the employees where they are precisely until one of them, actually it was a contractor in Asia Pacific somewhere, who fell off a storage tank and they didn't know it. And of course, until they couldn't find him at the end of the day. So I think that made also the regulators think twice about privacy. OK, so there's privacy, but saving human lives is another thing. And sometimes, if these are opposed, their digital transformation for the providing safety for everybody and of course compliance with the regulators wherever they are, was in the end more important than the privacy of making sure that we know where people are was less important than making sure that everybody is safe. All of those things apply, right?
• A: There's always a trade off, but of course, and you have less control out in the yard and there are a lot of people who work in heights and things which can be challenging.

Customer 2: SSAB

• Q: What are your thoughts on the maturity, also on the statistics? And on privacy versus safety, what do you think? How does SSAB do things? Do you have people working in heights and drones controlling them or is SSAB the same?
• A: I mean we have, we have more or less the same culture. We are in the same part of the world. We use drones for, as you say, for taking inspections mainly on facilities where we used to do manual inspections before risky work, but today we use the drones in a much larger scale. For instance, so new technology, it comes to us as well. But it may be sometimes it goes a bit too slow. We want to be further ahead, but it takes time. It's change management. We want to work with all topics with new technologies and new ways of working, which takes time to actually implement. Digital transformation is not easy. It's easy in the conference room to sell flopper systems, pink systems that will solve all our old problems, but that is not the case. It's just hard work in different areas, in new areas with new technology.
• Q: I'm a little bit guilty because of course I'm a conference room guy when I evangelize. But I do realize when speaking to you and people like you, is that it's very easy to buy a piece of technology because it actually solves maybe a problem. But to sell it to your colleague and to sell it to your board and to implement it and do the management of change, that's not easy at all. Change management resistance, all of that becomes part of the play, doesn't it?
• A: I mean I our task is not to invent new technology, it's to really use the technology that is invented and how to use it and where to use it in an effective way. That is our main task should say in the process industry.
• Q: No, I think that's true for everybody. So, what about your activities on safety management?  Work orders, permits on paper. How do you how do you do that?
• A: We are a bit scattered. We have a lot of instructions and ways of working, still on paper and in different systems. It's not in one system where we can work with the internal safety or contractor safety. It's much based on paperwork when it comes to permits, risk analysis and such. So, we we're not really effective there. We can see potential there for sure.
• So, for those of you who don't know, SSAB is steel works right? Closely related to another client of IFS which is LKAB, the people that dig up the steel if you will or the iron ore, and you and you turn it into something that we can all use, right? So, can you explain your process?
• This is our planned maintenance that is planned every week or second week or every eight week. So, it's routine work. We have our work orders in IFS. We have the work orders for a production line and they fill out. So, we have 100 work orders for the production line and they are planned. So, let's say at Thursday, that's the last day that we can have our work orders and there are many manually ordered maintenance as well, and they have to come in at Thursday. And after that Monday, we have a coordination meeting for all the work orders to see if there are any safety issues. And that's a very important meeting.
• Q: Can I just ask you who's in that meeting?
• A: It's the maintenance guys that meets. Our workers or the entrepreneurs who do the maintenance. But everything is not perfect, though it happens. We have additional work that comes in late, so if there are more than five of those, we have to do a new coordination meeting to see if there are any more safety issues before we start the maintenance. So, on Thursday, if we have about 8 to 16 there, you have the maintenance day. And after that we report and the day after we follow up if there are any issues, so we can learn from the issues to go forward.
• Q: So, the meeting about safety is internal maintenance meeting. Did I understand that correctly?
• A: A yeah.
• Q: So if you look at that circle of collaboration idea that I discussed earlier, is there a specific reason why? or is the safety people embedded in the maintenance organization? or how do you coordinate that with the safety people? or are they part of you already?
• A: They are part of our organization and also the external vendors. Maybe we can summarize it to say that we have like 4 layers when it comes to safety work before we before executing the planned maintenance, we have these coordination meetings and after that on certain areas when do we work on let's say for on cranes or when would be the scaffoldings or such, we have another process kicking in that's called, if I directly translated it's “risk before work”. That means that the guy who shall do the work needs to meet the operations and the production personnel to get the information about the risks in the area and tell them, OK, we will start executing the work. We will be in your area doing this kind of work, and then we'll also put demands on that before executing the actual work. You need to do a risk analysis on the actual work that you're supposed to do. Change the cylinder or something else. And then you do the lockout tagout work as well. We let the external vendors quite deep into our ways of working our processes and our systems, so we try to see them as an SSAB employee. We put high demands on them, but we also give them high responsibility and possible ways of working.
• Q: Nice. Would they work also on IFS for example? Do they have even access to the tools?
• A: Yes, they do. They have access to our system where we systematically monitor or to register what has happened in the risks, or if you had some deviations during the work safety deviations, we let them in that system also.
• Q: I wanted to hear from you also like your feedback on those statistics. Any additional comments or coloring? Or maybe also a assessment of where you are in terms of digital transformation, if you will. Are you like everybody else, in the 2 1/2 kind of area?
• A: Well, it is a really different in some areas. We are quite developed and in some areas we are really manual still today like stone age people. I mean in condition vibration measurement, we are quite developed there and using the predictive methods and able to find deviations in time, but in some other areas we are not that strong.
• Q: But that's of course only needed basis, right? So, at some point you will find a reason to invest in something in order to satisfy a board question or a member question, like we need to improves statistics. I think this is why I ask, right? So, do you have bad statistics? Maybe in a certain country or in a certain division you're also a multi country organization.
• A: Yeah. I mean it's like 300 set as well, but the last 10 years we have in the safety area made a huge progress. Huge. Really. But, we don't have like 1 common system. It's still a scared, systematic ways of working, a lot of paperwork, which is not very efficient, and you don't get the history recorded, and there we have some development areas, I think.
• Q: Could also be interesting for AI, right? So I think especially when you have paper, to maybe to interpret text better and easier to help?  To interpret text is like horrible, right?
• A: Have you seen my text? That will be impossible even for AI. No, no, that's true.

Customer 3: Floatel

• Q: What you see at Floatel?
• Q: Yeah, we are using the IFS 10, but as we are in the oil and gas the business, we have to apply to a lot of rules. We are both affected by the offshore and also the countries where we operate with this. They have very different rules in let’s say Brazil or Norway. And we were just recently implemented the health safety parts of IFS. We are learning to use that at the moment. We have also started with maintenance in IFS. Previously, we had a business system called Star. Quite old system specific for shipping. So, we're learning to use the system is more and more. We're also on stage 2.5. Looking at using a failure analysis and the implementing ways of increasing quality, but we are quite far.
• Q: Quality and failure analysis. To me, that sounds like reliability improvement?
• A: Yes, but we also recently have the sustainability aspect. We need to start reporting and because of this, we're looking at the analytics or how we are going to use BI to get to reports from machines at the moment as a system to report values running our sound measurements. That's where we are at the moment.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• F: Excellent and thanks for that coloring. I think it is nice to see that its quite different in 3 different industries, but all three quite asset intensive and asset centric. And you basically echo a little bit what I noted earlier that everybody wants to be at 4.0, but everybody is part of that 62%. I'm in control, but I want to somehow move, but it's not easy to do that.
• R: I had a couple thoughts. So, you both made the point about on Bas's continuum, what's interesting to me is what's going to get everyone from the two or three to the five is not anything new. It's adopting what is readily available, right? And so this is interesting to me because I always am asked to do predictions every year. And it drives me nuts, because when a technology provider asks me to write predictions, what they want is for me to say some new cool, technological advancement feature, and one I refuse to, but two, it's because of these conversations. The progress that we will see in our industry is over the next 5 and 10 years is not going to come from the next big thing. It's going to come from the immense layers of change that you all have to weed through to make what is already available, a practice and a beneficial use to your business. And I just think conversations like these are so important to have for people who do work for technology providers to be able to internally evangelize that point. Because it isn't about continuously throwing new stuff at you. It's about helping make it easier to adopt. Helping make it more streamlined so that your battle of managing that change internally, particularly in huge global businesses, is just a little bit easier. So, I appreciate the conversation if for no reason other than that. I also wanted to put in the chat a link for you guys, this is a podcast that I did not too long ago with a gentleman who leads service at Socomec and it's going to say field service in the title, but don't let that dissuade you from checking it out if you're interested in the safety topic because it was a conversation on safety. And I'll be honest at going into it, I thought it was going to be so boring because I thought, how can we do a whole podcast on safety and have it not be boring? But it really wasn't. This is the topic that he's very passionate about for some personal reasons that he shares, but he talks a lot about what it takes to really make safety a fundamental piece of your company culture. And so there's some really good specifics around things that work, things that don't, but it could be a good follow on to this conversation.

• F: It is important to have a system that is user friendly. We use Novacura to make it user friendly. So, when people do their work orders and report it, they do the right thing every single time and then we use Novacura so we can analyze the data. So, we need a more user friendly system. Because there are many people who work in a system, and you need a user friendly system.
• R: I totally get that. I was having a long conversation with Novacura actually at our sales kick off 2 weeks ago and it was all around this. I think that's a very good choice. I think I saw of it, it really helps to have this user adoption in mobility and connectivity with using a Novacura. I just wanted to add one comment about the digital transformation, I think it's a thing. People digitally transform. I think we also transform digitally in the 90s, we just didn't call it that, right? So we went from paper to the first kind of systems that we had, and then now of course, we are in the cloud and now there's AI and predictions and whatever. But, totally agree that it's freaking difficult to find the prediction of next because actually we still have to get everybody to where we think the world is. But somehow it's not yet, and I think we can definitely help there. I think you almost have to sell digital transformation to your colleagues and your board and that's not easy. It's also not easy for us, to convince your board and somehow, since you are not even professional seller, you're professional engineers typically. So, it's hard sometimes. If you're interested, I think there's a nice book I will share the title. Maybe you know it already. It's called value driven maintenance. I recommend it to anybody. It's written by a consulting firm that came from Ernest and Young a long time ago. But their mission is to educate people like you to sell ideas to the board and get them sold. Because I think it's maybe not the only reason why digital transformation POC’s are easy, but rollouts are difficult. But because it's easy to buy it from your budget, it's difficult to roll it out on somebody else's budget. And I think and this is maybe the key for the success of this transformation to look at value, what it contributes to the corporation and all that, and how to sell it to your boss. I think they also wrote something in the trend report, but it could be that it's the trend report of last year. So anyway, I wanted to end with that.

Podcast Link:

https://www.futureoffieldservice.com/2023/09/27/creating-a-culture-of-safety-in-field-service/

Next Meeting: 20 February 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Combined CollABorative: Think Tank – Human Centricity: Trends in Recruiting, Hiring & Retention with Guest Speaker Lauren Winans, CEO of Next-Level Benefits

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