Dale Hanna and I talk about the services that are provided by Foresight Intelligence.

Dale, you've got... Well, in the last couple of three weeks, we had a couple of blogs from you relative to maintenance and text messaging and software that makes the management of equipment easier. Bill Piles of Vice President of Product Support for Nordtrax and others, he's written in the same time period. Let's start at the beginning. What got you interested in applying software to equipment? How long have you been doing that? It's a long time now, isn't it?

In the fleet management side, does that mean you cover all brands?

It's a safer place too, because if I'm not mistaken, Most of the major brands had their own telematics fault code systems. There was not compatibility from one to the other.

So in effect, you filter, you're a filter between the OEM hardware software and the dealer's business information.

So, okay, and I won't go into the brands, but we can cover that in another blog, perhaps. Yeah. One of the things in this industry is the manufacturers, Caterpillar, Comenzu, Volvo, Case. Dear JCB, others, they did not want to share. They typically don't want to share things. Standard times, flat rate times, sensors, fault codes, all of those things. And I think they're slowly but surely breaking down. Automotive and on highway, everybody shares everything. And let the best man win. So I don't know of anybody else that does the transformation and the interfacing between these different. vendors and the information that a contractor needs to have or a dealer needs to have. Is there anybody competing with you in this?

So let's stay there for a second. So I own a fleet of equipment, or I'm a dealer and I have a rental fleet, or I'm some other hybrid. Yes. I repair these machines. Okay. And let me say I'm a dealer and I repair it. You have a tool that sends text messages out to the contractor on every... day whenever there's activity against that work order. True?

It's almost like I'm from another era. We used to give pagers to people. Yes. For exactly the communication dilemma that you talked about. You find something additional on the machine. You try and call while they're nowhere near a phone. They're on the job site. They're on a machine or whatever. We gave them a pager. That helped. Today with texts, I mean, people are married to their phone. They're texting all the time, particularly the younger generations.

And is that your experience as well at 90 seconds? The response is that quick?

Yeah, that happens to me too. And it's interesting, my grandkids. You know, they're much younger, obviously, but they don't use the phone hardly at all. It's all texting.

Well, I don't know if you noticed, but Elon Musk just announced yesterday or the day before. He's covered the world now. Airplanes can be doing Internet connections no matter where they are in the world.

That's right. And Bezos is going to do the same. So the texting attribute, to my understanding, you can also have a text go underground in a mine. 50,100 feet underground, they're able to receive text messages.

So that's the texting. That's communication on the progress of a work order of a repair. And that solves a huge problem from a communication point of view. I have no idea what the statistics are, but I bet you the first attempt to communicate, you and I on the phone or a text, say phone, I bet you it's less than 50%. Me trying to call you and get you. Oh, yeah. Half the time, I'll have to leave a message. And vice versa, the same will be true for you calling me back.

Yeah, it's remarkable. Okay, so we've got that communication going back and forth. You mentioned inspections. Do you have a format you've developed or do you use the manufacturer's formats or what? How did you get into the inspection side of things?

So you're doing that on a tablet? You're doing that on a phone? You're doing it on a laptop or all of the above?

And the phone has got a big enough format that you can get everything there that you need to get?

Okay, okay.

And, okay, so I've got the inspection. I've got a format. I go to the machine. I've got an inspector. He fills out the form on the phone. That then goes to the dealer. What do they do with it from there? Do you go so far as to put together a quote?

So one piece of this puzzle is the work order. Discommunication and tracking. Progress reports, I'm going to call it. Another piece is inspections. And that leads to communication with the customer saying, okay, we found some things here you need to pay attention to. And here's a quote if you want us to do it.

Now, is that done in a work order format in their business system? Do you transform that for them as well? Or do you wait for the customer to come back from the quote before you create the work order?

Okay, so let's stay there for a second and just get out into the ozone a bit more. Anytime that I communicate with a customer a quotation, I want to be able to track whether I got the business or not.

Not the way it's being done today. By waiting for the customer to come back before I start a work order, what I'm trying to get everybody in the systems world to pay attention to is I want a portal for customer communication and equipment sales and use sales and rental sales and parts sales and labor, maintenance, all of those things. So that when you come down through this portal, there's only one of two ways you can come out of there. Either give me an order. or it's lost business. And I'm really, this is me now, and it's not pertinent to what we're really talking about, but I'm really concerned that the dealer's market coverage has consistently been shrinking to be only those people that are giving us a fair amount of business. Because I don't have enough people or enough time to talk to all these other people. And that bothers the hell out of me. Because sooner or later, competition is going to be coming around and taking off our big guys.

And that's not in the very distant future, in my opinion. So I get the quote. It goes out there. It comes back quickly. Then I open up a work order and I'm off back into the communications mold. How do you tie into maintenance?

So the other two, fault codes and fluid analysis, let's leave those to the side for the moment. Okay. And we're dealing with maintenance now, and we're dealing with time blocks to schedule. So I've got a labor scheduling piece to this puzzle as well.

And do you do that tied to the maintenance? We

Yes. That also opens you up. One of my favorite little subjects is job codes. And it opens me up with the degree of difficulty of the work and the skill set of the map.

So if I look at, you know, good, better, best, ABC, the degree of difficulty is ABC, hardest is ABC, easiest, the skills of the guy best is ABC is the least. And I can match them according to that and have a schedule to an individual guy. which we haven't been able to do in this industry, to my knowledge, anywhere. And then the other piece of that puzzle is scheduling bays. Everybody talks, Dale, to the fact that we don't have enough technicians. Right. I think that's nonsense. We have plenty of technicians. We can hire plenty of technicians. However, we don't have any place for them to work. Right. We don't have enough bays. Right. And we only operate single shift.

So I got three times the bays that they think that we have, but they're not business people or technical people. So if you get into the scheduling, then that's going to open up potentially. I have in front of me 702 hours of A-skilled work. I have 690 of B-skilled work and 1800 of C-skilled work. And I have this many bays. wait a second, why don't we extend the number of hours on a bay? Yes.

And nobody's really provided that kind of a tool to make it easy for a service manager because he's not there at night.

And that's going to be really powerful once you get that in place.

Yeah. Those that require a crane. Those that require lifting capacity. Those that require drainage or fluid. You know, there's so many different things.

Some dealers that I've seen automotive more than equipment, although there's a few equipment, have a TV screen up in their waiting area. Is it possible that the customer could? have access to a camera so that they could see their machine being worked on during the day?

Is it advisable?

Well, the other thing that that opens up is... And I'm just talking off the top of my head. Yeah. The customer might want to be talking to the mechanic. And they could actually be communicating with the mechanic directly while he's at the machine. Yes. So that opens up another little tool that is potentially beneficial.

And send the video.

But that's also when it would be really beneficial if I had a camera that I can be showing the customer exactly what I'm talking about. This is what we need to do. This is why we need to do it. Are you ready?

Okay, so go to the fault codes next. That's all sensor-driven, correct?

Do you think we're at the point or close to the point, Dale, where we're going to have a mission control in a dealership or room that is equipped with monitors that has people that are just looking at the machines and that the monitor is going to change color, the red, yellow, green, or the 1234 or whatever the foresight intelligence triggers? Are we getting close to that?

It's interesting because command center war rooms terminology. I don't know the frequency of alerts, fault codes. But that's going to be the thing that's going to drive everything, isn't it? I can handle this many faults an hour per person and do it effectively. Because what we start getting into, I think, Dale, and correct me if I'm wrong, we're not selling things anymore. We're selling services now. Absolutely.

And that thing, the machine, the differentiation across brands is disappearing. This service is difficult. Exactly. But the services now I can put a particular dealership brand on that, a value added brand that allows me to differentiate.

So when you set this up, I'm assuming that you sit down, your people sit down with the dealer personnel or the contractor personnel and say, OK, on this brand of equipment, on this machine. These are the 72 fault codes that I want to pay serious attention to. The rest of them are second tier or some such a relationship.

Customer support agreement.

Yeah, everybody's got their own. Everybody

So do you have the management report coming backwards that yesterday we had 7,419 of those 350 were red alerts and you missed communicating to the customer on 62 of them?

So why doesn't everybody use this type of a tool?

Yeah, it's an interesting, it's a generational thing, isn't it, Dale? Most of the people that are reacting well to this are probably in their 40s or mid 40s and younger.

Okay, so the sensors then, let's go a little bit further. Yes. Pricing on all of these things, inspections to work. I could have a different pricing module that I gave a quotation and I got business or I got quotation. I didn't get business. True. Yeah. Do you do that today?

Let me, let me just be silly for a second. The quotation, I'll send it out to you. That's five cents. If it becomes an order, that's another five cents.

I know. I know. So here comes Amazon, and that's the model that I say we're all following. Right. And Amazon Prime. Right. So Foresight Prime. Right. It's going to be $20 a month for the year. $240 a year. Right. And with that, you get this, this, this, this, this. Right. In these frequencies. Right. And I can have a tier one, tier two, tier three. Right. As beneficial pricing, the bigger, the better sort of deal. Do you see that coming?

Yeah. And that's consistent with Amazon Prime too, that they have the one price that doesn't change other than annually. They might throw some bennies in along the way. Right. to enhance their opportunity in the future to change pricing. But I think this is where our industry is going, Dale. It's not going to be selling machines. It's not going to be selling parts. It's not going to be selling an hour of labor. It's supporting the customer such that the customer doesn't need to worry about everything he needs to do to get that trench of 100 feet or to put 10 feet of paving on or whatever the heck it is he's doing with the machine. That's all he's going to buy. He won't be even talking about. 750,000. It might be X. And that includes the machine.

So let's shift into oil sampling then. Oil sampling has been around a long time, at least 50 years in our industry. World War II prior to that. The people that started it were the Forzeron family in Long Beach, and they did submarines in World War II and airplanes. And it's kind of an interesting circumstance. Oil sampling is the only tool that we have that can predict failure. There's nothing else we have that can do that. The sensors, the alerts, that's cool. But I can see three months in advance that the aluminum content is going up or whatever it might be. I still don't think that people respond to oil sampling as well as they could and should. Is that an experience that you're having with the Foresight clients as well, or is oil sampling critical to them?

So it's not a stack of paper. It's specific triggers. It's

Or even CSV, right?

So that war room or command center control or whatever it's going to be called, that then becomes truly. the heartbeat of the dealership or the heartbeat of the contractor managing the health of the machine and the productivity of the machine.

Okay. So those four legs, let me call it on a stool. Typically, I like three legs on the stool. I found out there's only one, but that's a separate deal. What's next? What don't you have that people are starting to ask?

That's an interesting observation. It's kind of like the Tower of Babel, if we want to think in those terms, you know. At the dealer, your example is perfect. We've got 6,8,10,15 different systems that don't communicate with each other. Some of them have unique data elements. Some of them have common data elements. Now we don't know. I mean, part of data analytics is going to be the quality of the data. And until we get integration, that data quality is going to be at issue.

Yeah. It's

Integration. And also. how to sell this to a machine owner. Because we're so used to, like Stephanie Smith, when we did a podcast with her a while back, she gave me an expression that I haven't forgotten, that our salesman used to be walking brochures. The only way that the customer could get the specifications of a machine is if the salesman happened to come out and show them the spec sheet. Right. Today, the customer can see all of that on the internet.

Doesn't need the salesman at all. Nope. In fact, what Alex Kraft does in Heave with the communication, somebody wants a machine and they get texts over to the salesman saying, hey, do you want to quote on this? We're moving into a completely different era, aren't we?

It's really fascinating how this whole thing has evolved. Four basic areas, communication on work order status, sensors, maintenance, oil sampling, integration, and then training people to work in that command center or war room or whatever. Who do you see is going to be doing that? The OEM, the dealer, the contractor? Who's going to be driving that journey? Because I don't know of anybody doing that today. I

Do you see much action with people like Kubota or Bobcat or Hyundai or especially people Sakai and Bomeg? Or is it primarily the main line guys?

I think we've done a very good job. I think you've done a very good job in explaining what Foresight does and why and how. I didn't realize it had been 12 years, but business information, data analytics, the quality of that information. And then the communications piece with text as opposed to phone, the dynamics have changed completely in communication between people. Urgency. Absolutely. You know, it's a wonderful circumstance. How can we wrap this up, Dale? What kind of a bow do you want to put on this?

One of the things that triggers for me is an illustration with Excel. Pivot tables. I'm going to say that the pivot table is the more complex solution. And the spreadsheets are the easy one. And the number of people that are really fluent and easy with pivot tables is very small in the overall subset. Yes. The delivery system that you're talking about with Amazon, Walmart's got the same thing. Now small business is going to have access to the same software. So that differentiator that Bezos had in the 90s when he started, that's going away.

And so now we're looking at the logistics. Now we're into warehousing. We're into distribution and transportation. And that's a process world, still relatively straightforward and simple. But the world you're talking about, that's complex. That needs much more talent in the employee than the other two models.

One of the things that, and you've heard me say this, Ed Gordon, who is one of our contributors and writes books, has a thing called Job Shock. And Ed and I, he comes out here to the desert in the wintertime, lives in Chicago. He escapes the cold and goes to the warmth like you and I enjoy. He says by 2030,50% of the U.S. workforce will not have the skills necessary to be employable. So say he's wrong by 10 years, make it 24. At some point certain, that's going to be true.

And the same thing is true with fast food restaurants. Right. We're going to have kiosks.

Yeah. So the interesting thing to me on the extension of what Ed's talking about is, sociologically, the country is not going to be able to handle that very well. Nobody's thinking about that. Nobody's organizing about it. You know, one of the things that I came out of university in the 1960s, and mathematics and physics and statistics and computer science, so I learned how to wire unit record equipment. I learned basic statistics. And I wanted to be in data processing. So it took me a while to get there. But I ran two shops as a, quote, data processing manager and one company in the software business. And my schooling and experience, I think it was about 1981 or two. So 20 years, roughly. I can't keep up. I give up. I can't stay current. The only way I would have been able to do it is to leave and go back to school. So I just said, because we didn't have that option.

And so if I've got a 20 year life of my education, you're an electrical engineer. I don't know that 20 years is going to make your need satisfied. But today, I think that's 10 years. It may be not even that long. Not either. The education that's going to last X, there's a half-life to this thing that's going to be a problem that we have to deal with. So people are going to be going back to school as adults.

And companies are going to have to pay for that.

absolutely. So the dynamic of the organization is going to change, isn't it?

Well, the other side of that is that we're still ahead of the curve like you are, Dale, that a lot of employers consider that I'm hiring a skill set. What I call is I'm hiring a tool for my toolbox. And if that tool is not sufficiently sharp or sufficiently flexible, I'll get rid of that tool and I'll get one that satisfies the need rather than trying to keep that tool. Rather than training the employee to continue, they say, no, no, I'll just replace them. So it's, yeah, we've got some interesting things. However, your four legs, you know, the sensor, the maintenance, the communication, the oil sampling, all of those things, that's really powerful development for dealers and for people that own machines to control their operating costs. These machines are expensive today.

So thank you for what you do. Thank you for the time. Thank you for being a friend. Anything you want to say in wrap?

I think we covered a lot of ground, and I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did. And we'll have another of these in the future, Dale. But to everybody listening, thank you for... being with us and look forward to having you with us at the next Candid Conversation.