- Right.
So let's talk about,
let's take it all the way back
to the enterprise solution thing.
So, enterprise solutions we've identified,
were not even possible, until Industry 4.0.
And this fourth industrial revolution
is a present day thing, right?
It really just happened,
in the last five to ten years.
It's unfair to say that it happened 10 years ago,
cause it really didn't happen 10 years ago.
It's really been less than that.
People've been talking about it,
but it really hasn't come into practice
until the last five years.
So in order for us to even develop enterprise solutions,
we needed the fourth industrial revolution.
We needed networks.
We already had to have
the third industrial revolution happen.
That is automation.
Now, in the fourth industrial revolution,
we're taking everything that we,
all that information now that's available,
because we automated,
and we're doing something with--
We're helping to automate the process of making decisions.
And we want to make those decisions in real time.
That's why digital factories matter.
But in order to do that,
we have to create new integrators.
We have to create new distributors.
We have to create new products companies,
that are gonna be able to service this transformation.
What I want to talk about right now is,
what does the integrator of tomorrow look like?
And in order to answer that question,
I want to tell you what the integrator of today looks like.
Now this is gonna piss off a lot of my integrator friends,
because I am going to show our customers basically
how their business works.
But here's how an integrator works.
An integrator starts out small, generally as a niche.
They start out in a niche,
I'm a conveyor integrator,
I'm gonna integrator conveyor systems
into my material handling facility, okay?
But generally here's what happens.
An integrator has, say, two senior engineers.
And those senior engineers are rock stars.
I was one of these guys.
I've worked for other integrators.
The senior engineer started out as a junior engineer,
or as a contractor.
The junior engineer and the contractor are hired short term,
and they had super super high turnover rate.
You generally keep about one in ten of these people.
So, one in ten for greater than six months.
So, I've got my senior engineers,
and then I also have my apps engineer.
My applications engineer used to be a senior engineer.
So he used to be a rock star.
The applications engineer does sales and design, okay.
So the applications engineer is the forward facing person,
who goes to the customer,
and hears them out about their problem,
takes the statement of work,
and turns it into a quoted solution.
That application engineer works with the sales department
to write a scope of work,
to do the SOW, and to do your contract.
And that apps engineer and those senior engineers
are the ones who are always talking to the customer.
This senior engineer,
sometimes is your project manager as well.
Or, you have a PM, who used to be a senior engineer.
So they kinda go like this, okay.
So your have a project manager
who used to be a senior engineer.
So these guys are the one that sells the customer
the bill of goods.
Oh and that sales guy.
And the project manager gets the project file.
And here's what happens.
The project manager writes out, you know,
step one, step two, and step three.
He writes out a schedule.
Then he interfaces with the customer, so this one goes,
this guy's always talking to the customer.
Keepin' a smile on his face.
And then what happens is the project manager
gives the project to the juniors and the contractors.
They call a contracting company,
they bring in the engineers,
and these engineers are the ones who do the actual work.
No one who's every talked to the customer ever.
The senior engineer, if they run into a problem,
the senior engineer is the one who goes in
and reassures the customer everything's going hunky-dory.
This is the reason that most integrators
keep one out of every three customers.
So the average is that,
the average integrator does a second project
with a customer one out of three times.
This is the old model.
This is the Industry 3.0 model.
So one of the things that I would do,
is I would ask my integrator,
do you operate like this?
There are some fundamental issues
with the way that this model works.
Number one,
they use the waterfall project management methodology.
That means that we have to clearly define
what our deliverables and milestones are.
Now I can tell you that for enterprise solutions,
if you watched out earlier videos,
you know that you don't know
what the milestones and deliverables are.
You don't know what they all are.
You only know the first half.
So you have to be agile.
And in order to be agile,
you can't use waterfall project management.
You need to use, I like to use, Vanilla Scrum.
Because again, we said,
we have to think like software developers.
Even though we're engineers,
we gotta think like software developers.
So we use Vanilla Scrum.
Vanilla Scrum is, I put all my tasks back here,
and I break my project out into phases,
or into releases, or into sprints,
and then I just draw my tasks
and drop 'em into a certain step.
As a new requirement comes up,
we just add it into the backlog and drop it in.
Here, what we have to do,
is we've got to add it to the end of the schedule.
We have to write a change order.
We have to do all these things in waterfall.
Waterfall is not designed for enterprise solutions.
Waterfall is designed for construction,
which by the way is where it came from.
I dunno, we're not building plants, the last I checked.
Alright, so that's the first problem,
with the way the traditional integrator does it.
The Industry 3.0 integrator does it.
The second problem is that these guys
aren't doing your project.
Those are the rock stars.
They're not doing your project.
- [Man] They're the guys you want to--
- They're the ones you want doing your projects.
But they're not the ones doing your projects.
And this guy is definitely not doing your projects.
I assure you that the applications engineer,
even if the integrator, yeah,
the applications engineer is the guy who runs the company.
It's almost always.
The average integrator is less than
five million dollars of revenue a year.
So that's, this is inside baseball.
If you wanna know, if you're a CEO.
If you're a decision maker.
If you want to know why your projects fail.
They fail for this reason.
This is just one of those reasons.
There's lots of other reasons,
you have, why your enterprise projects are failing.
That's one part of it, okay.
So the integrator of the future,
I could keep going, I could talk about how,
eventually once you identify the rock star,
the rock start becomes a senior,
but it's one out of ten.
You have all this huge turn over.
- [Man] Then he goes and creates his own company.
- Then he goes and creates his own company.
And that's one of the reason, because,
if he's a rock star,
he's not gonna come here and get paid $80,000 a year
when he's generating 450 to 500 thousand dollars
a year in revenue.
All that kind of thing.
There are some integrators
that build themselves like law firms,
which are reputation based, limited liability partnerships.
But the vast majority of integrators, I assure you,
are built just like that, okay.
Alright, so the integrator of the future.