Predictive Maintenance and Industry Insights with Ryan Treece

Nikki Gonzales [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Automation Ladies. I'm your host, Nikki Gonzales, if you've never joined us before. And my cohost, Courtney Fernandez Hello. And our guest today, Ryan Treese. Ryan, why don't you introduce yourself and tell our audience who you are and how you got to be doing what you're doing right now with FreeWave. And that's new relatively new to me because I haven't talked to you in a while.

Ryan Treece [00:00:20]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:00:21]:
So, yeah, we'll we'll get into that as well.

Ryan Treece [00:00:23]:
Yeah. Ryan Therese. I'm at FreeWave Technologies global business development manager for our AI and data platforms. Prior to this, I worked at Keyence, Cognex, Telet, Banner Engineering, a bunch of the the OT side of side of the house doing predictive maintenance, machine vision. Lots lots of factory floors, definitely. Also, part of ISA. They're a smart manufacturing and IIoT division.

Nikki Gonzales [00:00:49]:
Oh, yeah.

Ryan Treece [00:00:50]:
Yep. And so I'm doing the, edge and cloud technical committee on that. So I

Nikki Gonzales [00:00:55]:
think we've had a couple if we're Jessica Morell was on the show before. She was on that committee, I believe, at some point in the past.

Ryan Treece [00:01:03]:
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I've seen Jessica and I say stuff that's yeah. Yeah. It's and then also nonprofit industry four point o club. We started that actually during COVID when everyone was online talking about how to do these digital transformations, industry four point o, all those buzzwords. Right? So Yeah.

Ryan Treece [00:01:21]:
That's more of a

Nikki Gonzales [00:01:22]:
friend Anne Wyatt. Yeah.

Ryan Treece [00:01:23]:
Anne Wyatt.

Nikki Gonzales [00:01:24]:
As well.

Ryan Treece [00:01:25]:
Yep. Yep. Exactly. So, yeah. That's, that's what I've been I've been doing nowadays.

Nikki Gonzales [00:01:30]:
Very cool. Didn't you also haven't you been helping Anne, like, cohost some of her show

Ryan Treece [00:01:34]:
or Yeah. Yeah. We did a season together. Definitely. Yep.

Nikki Gonzales [00:01:37]:
Very cool. We should check that out. I don't actually listen to a lot of other podcasts. I don't I definitely don't listen to my own. But I I at some points, I think I should I like to catch up on sometimes when I drive. Like, I think I might be driving to Austin in January or February for the industrial marketing summit. Oh. And that's I think the last time I binged podcast was when I drove to Austin for that this year.

Ryan Treece [00:02:02]:
That's awesome. Well, I'll see you

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:03]:
in Austin. We'll have an entire season for my drive. I'm excited.

Ryan Treece [00:02:08]:
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I'll see you in Austin. I live in Austin, by the way, viewers, so I'm there now.

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:14]:
Oh, yeah. Okay. You've been there this whole time, or was that re more recently?

Ryan Treece [00:02:19]:
I moved there, well, like, three or four years ago.

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:22]:
Okay. Yep. Well, I mean, that makes why you're able to drive down to.

Ryan Treece [00:02:26]:
Yeah. OT Skatecon. I wear this hat almost every day. Nice. So if you

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:30]:
guys are listening on the podcast, he has the black hat with the pink lettering.

Ryan Treece [00:02:35]:
Mhmm.

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:35]:
I will have to say it was a great pick.

Ryan Treece [00:02:37]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:37]:
Yeah. Thanks for representing.

Ryan Treece [00:02:39]:
Yeah. Thanks. It was a great conference. It was I learned so much in such little time. I think I slept for, like, one or two days afterwards.

Nikki Gonzales [00:02:48]:
In a

Ryan Treece [00:02:49]:
good way, though. It was a good way. Fire hose. Yeah. I liked it though. Because most most times you go to these types of conferences and stuff, and it's, like, very long, boring, you know, and then I'll get excited for, like, fifteen minute parts of these presentations. But this was like you took all the good chunks and all the gems and then you condensed it and then you just fire hosed us. It was awesome.

Nikki Gonzales [00:03:13]:
That is exactly what we were trying to do. And Ally's mind is very much she kinda thinks, like, enlists in a lot of ways. And so she listed out the topics in the way that she sees them in sequenced in, you know, the kind of OT world. And I've been in the on the other end of, like, Ali info dump fire hose things before, and it's just it's it's fascinating, and it's incredible. And, like, I can keep up with most of it. But then, yeah, like, when you're around the people that info dump on you like that enough, you know, you don't have to get it all at once, but you do get enough to totally be excited. And then you you get to know the people well enough to be able to

Courtney Fernandez [00:03:52]:
ask remember who did the info dumping so you can call

Ryan Treece [00:03:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Nikki Gonzales [00:03:56]:
Dump who did what? Exactly. Exactly.

Ryan Treece [00:03:59]:
Yeah. That's And Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:04:01]:
And where to reach them maybe. But that's something else that I think we are gonna have to do a little bit better job of was just like kinda keeping everybody communicating. We're making it easier together. We had a lot in mind that we didn't get a chance to implement in terms of just time frame. Are we gonna see your agendas here, Ryan?

Ryan Treece [00:04:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I I plan on I plan on seeing yeah. I hope this is an annual event. I I really enjoyed it last year. So

Nikki Gonzales [00:04:25]:
It is. And we are actually Ally's coming to Houston next week and to finalize our venue selection.

Ryan Treece [00:04:31]:
Awesome.

Nikki Gonzales [00:04:32]:
So we'll be probably sharing some stuff just like as we're touring. We're going to a few different places, and then, yeah, it'll be exciting to to kinda just keep showing it as we're building it, I guess, sharing it with the community because we're also getting a lot of input from the people that are coming. And we have a new feature on the site. So, like, if when you buy a ticket, we're not just featuring the speakers. We're featuring everybody that's coming.

Ryan Treece [00:04:53]:
Oh, that's cool.

Nikki Gonzales [00:04:54]:
Because there's so much value in in people like, the cap the difference, like yeah. Some people are coming that are really novice at everything, but the majority of people are very much experts in their fields and then not so expert in the adjacent things, and that's what a lot of the value is in meeting those other people. So but the people that are speaking versus the people that are attending, I would say a majority of a lot of our attendees would be qualified enough to also be speakers. There's just not enough room on the lineup for everybody.

Ryan Treece [00:05:23]:
Right.

Nikki Gonzales [00:05:24]:
Right? So thinking about why do people go to educational conferences even? You know, part of it is to add of course, it's to be educated. It's to your network. It's to somehow add value to your day your daily work, right, ideally, or your strategic direction. But then it's also about building out your career, your profile, your skills. So why not let people get a chance to have their personal brand out there even if they're just attending? Like, it's a big deal. Some people pay for this with their own money, and they take PTO. And I think that's well worth,

Courtney Fernandez [00:05:55]:
like, showing off. Massive dedication.

Ryan Treece [00:05:58]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome.

Nikki Gonzales [00:06:00]:
And then trying to make the most of it in terms of networking and connection and value building beyond just the the two days or whatever. Yeah. Ryan, I know that you had some topics that you potentially wanted to talk about. So what do you got for us today, Ryan?

Ryan Treece [00:06:14]:
I think one of the first things we could talk about is how to get started in industrial IoT, industry four point o, kind of all these digital transformation projects. I think there's so many solutions out there, and it gets overwhelming because you'll have some companies that are offering something like an AI or ML predictive process solution. Well, that can be tough if you don't know how your PLC is communicating or what metrics you wanna monitor on your PLC. So if you don't know how to pull data from a PLC, you might have some some trouble doing that and I would recommend going kind of where your comfort zone is. Right? So I think one of the easiest ones is probably predictive maintenance. You'll probably see predictive maintenance vibration temperature monitoring. There's a lot of different solutions out there.

Nikki Gonzales [00:07:04]:
Yeah, that's become kind of bread and butter at this point, right? Those two modes of predictive maintenance.

Ryan Treece [00:07:10]:
I think of it, it's always so weird how when you drive your car, if you have a problem with your car, your check engine light comes on.

Nikki Gonzales [00:07:19]:
Yep.

Ryan Treece [00:07:19]:
Right? You don't really see that in the factory when it comes to these motors. They just run them into the ground to the point of failure and then everything's on fire and they're like, okay, how do you get it up and run it? How do we band aid it? Can you get us through this shift? We're trying to order spare parts. So I think investing in something like a vibration temperature sensor, a lot of them have like magnetic mounting brackets. You can just pop it right on the side of the motor closest to the bearing or the point of failure. Yep. And then that's gonna do the job for you. It'll monitor as that bearing wears. It's gonna vibrate a little more.

Ryan Treece [00:07:54]:
It'll just send you depending on the system, it could send you an alert. It could automatically put it on your schedule for preventive maintenance over the weekend, different things like that. So I think that's always if someone says I have no idea where to get started, I would probably start there. And then That's

Nikki Gonzales [00:08:10]:
an easy one because you can do it with just, like, you start with literally, like, one asset and then replicate it to, like, maybe just, like, get some value out of it before you have to do a whole big plan.

Ryan Treece [00:08:21]:
Yeah. Exactly. It doesn't take any coding experience, anything like that. Right? So a lot of solutions will have some sort of dashboard that you can view data in. So you're not having to, you know, build up this this kind of logic. So a lot of the the more comprehensive solutions are, okay, you have to inventory. If you're doing the whole line, a lot of times in The US, you're gonna source by the lowest bidder for the project. And and then you also have special machinery.

Ryan Treece [00:08:49]:
So you could have a Siemens PLC on the machining station that was built in Germany, and then you could have a Rockwell PLC and the assembly station right after it. Right? And so I think that's where a lot of people hit those bottlenecks with all these proprietary industrial protocols converting those definitely helps to have someone like Ignition, inductive automation doing that. But if you've never done it before, that can be pretty daunting task for you.

Nikki Gonzales [00:09:18]:
Hey. I wanna take a quick break from today's episode to mention our sponsor, Automate. It's coming up soon, and you know you have to be there. We're always there. It's going to be amazing. It's the biggest automation party of the year. You got robots, cobots, motion, vision tech, AI, you name it. All the cool stuff is gonna be in one place for you to come see.

Nikki Gonzales [00:09:38]:
Plus, lots of great companies and people to connect with, including us. So why don't you head over to automate.org, get your tickets, and we'll see you there. Have you seen, like, specific applications or done any cool factory tours lately where you've been either talking about that kind of stuff or seeing some in action?

Ryan Treece [00:09:57]:
You know, I haven't done much in the factory recently, but I've been, I guess you could say, in in the in the cornfields lately or the farms.

Nikki Gonzales [00:10:06]:
So Oh, okay.

Ryan Treece [00:10:07]:
Yeah. So free free wave, we've traditionally been a 900 megahertz private wireless radio company. So we can transmit data up to forty, sixty miles depending on on the conditions there. So we run into a lot of applications for oil and gas we're pretty big on. But smart agriculture has been a fun one recently. And part of the problem that they're having is all of their machinery and equipment is in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Right? And and the most remote areas to have that kind of real estate to do the farming.

Ryan Treece [00:10:40]:
So they're not only having issues with, okay, what kind of data are we pulling? And then which assets do we wanna monitor? They're trying to think, how do we even get that back to our cloud? Because there's no cell tower cell tower connectivity. So it's always going to be a combination of cellular or satellite in that case. Satellite's still pretty expensive, but I think if you look at if you look at, like, a remote asset, you're gonna have a few different boxes on it no matter what. So if you have a global solution going in remote areas Yeah. You're probably juggling multiple wireless carriers or MVNOs to try and get the coverage areas in these different places. You're so that's multiple cellular, probably one or two different dedicated boxes for satellite solutions. You're probably having something hosting like the actual AI or predictive maintenance solution itself. So some kind of industrialized gateway there.

Ryan Treece [00:11:37]:
And then also a lot of times you'll see like an Ewan box by HMS just because if you're a remote VPN. Right? Yep. So if you start adding this up, right, here's single functionality, little boxes. You have four or five boxes that go out on every machine and all these different combinations. So that's that's what I've been kind of we've been working away at on Freeway for probably the past six months that I've been here is how how do we make that easier for everyone to deploy and manage and things like that?

Nikki Gonzales [00:12:07]:
So, yeah, how do you guys do that?

Ryan Treece [00:12:09]:
Good question. We're still figuring a lot of it out. Right? Okay. Okay. So I think part of it is we we're noticing challenges. Like, we've had customers who have LoRaWAN in the field, and they're seeing the actual crops are causing noise with the RF antennas. So we're

Nikki Gonzales [00:12:27]:
Oh, okay.

Ryan Treece [00:12:28]:
Yeah. So we're we're helping. That can be some antenna issues. We'll look at that. We partner with a company called Velocity IoT, and they have a group of companies that they work with globally so that you can remotely manage it via our web portal. So you can activate, deactivate, all that just clicking through the web portal, and it can show you kind of a map of that stuff. So So I think that's that's been a lot of what we're doing there is just even consolidating the amount of cell phone carriers people are using. And then on the satellite side, we've worked with Viasat, and we'll actually take, like, a modbus based sensor or we'll convert, like, an analog sensor to modbus and connect directly to the satellite terminal.

Ryan Treece [00:13:09]:
So you're not having to have that piece of IO in between, like, a a PLC or we're we're removing the cost there. So we're really trying to consolidate how many boxes you have to buy, manage, and deploy out there.

Nikki Gonzales [00:13:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. That seems like a a good move, and I'm assuming that there's a pretty decent market for that because I've actually been my first job as an intern for my dad's company was I when I was in middle school. My very first summer was to take the the spec sheets of a satellite receiver for Inmarsat

Ryan Treece [00:13:40]:
Mhmm.

Nikki Gonzales [00:13:40]:
And my dad's GPRS box and controller that he had built for his system that so it was a dual GPRS and satellite system that for tracking trucks and boats and barges and things like that. So it was called mobile resource management at that

Ryan Treece [00:13:55]:
time. Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:13:56]:
And he would stick those on whatever the trucks mostly because, yeah, a lot of you don't have cell coverage. Definitely not reliable. You're gonna lose your assets and have no idea what's going on with them. And then you start pinging those satellites. But, But, yeah, the satellite receiver was like it's a hefty it was a hefty thing. I'm sure they're a lot smaller now, but still, you end up with a lot of hardware.

Ryan Treece [00:14:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. And then

Nikki Gonzales [00:14:17]:
And that stuff's been around installed now for a long time. So people that were I don't know. You would call it maybe early adopters of these things. Right? But they've been using them for, like, ten, fifteen years. They have a lot of this legacy equipment, and it I mean, it works, but it's yeah. It's it's a it doesn't have to be that complicated. I was just thinking of, like, Elon Musk gets Rocket. You know? Like, how Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:14:37]:
I was actually just thinking

Courtney Fernandez [00:14:38]:
is is anybody doing this with the Starlink satellites that you know of?

Nikki Gonzales [00:14:43]:
I'm just curious about that.

Courtney Fernandez [00:14:45]:
Getting cheaper, more more accessible with Starlink being a thing now.

Ryan Treece [00:14:49]:
I've been tweeting Elon. It's what do you say that? Like, the past week, I see Elon tweeting about the Starlink. I'm like, hey. If you need someone on the industrial side, we're doing stuff with satellite and remote assets. I I haven't gotten a response, but but I don't yeah. I'm not seeing Starlink. I think they're more consumer focused and high speed remote access for for enabling different countries and communities that are missing, which I think still you definitely need. But, yeah, I think everything nowadays, if you looked at five years ago, companies with the ability to remote VPN even into equipment, it was pretty scarce.

Ryan Treece [00:15:25]:
Yep. So I sold machinery for a company called the Crossmify for a few years, and our service department operated by customer calls Ryan, the salesperson, angry that production's down. Ryan apologizes a bunch of time, hangs up the phone, calls my service manager, begs him to get a body on a plane and fly them out there. Right? And that's I mean, you're looking at a last minute plane ticket. You're looking at hotel. You're looking at hourly for for that person or per day. Right? And that's that's not a great way to to operate a business model as opposed to, okay. Here, let me pull my laptop out, remote in, look at the PLC registers, diagnose.

Ryan Treece [00:16:04]:
And even if they can't fix it remotely, now when they go to fly there, they have they're more informed. Right? They're able to see, okay, I'm gonna bring this tool. I'm gonna bring these different things because if you don't know, you're flying blind. Even when when we worked at Keyence, I felt like I was bringing every you know, you got the suitcases. Right? Yeah. Bring everything in because you don't know what you're gonna run into. And on the machine vision side, I need every lens. You can't bring every light.

Ryan Treece [00:16:30]:
Right? And so, yeah, you gotta you gotta gotta have an informed decision before you go in there, and it's it's always helpful.

Nikki Gonzales [00:16:37]:
But, yeah, that birthed my life's motto. Everything the answer to everything is it depends.

Courtney Fernandez [00:16:41]:
It depends.

Ryan Treece [00:16:42]:
It depends. Right?

Nikki Gonzales [00:16:44]:
So how much does a vision system cost?

Courtney Fernandez [00:16:49]:
Oh. Oh. Varies widely.

Ryan Treece [00:16:51]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:16:51]:
Yeah. But then I found you can't ask me a question that I can't find some, you know, nuance to the answer to that because it depends on the circumstances.

Courtney Fernandez [00:17:00]:
Well, you gotta think it's like something. Right? You're like, will it work? Will will, you know, how much will this cost? Will, like, just are you just buying one to put it on your shelf? Like, what are you doing?

Ryan Treece [00:17:09]:
Right. Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:17:11]:
And part of me is like, well, I'm I'm one of those people that I love, you know, price transparency. I don't wanna have to go through talking to five different people to get a price to buy something, you know, and it's not like so I guess it's conflicting in that sense, but doesn't mean that you can't, like, have some ideas. And some things are just concrete, and other things are not for sure. So, yeah, Starlink is up and coming. They're I think they're doing a great job in remote areas, but they are really focused on that consumer. And I know, like, there there's a lot of things that are different between IoT type connectivity that you need, the type of messaging, frequencies, and amounts, and things like that between, like, consumer and commercial use.

Courtney Fernandez [00:17:50]:
My my question was actually more on the reliability of the connection because there's some customers that are like, this cannot go down.

Nikki Gonzales [00:17:57]:
Yeah. So then you have to have redundancy with other because even satellites, even Starlink will have dead zones.

Courtney Fernandez [00:18:03]:
Yep.

Nikki Gonzales [00:18:04]:
And that's when they'll they, like, line up in a certain way in the geography and, you know, there may be mountains or whatever, but there can be, like, short snippets of time where they don't have coverage.

Ryan Treece [00:18:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. We we've seen that too. Right? And just with any kind of infrastructure, you're gonna have certain weather conditions that it might not be ideal for it. And so that combination is they have gateways now actually with cellular and satellite built into it, and then you can do an automatic failover. Right? So if you wanna go with cellular and have it run on cellular all the time, then if the the local cell network gets too congested or it goes down, fills over to satellite and vice versa. So, yeah, it's getting easier.

Nikki Gonzales [00:18:45]:
Yeah. So I I'm actually I've kinda stayed away from these. The like, having been in in IoT for so long, like, I kinda got tired of, like, it becoming all of a sudden a thing and, like, it wasn't all of a sudden a thing. And and then the industry four point o and stuff, and I just like, well, I don't know enough about it to say anything about it, so I'm gonna kinda stay out of the fray and just focus on kinda what I know. But now it's like, okay. You can't really just ignore it anymore. And now that I'm focusing on more things towards the future, it's like how you can't look at the future and not this not be the part of it. It.

Nikki Gonzales [00:19:18]:
Right?

Ryan Treece [00:19:18]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:19:19]:
The data, the AI, the connectivity, as much as we wanna keep in touch with everything. On. Stay close to the the ground. Right? Which is why I think, like, the ethos of the OT Skatecon is kinda like, let's connect all the levels together. Something Yeah. In a community. So it's not like insular echo chamber communities of people only on the same level.

Ryan Treece [00:19:40]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:19:41]:
But now I'm interested in this stuff, like, a little bit more. And so I think I wanna have more conversations about them, and I'm more open to hearing about it. What's your kinda take on where we are with it in terms of you've been around it for a long time too.

Ryan Treece [00:19:55]:
I think I think it's it's finally maturing, and I'm pretty optimistic. So like I mentioned earlier with the remote machine connectivity, right, I think that you see a ton of startups that started in 2020, And I think a lot of those went away. All the hype ones, you know, all the we got seed money, we're gonna find this. But I'm seeing a lot more people who have a core business product, whether you're a machine builder or an insulin pump manufacturer. A lot of people, it's becoming much easier to have the tools to build a a remote cloud system, integrated sensors, and and things like that. So I think, it's it's gonna kind of continue to take off over the next probably four to five years, and we're gonna have a a even more connected kinda industry here.

Nikki Gonzales [00:20:46]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And then on the flip side, that terrifies us all is the cybersecurity.

Ryan Treece [00:20:51]:
Yeah. Like

Nikki Gonzales [00:20:52]:
like, the the casino that got hacked through their aquarium sensor.

Ryan Treece [00:20:56]:
Yeah. That's another big thing we've been looking at actually. So VPNs, awesome for the use case I said, right, remote service. But the problem with the VPN is you basically you build a castle wall. And then once you're inside that castle, you get the VPN credentials. You can move around really easily. So something I've been learning about more and, and I'm not an expert on, on it by any means yet. Zero trust architecture is something that I've been learning a lot about.

Ryan Treece [00:21:27]:
And that gives you what they call least privileged least privileged access, I think it is. So basically, you have no permissions. Right? So you can't even see the assets when you're on the network with zero trust. You it won't you can't scan. You can't port scan. You can't do anything like that. So it's a a software solution that verifies the transactions and interconnectivity once you're on the network still. And so I think that that is gonna be huge, actually.

Ryan Treece [00:21:54]:
The DOD has I think it's that mandate, actually. They gave some reference arc architecture and things like that. There's documentation online. But yeah. Because you'll see them go in through a legacy sensor or something that people probably forgot about. Right? Like you said, an aquarium sensor. So there's this these legacy systems that people completely forget about. They do this one simple task off to the side, and they don't they don't pay attention to it because it does its thing.

Ryan Treece [00:22:19]:
And I think that's the biggest vulnerability in these places.

Nikki Gonzales [00:22:26]:
Yeah. I've been trying to think, like, whether you know, because, like, there's a lot of attack vectors that are just not even about the technology either. So it's it's kind of like a lose lose or situation. Like, you you just gotta move on with it because you're not gonna stay safe by not connecting,

Ryan Treece [00:22:42]:
you

Nikki Gonzales [00:22:42]:
know, anything. But at the same time, you have to figure out how how to do it and minimize your risk because it there's just always gonna be that risk. So, like, don't assume that you can be safe, so have all of your to quote badly, our cybersecurity speaker, Ashley VanHoozen. There are two types of companies, ones that have been hacked or ones that will get hacked. So you better have an OT specific incident response plan to make sure that you know what you're gonna do when it does happen and not just from a, you know, your finance and accounting and, you know, your operations standpoint or your other stuff, but, like, your, yeah, your OT stuff. It's how do you keep your line running. Okay. So now we have some questions from the audience.

Nikki Gonzales [00:23:23]:
This is cool. Lou asked, where can you find success stories or example of where industry four point o has shown value other than the obvious Google search? Yeah. Any suggestions?

Ryan Treece [00:23:34]:
Google's too good. How am I how am I supposed to outdo Google?

Courtney Fernandez [00:23:38]:
Better than Google.

Ryan Treece [00:23:39]:
How am I gonna outdo Google? Lou, you're setting me up for failure, man. It's good to see you. You know, I think it's gonna be very if you want something outside of predictive maintenance, process predictive, things like that, it's really gonna be tailored to your business model and your process. I've gone into tons of automotive factories, and someone making a front bumper on this assembly line is making it completely different than maybe the plant next door. Right? So I think the key thing is understanding what kind of those those metrics are important to your individual process and then finding a way to just monitor those and provide that actionable item there. So it's, yeah, it's tough to outdo Google. But if there's a lot of it, it's just monitoring data points and then sending alerts and automating that part of it.

Nikki Gonzales [00:24:27]:
Yeah. That's a good question, though. I think, you know, we've been talking about this a lot lately in a lot of different, like, conversations that I've had. It's just really challenging to get case studies in our industry because so much stuff is under NDA, and every company considers what they're doing a competitive advantage. And so, like, us as and I say us. Like, right right now, I identify myself as a systems integrator with PCE. But it it yeah. It's hard to be able to talk about what we do while not sharing too much, while making, you know, useful information for other people.

Nikki Gonzales [00:25:03]:
Like, it it's a it's a real challenge. So maybe places like ISA presentations, like, do they have real case studies that they ever talk about or share or, like, these kind of industry groups? I'm sure, like, that there are some that have, like, actionable case studies available. But maybe we'll we'll try to do some research and drop a few links or something.

Courtney Fernandez [00:25:25]:
I know manufacturers are usually happy to publish case studies on their own websites. So if you know manufacturer of an I o IIoT product.

Nikki Gonzales [00:25:34]:
Oh, you mean the manufacturer as in yeah. The

Courtney Fernandez [00:25:37]:
Like the manufacturer of the IIoT devices.

Nikki Gonzales [00:25:39]:
Yeah. Like,

Courtney Fernandez [00:25:40]:
I'm thinking, like, UR has case studies on people who use UR robots. So if you're using an IIoT device, you know, that company might have a case study on people that have done so successfully.

Ryan Treece [00:25:49]:
Yeah. I

Courtney Fernandez [00:25:50]:
haven't looked myself though.

Nikki Gonzales [00:25:51]:
Okay. I'm I'm having some ideas here. If there isn't really a good place for curated case studies just across manufacturers, like, not to have to go to individual web websites for that. Okay.

Ryan Treece [00:26:03]:
Yeah. Most of most of the ISA stuff, is a good resource too. They they have, like, a monthly magazine that goes out in tech magazine. And, actually, it's another great reason to get involved with with ISA. So I think it's a little over a hundred bucks a year. So it's not a huge financial commitment. But once I started and and then attending the meetings, we do share information on use cases. There's opportunities to volunteer on all these different subcommittees as well within ISA.

Ryan Treece [00:26:31]:
So there's a cybersecurity portion. There's a edge and cloud computing portion. There's all these different buckets. Right? And part of it is that information sharing. So some some groups will do it better than others. And then there's, a lot of process industries and not as much discrete manufacturing in there. But Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Treece [00:26:50]:
It's been a a really great organization to join, and and I think that's something we mentioned kind of in the in the show notes is how to how to get involved and how to do that. And I think that's really where where all my speaking and and the articles and stuff took off was was through ISA.

Nikki Gonzales [00:27:07]:
Cool. Yeah. I know our friend Scott Chapman, another one of the speakers from MultiScadicon, who actually spoke about predictive maintenance. I think he's he's part of the ISA chapter, like, instrumentation. And it's a little far for me to go, so I haven't been to one of their events, but it looks cool.

Ryan Treece [00:27:22]:
Yeah. It's really cool.

Nikki Gonzales [00:27:24]:
Yeah. I guess they're kinda concentrated, like, which groups are active by what industries are active in different areas. Right? Because there's a lot of different subchapters and things like that.

Ryan Treece [00:27:32]:
Yeah. You have you have, like, your local chop chapter. So I'm part of our bluebonnet, they call it local chapter in Austin. And so they'll have local meetings and things like that. And then there's different high level parts of it, like the process instrument process instrumentation group, and then we're part of the smart manufacturing and IIoT. So you can be part of multiple groups and attend multiple meetings. It's it's pretty easy to float around there.

Nikki Gonzales [00:27:57]:
Yeah. Very cool. I've been I've been a member probably since maybe for two years, but I just had not, like, prioritized the time to get involved. Like, there's so many different communities and organizations to get value from in the industry, but it's just like, obviously, you can't be part of them all. And if they cost money, you can't pay for them all, but it's more of a time thing even just, like, committing to being in these different places. And it's helpful to kinda, you know, keep some consistency and get to know people in one place because you won't get everything from one visit or one webinar or whatever. What's kind of your favorite format right now? Is it still webinars that you like to go to to, like, to learn, or do you really just wanna read the case studies, like, on a website or a PDF or something? Because I think that's kinda a lot of people are trying to do, like, more interactive stuff and more media, but I don't know if people really want that or if they just want the plain old, like, art magazine article or three pager, like, with just, like, the nuts and bolts of the application.

Ryan Treece [00:28:57]:
What what do you what do you two prefer?

Courtney Fernandez [00:29:00]:
I'm, like, I haven't

Nikki Gonzales [00:29:02]:
been looking for solutions for a long time, so I don't think my opinion is necessarily valid

Ryan Treece [00:29:07]:
in that sense. What, Courtney, I think you said, like, case studies and and white papers?

Courtney Fernandez [00:29:12]:
Yeah. Well, mostly because I could go at my pace through those where webinars I mean, I think there's lots of studies that show that we can, like, read and write much faster than we can hear and talk. So I I tend to be going a mile a minute and faster than my mouth and my brain can keep up with things. So webinars, I end up clicking through to the parts that I wanna see, and I know I'm missing stuff and, you know, case studies, I just jump right to what I care about reading.

Ryan Treece [00:29:37]:
Yeah. I I see, I can't I can't sit still long enough to read something, so I need, like, the the shortened social media two minute video to get me excited Nice. And the and the prime of the brain, and then I'll I'll I'll deep dive read one of those case studies. Right? Because, yeah, I can't same thing with a lot of the webinars and stuff. It's like click, skip, skip, skip. Okay. I think I heard something there.

Nikki Gonzales [00:30:00]:
Yeah. And it's hard, obviously, because, like, you you don't know what each person's gonna be looking for. But one of the things that bugs me about webinars is when there's, like, way too much sales speak before you get to the what you advertised as the topic of the webinar. Yeah. So I appreciate, like, like, when people kinda get to the point of what they're talking about. But I also overtalk before all of my stuff, so I, like, can't really be as mad about that. But, yeah, one of the reasons we started to do live demos is because I do like to see, like, I don't know, be able to have this back and forth with someone sometimes, but you don't want it to be, like, I don't know, like a high pressure sales thing. Live interaction is where it's at.

Nikki Gonzales [00:30:43]:
Yeah. That's cool. Like, kinda like this maybe. I've kissed my whole

Courtney Fernandez [00:30:46]:
Trade show demos.

Nikki Gonzales [00:30:48]:
Yeah. Interact like, trade show demos because when you you got the thing so that's cool to see the tech. And I still love, like, demo vans and trucks. I love that companies put those together Oh,

Courtney Fernandez [00:30:57]:
I love those.

Nikki Gonzales [00:30:58]:
With all their stuff and then bring them to you and you can just go, like, touch all the things.

Ryan Treece [00:31:02]:
Toys for adults is what it is. Right? You see one of those big distributor vans or RVs, and it's all the lights are spinning, all the buzzers.

Nikki Gonzales [00:31:10]:
Yeah. That's cool for certain things. Right? But for the actual, like, case studies, like, let me see how someone else got value out of this and if it's something that I could potentially replicate. Because as much as it is cool that things spin and they have lights and buttons and stuff, if you don't if you don't get an ROI out of that, then you've just spent money on a lot of shiny flashy things.

Courtney Fernandez [00:31:30]:
That's why I like proof of concepts and case studies because people are very likely to look at something and go, hey, my part is that or my part looks like that. And Yeah. If you see it being, you know, happening, you're like, it can happen. I can actually spend money and get a result.

Nikki Gonzales [00:31:46]:
Oh, back in our key instays, Ryan, you know, we had those catalogs with app sample applications, and it would show the little pictures of, like, the process on the line, which was super cool. In your territory, did you ever actually see those applications?

Ryan Treece [00:31:59]:
Never. Okay. Me neither. They had well, you were West Coast, weren't you?

Nikki Gonzales [00:32:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. And so I always had something that I had to basically, like, write a white paper on because the only people that came to me were like, well, I I tried this with everything else, and it didn't work. Can you do it? And and it was some time you know, it was, like, it was real hit or miss whether it was even possible at the time with machine vision. And, like, of course, the lab log was like

Courtney Fernandez [00:32:23]:
it was nobody ever brought you their 80 percenter. They always brought you their really messed up 20 percenter.

Ryan Treece [00:32:29]:
You're like Yes. Yes.

Nikki Gonzales [00:32:29]:
This is like, oh, the o ring inspection. Yeah. That looks really straightforward. And I'm like, wait. Nobody in my territory makes o rings. And if they did, they probably are already inspecting them with something else.

Ryan Treece [00:32:40]:
Right. Yeah. Even in automotive, I felt like a lot of those application guides, like, were showing, like, picture of an engine block and just a camera pointing at it. And I'm like, okay. But what? Like, yeah. I I I was like, oh, I'm sorry.

Nikki Gonzales [00:32:55]:
People, like, say something real. Don't just say the the words, but you're not actually saying anything. Not to criticize those catalogs. They were very informative.

Ryan Treece [00:33:04]:
It's hard. That's hard.

Nikki Gonzales [00:33:05]:
But you can't like, from the sales standpoint, you just can't speak to it to the value like a case study can that actually shows, like, this is a thing that was actually done, not our idea of what, like, the application looks like before it goes out in the wild.

Ryan Treece [00:33:19]:
Yeah. If I'm looking at, like, a network architecture, I don't wanna hear someone on a podcast talking their way through a a network architecture while I try to build it in my brain. Right? I can try it, but but yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:33:31]:
You go to TraceRoute and read Josh Voorhees' blogs because he lays it out. He's got, like, pictures.

Ryan Treece [00:33:38]:
Yeah. I like his content. I've seen his stuff on LinkedIn.

Nikki Gonzales [00:33:41]:
Yeah. But, yeah, there's different forms of content for different things. So the answer to that is it depends.

Courtney Fernandez [00:33:46]:
Oh, we got it made by an application engineer too because some of the companies have applications engineers dedicating, like, 20% of their time to making videos or white paper docs on how to use things. But that's a great practice, and I think all of them should do that. Like, you need to go update your YouTube videos. I have rescued myself on multiple projects with a five year old YouTube video with a applications engineer that's not even with the company anymore.

Ryan Treece [00:34:11]:
But,

Courtney Fernandez [00:34:12]:
you know, that kind of video has rescued me. And I Honestly.

Nikki Gonzales [00:34:15]:
And I think brands have short sold the value of that type of content because it is evergreen. If you can think about anything that, you know Yeah. It just it's not gonna be flashy and get millions of views when it comes out. It's just gonna be one of those, like, handy, sturdy things that, you know, like, people that used to look in the manual. Now people Google and YouTube, and it's like you want them to find a how to or this, you know, thing for your even if it's, like, you know, a couple models old. But, again, ideally, you keep it up to date and you produce fresh as often as you decide that you need to upgrade your product,

Ryan Treece [00:34:49]:
you

Nikki Gonzales [00:34:49]:
should decide to try to upgrade some of this material.

Courtney Fernandez [00:34:52]:
The menus have moved around since this video, but the option is still there somewhere.

Nikki Gonzales [00:34:57]:
Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Ryan Treece [00:34:58]:
Yeah. I think a lot of people wanna do it themselves. Right? They don't wanna go through the support. They don't wanna do this back and forth. They don't wanna go through this troubleshooting tree with someone. Yeah. They'd rather look at a a YouTube video, skip to where it is, and then watch, okay, they click there, there, and there. Where are those menu buttons on my screen now? I always keep changing.

Courtney Fernandez [00:35:20]:
Why is mine gray? That's always my favorite.

Ryan Treece [00:35:25]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:35:25]:
Yeah. I really wanna encourage

Courtney Fernandez [00:35:26]:
How come his isn't gray?

Nikki Gonzales [00:35:28]:
All the engineers out there that if you've ever felt the pat the itch at all to produce something that would be valuable to other people on a mass scale rather than just one to one with your customers, which is I know where you're comfortable and you provide so much value to those customers or your sales folks or your internal customers, right, that it would just, like it would it would be so cool for the industry to get your that one on one value out to the rest of us even if we weren't so lucky as to meet you face to face and get your help. It is actually something that, like, back, like, three jobs ago, I was trying to get people to do as a salesperson because I wanted to not have to bother a sales engineer and get their time and get something booked just to get a quick question answered that I knew that they had already answered for someone else before by showing them how to do it in the software. Right? But I understand it's like it took me a really long time to feel comfortable doing this, so not everybody wants to be out there. But, dude, just don't even worry about it. So, Ryan, I when we first talked or reconnected after finding each other on LinkedIn and realizing that, you know, we had worked together at Can't, you had had a a journey. We we connected on a lot of things. And I think our friend Jim Mayer with the Manufacturing Culture podcast may or may not have been brought up because I think we both had had conversations with him as well. How is your career progressing as you see it in terms of, like, the company culture and the growth, your, like, maturity in your career? Are you seeing, like, big changes? Or

Ryan Treece [00:37:00]:
Yeah. It's it's been fun. I've always just tried to to learn as much as I can at at every company I've had. I think that's been kinda my passion, and I I always say I'm a a terrible salesperson, but I'm more of a a teacher. Right? So I'll talk to the engineers, and I always ask why. Why isn't this working? Because well, because the customer's asking me why. Why isn't it working? No. That's not a real answer.

Ryan Treece [00:37:26]:
Why is it really not working? Right. And so I think I've done that over the years as much, and I've just continued to focus on on sharing that information with people, but not all companies, like that. Right? Yeah. And I think that was tough earlier on in my career to where I wanted to kind of be part of it, do more, join ISA and do these speaking panels, but maybe the response was, oh, you can't do that. We have to have a director do that. Right? Or or something like that.

Nikki Gonzales [00:37:56]:
Or how does it help you meet your sales goal today?

Ryan Treece [00:37:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Is this gonna help you hit goal? Maybe.

Nikki Gonzales [00:38:03]:
Yeah.

Ryan Treece [00:38:03]:
I don't know. Is anything gonna help me hit goal? I mean, everything's a guess. Right? And so, yeah, I think when now in the interview process, one thing I start doing is I tell them. I say, hey. I'm part of nonprofit. I go to these industries. I do the speaking. Sometimes I might write an article.

Ryan Treece [00:38:21]:
Is that okay with you? Right? I'll I'll flat out ask and get permission upfront. Yeah. And then if the answer is no, it's usually a pretty good indicator of their company culture as well for me. I don't do well in very strict command and control, don't ask questions. Right? I like to know, okay. Maybe if there's an internal process that's not optimized, how can we fix this? Right? And I think I've gravitated kinda more towards those companies as my career has progressed, and I've been very fortunate to have some some great supportive bosses I found along the way, including at at Freeway if they've been awesome to work with.

Nikki Gonzales [00:38:59]:
Very cool to hear. Yeah. I think I also when I first joined, I was hoping to, like, have one of those careers where you kinda work at the same company a long time. I I wanted stability, I thought, but I found out that that wasn't realistic. So now it's like, okay. How can we add the most amount of value to each other while we're together? Because we both know it's not gonna be forever.

Ryan Treece [00:39:19]:
Right.

Nikki Gonzales [00:39:20]:
And it's like, why not just be honest about that now and, like, plan for that instead of I've had people or, you know, like people that don't talk to me after I quit a job.

Ryan Treece [00:39:29]:
Yeah. Weird. Right?

Nikki Gonzales [00:39:30]:
Upset that I left. And it's like, well, okay. And then I have seen companies now that have policies that are really like, hey. If you're gonna leave, like, we'll, you know, we'll pay you extra for the last month and just make sure we do a great hand off and, you know, hopefully, if if we really like to, you know, we might see you again later after you've gone and grown and flown. And, like, when you onboard somebody that used to work for you, there's so much that you can shortcut to Mhmm. That I don't see why companies don't see that kind of thing as more of an asset nowadays. Like, just being able to be a little bit more realistic with with people than Yeah. Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:40:06]:
Command and control, like you said it.

Ryan Treece [00:40:09]:
Well, I think it it's very short sighted. Right? Because they're if if you let someone come back, then there's this, like, insecurity that maybe more people will leave if they see we'll take them back. You know? It's like a toxic relationship with the employer. Right? And so it's very I don't know, self conscious. I I don't know.

Nikki Gonzales [00:40:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Ryan Treece [00:40:29]:
Huge corporations having these policies. Right? And I I like how you mentioned when I leave a company, I think that's part of a huge indicator of I have people that genuinely reach out and they, it was awesome working with you. Best of luck. Because I always try to support people. I don't I don't support companies. Right? And so when I'm working with someone

Nikki Gonzales [00:40:52]:
know customers also, like, follow the people. Exactly. In our industry, especially, like, controls people, sales people, like, I don't know how many customers I've sold to from multiple companies just because they liked me, and they wanted to know what I had for them at any given time.

Courtney Fernandez [00:41:07]:
We were just talking about this.

Nikki Gonzales [00:41:10]:
Yeah. And trust me, I will continue to recommend my previous employers if I still believe in them, right, to those same to those customers and then my new customers, right, if I happen to think that they could use what I used to sell or what my, you know, former company used to do. Your employees are a huge, like, networking tool if they leave you, if you if you empower them to do that.

Ryan Treece [00:41:32]:
Yeah. And how you leave that is is the biggest indicator. Right? You can have an awesome company while you're there, and then if you're, you know, on the way out, they're they're rude. That can kill you're gonna have more conversations openly about that company. Yes. And it's gonna be viewed as less biased than the people who are currently working there, and their livelihood depends on the reputation of the company. And I don't

Nikki Gonzales [00:41:55]:
think Absolutely. Yeah.

Ryan Treece [00:41:56]:
I don't think that gets said enough, but I think that's another thing as you progress through your career is you kinda find those people who support you. And I think I I read something or heard something and it's something along the lines of, like, keep people in your network who will bring your name up in a room full of opportunities.

Nikki Gonzales [00:42:14]:
Right? Yep. Yes.

Ryan Treece [00:42:15]:
And I had a I I always like finding specialists, you know, for each of these different things in my network. And I almost always if I run into a problem, like, you know what? Not me, but I have someone. You need to call her. You need to call him. Right? Whoever whoever that may be. But I also noticed a lot of people aren't doing that. Right? It was almost always a one way street. Or I would do that, and then I would hear, like, weird feedback from the customer or something.

Ryan Treece [00:42:44]:
Right? And so I think finding those people that you trust that, one, they know what they're doing. They're they're an honest salesperson. They're genuinely gonna be there to help. When things get tough, they're gonna go to the plant at 07:00 at night and sit there on the line and and make sure it works and stand with them. Finding those type of people and then making sure that, I don't know, you you have the the right network that you keep there. But that's that's tough because it's just learned over time and experience. Right?

Nikki Gonzales [00:43:13]:
Yeah. So shout out to Caitlin Young and Brett Young in Kansas City. They are the people you wanna call if you ever have anything down in the middle of the night. They will come. They will be there. That has been vetted and verified by our network.

Ryan Treece [00:43:26]:
That's We

Nikki Gonzales [00:43:27]:
were just recording with Caitlin earlier, and, like, this literally came up. So I thought Really? We are yeah. And now Yeah. Here we are in a room potentially full of opportunity. If anybody here is from Kansas City, we will personally vouch for them. They Yeah. So And it's it's super important to be able to know good people. Because you're right.

Nikki Gonzales [00:43:42]:
Just any referral isn't just like, it could be a disaster if you refer people that to someone that, you know, isn't gonna be trustworthy or whatever. So it's important to kinda have a a a really good network of people you can trust around you. And in this industry, I think reputations do precede a lot of people. But it's hard because it's kinda siloed. Right? We have these siloed networks. And so I've definitely interacted with people on the national scale that then when I talk to their local, like, people in their local market, they're like, oh, no. Do not, like, stay away from that person or that company with a 10 foot pole because their local reputation is terrible.

Ryan Treece [00:44:19]:
Yeah.

Nikki Gonzales [00:44:20]:
And that sort of stuff is, like, now that we have the age of the Internet, it's great. But you also like that personal, you know, knowledge of someone is important too. And I don't know what that balance is, but other than just trying to get to know people, there's always a risk. But I think, you know, you can kinda once you've been around people a few times or seen or heard from other people that have worked with them, you can get a feel for. And then just a lot of people have, like, you know, they've been in the industry for decades at different companies. And Yeah. Like you said, people once they leave, once that relationship is severed, somebody is gonna talk. And you either hear the good things or you hear the the bad things.

Courtney Fernandez [00:44:55]:
We used to say that's the difference between having a brand ambassador or having a brand assassin when people leave. And I've actually in the last two years, I've seen it go both ways. Like, I worked for UR in 2021, and it like, I had a great experience there, and I don't work for them anymore, but I still speak very highly of them. I consider myself a brand ambassador, and I've seen another company that just, like, did people so dirty that not only will I not, like, recommend your product, talk about your product, integrate your product, I won't do business with you, like, at all. Not the employees of the company. Like, there's some employees of the company I'll still talk to, but the company as a whole, like, all these employees have bad things to say about having worked for them. And, you know, that stuff is is detrimental in our industry.

Nikki Gonzales [00:45:41]:
Oh, yeah. And people do talk even though they don't do so publicly because nobody wants to be sued or anything like that. Somebody on our team received a a a request to take down one of our posts a while back. We didn't actually violate anything, but it was their opinion that we may not be clear about certain thing and that they request that we, like, take it down. So even even just saying something where we even, like, in the post made clear the thing that it could have been potentially that it wasn't that. But, you know so everybody I know, guards, just like the NDAs with the case studies. Right? It's like people don't wanna take on the liability of saying something wrong, of being criticized, or if somebody, like, talking bad about you back. So it's just important to have people that you do know that you can trust, that you can privately talk to to kinda suss out.

Nikki Gonzales [00:46:26]:
Maybe if you're trying to do a big deal or you're looking at a big locking in with a big vendor or something, just ask a few people that you trust that maybe have experience with that. That can always go a long way as well. Because now we live in the age of, like, there's so many choices for everything. There's great choices for everything, and everybody's marketing material says they're the best at it. So how how do you really know? And sometimes it's just what works best for you because your integrator is used to it. I mean, that sounds like a terrible thing, but it's actually not. It's like the cost of implementing is also a huge part of the project, the cost of support maintenance implementation. So, like, I know, like, my dad, he does some things the same way that he's been doing it for ten years.

Nikki Gonzales [00:47:03]:
And it's like, it may not be the most effective way right now, but it's a lot faster for him to do it that way than to learn a new way to do it. And if the old way still works and they're still maintaining that framework and they're still, you know, all that stuff, then that's actually the most cost effective way of doing it Yeah. Because of the situation. Yeah. But, Ryan, where can people follow you? Where should people get in touch with you or your company if they want to learn more about what you do or your solutions or any of that? Plug what you want right now and then where can people expect to see or anything that they should expect to see, like, coming up from you? So shows or things you're excited about that other people might get excited about as well.

Ryan Treece [00:47:41]:
Oh, good question. So follow me on LinkedIn. Send me a message. I'm pretty responsive on there. Freeway.com. We have a lot of good documentation for for some newer stuff. We're doing a good job updating that. And, yeah, keep keep an eye out.

Ryan Treece [00:47:54]:
We we have some new hardware coming out. We're we have a lot of stuff in the r and d pipeline that's gonna hit in the next six months. And so I I can't can't talk about a lot of it, but I promise it's gonna make everyone's lives easier and and more simplified.

Nikki Gonzales [00:48:08]:
So thank you everybody for joining us. Maybe see you next week, and I hope you have a great rest of your Thursday, and rock the rest of the week.

Ryan Treece [00:48:15]:
K. Thanks. Mhmm.