(slow dramatic music)
- Excellent.
Hey, I am Rodney Clark, Vice President of the IoT
and Mixed Reality Sales Team here at Microsoft.
I'm joined by David and Rick from Ecolab.
- I'm David Goforth.
I'm Vice President of the Field Sales
for Ecolab Food & Beverage North America.
- I'm Rick Stokes.
I am Area Tech Support Manager for Ecolab,
and Food & Beverage North America.
- Well thank you both some much
for being here with us today.
Why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit
about Ecolab and your role and the customers
that you serve?
And, David, I'll direct that to you.
- Obviously, we're with Ecolab,
the Food & Beverage Division,
so we, our sales and services are targeted
towards anyone that manufactures food or beverage items.
So it could be a dairy processing facility,
it could be a brewing operation, a beverage operation.
It could be any type of food,
and that covers a lot of different scenarios,
and also protein.
If you think about poultry manufacturing,
beef manufacturing, so really anybody that,
any type of food or beverage manufacturing,
we are normally involved with those facilities.
- Excellent.
And it's a fascinating part of the industry
that you're in.
And I know that,
(laughs) we've all seen changes in the way
that technology is enabling transformations
of all industries, and businesses of all types.
What role has technology played for Ecolab
and how have you been able to leverage new innovation
to improve processes and customer connection?
- Well, our travel's been reduced to almost zero
during these last few months, due to the COVID situation.
And in some cases our customers are not allowing us entry
into their facilities as well,
so obviously we had to scramble
to try to maintain a high level of service to our customers.
We pride ourselves on our service.
That was the questions we asked:
How do we assist our field teams and our customers
with troubleshooting issues?
How do we keep those touchpoints with the customers
to ensure they're producing safe quality foods
and beverages?
And that's how we've integrated
the digital technologies into our organization
by being able to work remotely, but yet still be on-site.
So that's really helped us be able to provide service,
what we call world-class service,
without being on-site 100% of the time.
And it's really changed the way we look at things
and the way we attack our service programs now,
and moving forward in the future as well.
- What were some of the ways, Rick and David,
that you measured your success
through the use of some of this technology?
And maybe actually walk us, as you answer that,
or think about it, maybe walk us through
and paint the scenario when you talk
about the remote use of HoloLens and remote assist.
So maybe talk us through a scenario,
you know, how you measured and thought about things
in the 2 1/2 years since you started,
and then has that changed at all since COVID?
- If we look at the measurements,
I think obviously we've been able
to reduce our travel expenses for SEAL Team
as well as for our account managers out in the field.
We've been able to utilize the technology remotely
so we don't have that travel time or that travel expense.
We've also been able to look at things like efficiency.
When you think about travel and the amount of time it takes,
we are able to now troubleshoot our customer's issues
a lot faster, so we're a lot more efficient
in the turn-around time.
Once we hear about an issue, we can react a lot faster.
Normally the SEAL Teams are scheduled out. Pre-COVID
two to six weeks out.
And so now we can actually respond very quickly, remotely,
and a lot of times we can respond
with two to three SEAL Team members
instead of just having one person on the phone.
So we're a lot more efficient,
we can get more eyes on it as well.
And so we're able to utilize more SEAL Team members
and I think that's making our customers
a lot happier as well.
So that's a tough one to measure,
but customer satisfaction's a big one there, so.
And I guess the last one is that
we have the ability now to train and share knowledge,
and really assist internally and externally.
Assist internally with our account managers,
or account managers in training,
or if someone has a question about a piece of equipment,
we're able to quickly be able to train them.
Or we're able to troubleshoot our customers' issues
or help train them as well
with a lot of this remote technology as well.
So those are the kind of the ways
where we're measuring the success
of utilizing this digital technology.
- So, David, as you were talking through how you look at
and measure success, the thing that popped into my head
is that even the best technicians need help
from experts from time to time.
And as you experience the use
and incorporation of technology,
things like travel time, having the true experts
in addition to the folks who are on the front line
be available to your customers,
I'm sure has made a difference in customer sat.
Do you talk about this value at all to customers?
The fact that you are utilizing this technology?
You mentioned customer sat as an index,
but what about the conversations
that you have with customers
and how are they experiencing your investments
in use of the technologies? - Well it's a great question
'cause I can think about the scenario
where we used the HoloLens technology several weeks ago,
and the customer was just blown away by the technology.
So they saw it in use and I think they see that
as Ecolab being at the forefront
of utilizing that technology, but also too,
we're utilizing it now.
Just today, we shipped out one of the HoloLens units out
to a customer and let them wear it,
let them try it out, let them troubleshoot,
so we wanted them to be able to utilize it.
We're even talking about how do we potentially,
you know, putting together deals to where
maybe they have a HoloLens unit and they utilize it,
and they utilize our technical team, our SEAL Team,
and our account managers there for support
with their own HoloLens units.
So we're look at, as part of not only just our service,
troubleshooting, training, but also now we're utilizing it
in some of our sales process as well to say hey,
look at this digital technology that we're using.
We're able to now be here a lot faster than we used to
and you have access to some of our top team members
when it comes to our field expertise
in a lot shorter notice.
And we're looking at how do we incorporate this into sales?
Do we provide HoloLens units to these customers?
Do we provide remote assist licenses to the customer,
or at least have guest licenses
for them to utilize for us?
So we're really excited about utilizing the technology,
not only for our own internal,
and utilizing it to troubleshoot issues for our customers,
but also, how do we incorporate that
as part of our sales platform moving forward.
And really, to me, it's about leading
with digital technology, not only in service,
but also in our sales platforms in the future.
- That's great.
As you were going through that piece,
I was just thankful that we've had this partnership
between Microsoft and Ecolab for years,
and it's really great to see
when we can apply new innovation and technologies
to age-old customer opportunities and problems.
But I wanna go back, Rick, to a statement that you made
around how you got engaged and involved in this.
And you talked about starting with teams
and then graduating to remote assist,
and ultimately leveraging HoloLens.
Take us through how you actually made the choice
and decision on remote assist;
some of the things that you were thinking through
in that process, and then ultimately how you decided
to pair that with HoloLens.
- We were able to do a proof of concept
that showed that we could turn these things around
much quicker and I had more flexibility
because part of my world is scheduling who goes
as an expert.
And some of the limitations I have in the past,
when we were traveling everywhere, is where are you.
Now it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter where they are.
They can be East Coast, West Coast, anywhere in between.
As long as they have some time available,
I can schedule them so I'm getting the right expert.
So that was something key to that proof of concept,
is to show that we actually were delivering value
with the HoloLens and the technology was able
to adapt to those environments.
It's an industrial environment.
You can't take all kinds of technology in there
and expect it to work,
in noisy, dusty, wet environments,
but this tool was designed to be able to adapt to that.
- Yeah, it's awesome.
I think about it as like phoning a friend
to help me solve a real-time problem,
but the cool part is that it's in 3-D.
Right? (laughs)
I mean, it's just like the ultimate.
Can you walk us through?
So take us into the beverage plant,
or take us into the poultry plant
and walk through an example of how that SEAL
will work with your account team
and ultimately how they serve the customer
through the use of this technology.
- So we're dealing with our travel restrictions
and everything but the customer was having a problem
where they were not able to clean a piece of equipment
called a separator.
It's a pretty complicated piece of equipment,
lots of parts to it, and it's cleaned actually
by an automated program.
And so an account manager that's in the area
that doesn't have quite the years of experience
as our experts needed help.
So we were able to ship them a HoloLens
and that account manager was able to go into that plant
when that separator was being taken apart.
Normally that's a key time that you want an expert there
to see it disassembled, because they're gonna pick up
on some cues during the disassembly.
Way harder to do with just pictures,
or videos, or things like that.
It's difficult because you can't direct people
during the disassembly.
And in this case, the expert was able
to not only watch the live disassembly,
but through the account manager,
he asked the account manager to test a specific area
of that soil, 'cause we have test kits
that tell us what types of soil that is,
and he was guiding the account managers hands remotely
from, you know, 1,000 miles away to go through
and get that key information to be able to then conclude
within that two-hour tear down
of what was causing the problem.
Why wasn't it cleaning properly?
And that's just so much harder on a picture,
or even a video, because you can't stop in the middle,
wait, don't go any further, let's check this.
One of the things though that I'm also lookin' forward to
in the future, that I see this,
is becoming an expert takes time.
And honestly for us, it takes visits.
So for us, you've got 100 visits under your belt
or something like that, that's just starting out.
You need time to build that up.
But you also need problems.
And the idea is we don't create the problems,
we solve the problems.
But when we can utilize a technology
that lets a new person who may be nowhere in the area
watch how an expert is solving a problem,
that knowledge transfer,
that efficiency of knowledge transfer,
just the opportunity that's created with that,
I mean, we've had sessions where up to 60 people
had been listening in on a training session
about a specific piece of technology.
I don't think we had a solution like that before.
This should accelerate people who are beginner
or intermediate into that expert range much faster,
which is important because they're harder to find than ever.
- So I really see that really being an area
where it's untapped for us but really,
will be a big part of our future,
utilizing HoloLens or remote assist in the future
to be able to train our account managers,
to be able to train our customers,
and also to help them troubleshoot
some of that equipment as well,
so that's one area I really see
that we have not utilized as what,
but I see it becoming a big part of what we do.
And then also too, we've talked about utilizing it
for troubleshooting, we've talked about utilizing it
for training some, and Rick talked about that.
I see that becoming more and more for us,
where we can train large groups,
or we can train, especially where we're trying
to show them a PLC panel, or we're showing them
where we're moving through steps of a piece of equipment
and we want to utilize the HoloLens to do that.
I think that's something that we've,
we're looking forward to being able to utilize
to help train our field team.
We've got about probably 50% of our field team now
that's less than five years.
We had a lot of people with retirements
and this is a division where people come to work
and they stay for long periods of time normally.
But we've had a lot of people retire
and we've got a lot of young people,
so we gotta get them, as Rick stated,
it takes time and experience to get them trained up.
But I do feel like with this technology,
we're gonna be able to accelerate that training quite a bit
than what we would've done if they were just going
to the plant each and every day.
- So I just wanna say thank you so much
for all the work that you've done.
As we continue to innovate on remote assist,
on HoloLens 2, I know we can count on Ecolab,
not only in those two areas of tech,
but working with us to explore ways
that we can bring these efficiencies
and we can bring this innovation to our joint customers.
So thank you, gentlemen, for your time today.
- Thank you.
It's been a great partnership.
- Thank you.