Kendall Beushausen

Emerson’s Kendall Beushausen follows up his 5 Questions for Operational Certainty Consultant Kendall Beushausen podcast with this in-depth FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod podcast.

Kendall describes how the Internet of Things is all around us in our personal lives and how it is being applied in the manufacturing industries to improve business performance in many areas, especially reliability.

We hope you’ll enjoy this episode and will consider subscribing to the whole FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod series on your iOS or Android mobile device.

Transcript

Jim: Hi everyone. This is Jim Cahill. And welcome to another edition of FIRSTHAND: A conversation with an operational certainty consultant. Today I’m joined by Kendall Beushausen and he’s an Operational Certainty consultant based in South Carolina. You may have heard the earlier podcast on Kendall. He has a wealth of experience both in the Navy—the United States Navy—as well as some other companies before joining Emerson 11 years ago. And he has a wealth of experience in reliability. And today we’re gonna talk a little bit about digital transformation and how that intersects with reliability. So welcome to the podcast, Kendall.

Kendall: Thanks, Jim.

Jim: All right. Let’s start out by can you tell our listeners what is the internet of things and industrial internet of things which also go by IoT and IIoT?

Kendall: Well, Jim, in the simplest form, IoT or IIoT is the idea of connected devices and, as you know, today we’re living in a world with many, many devices that are connected to the internet, so to speak. Differentiating IoT and IIoT, IIoT is specifically to the industrial world, so it’s industrial internet of things.

Jim: You often hear with that digital transformation, so how would you describe digital transformation?

Kendall: Digital transformation to me is simply what we do with these connected devices. The connected devices provide a wealth of information that make our lives easier, more convenient, etc. But what we do with that information is ultimately how our lives have changed and that also applies in the industrial world. How can this technology make our business better, easier, faster, safer?

Jim: You know, I know it’s all around us in our personal lives, even this podcast we’re doing, people can subscribe to it, have it come to them, listen through their Bluetooth in their car, it’s all in there. Can you share some examples maybe of digital transformation occurring in our personal lives?

Kendall: Absolutely. Well, you hit on the podcast as an example, but I mean, let’s talk about something as simple as the telephone. Twenty to 30 years ago, everyone had a landline in their house, and you had to run to the kitchen to answer the phone when it rang. Now we have these devices that we carry with us wherever we go, and not only can we call somebody on these phones, there’s multiple means of communication through different applications such as texting, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. These all have different levels of involvement or complexities, let’s say. But ultimately, the communications that we used to have 20, 30 years ago has significantly changed, we don’t have to wait for somebody to get home to talk to them. We can send a message to find out if they’re available to chat on the phone.

Also on this phone, let’s consider television or entertainment. When I was growing up, there were three stations, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and you can watch whatever you wanted as long as it was on their schedule. But today, we can use this same device to stream whatever show we want and as what’s common now is binge-watching. So it’s improved by entertainment world for those that are into movies and sitcoms, etc.

Another good example is our health. I have several apps on my phone that help me track my health and my wellness through different applications. Some of them are exercise applications. My scales in the bathroom actually connect to my phone, so when I stand on the scale, it automatically connects to my phone and sends my metric information to my phone and it gives me a dashboard of information about my health from my BMI to my body fat and my weight, obviously, my metabolic age, visceral fat, there’s just a wealth of information that’s provided with these connected devices. So I could monitor my health performance over the course of time. Obviously, it gives you training options as well, so I can go look and see how much weight I’ve lost over the course of a period of time, or gained.

Another example in our personal lives is I have home security cameras at my house and with my phone, anywhere I have a cell signal or wifi signal, I can look and see what’s going on at my house. It also lets me know if there’s anything abnormal going on through motion sensors. If I’m not expecting someone at the house and they walk in front of the camera, I get a notification on my phone so I can identify whether or not they’re supposed to be there. Sometimes it’s a cat, the FedEx delivery, UPS delivery. I can make sure everything is safe and sound from wherever I’m at in the world.

Another very good example, in my opinion, is access to information through YouTube. And the reason that I like YouTube because there are so many how-to videos available, you can pretty much disassemble a house and put it back together by watching YouTube videos.

Jim: Those are all some great examples, especially the YouTube because that’s a nice crossover between our personal lives and our business lives because the how-to can apply to things you’re doing in our customer’s plants and other things. So I guess switching a little bit, what are some examples in our business life?

Kendall: Well, the first one that comes to mind is our access to not only information but people. For instance, we’re doing this podcast, I’m in South Carolina and you’re in Texas and we use these similar technologies through WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype, Jabber to conduct business on a very regular basis with these tools. I’m constantly in meetings with clients in Montana, Chicago, many other places, far away as in the Middle East at times with these technologies.

Getting more technical in my line of work, we’re able to use this digital transformation and connected devices to improve our equipment monitoring or even process monitoring for our clients. And really what that boils down to is we can see issues with processes and equipment much earlier than we were able to before with more specific technologies like vibration. Now we can look at not only vibration, but we can look at the process parameters, put it all together, and basically as what we call the PF curve in reliability, we’re able to identify potential failures much earlier.

Now, this also includes what we call analytics. Analytics is the statistical analysis of all of this data that many people refer to artificial intelligence or machine learning, these all kind of go hand in hand and managing all of this data because with all these connected devices in the industrial world, we have a constant stream of multiple data sources that we, as people, don’t have a capacity to process. So this ne