The Secure Connected Worker - Solve Smart

💭FREE Charter Engage: Know IT Podcast Series – The Secure Connected Worker - Solve Smart

This podcast series highlights new innovations, developments, and technologies in the IT Industry. In episode 2 of this 3-part series, we hear from Roland Plett, the Global Lead of the Energy and Mining industry solutions group for Cisco; Tim Workman, the Principal and Strategic Business Consultant for Presagient solutions; and Ronnie Scott, the Chief Technology Officer for Charter as they discuss the Secure Connected Worker as they focus on “Why is now the right time to implement strategies, products, and services that tie together an environment to address the Security Connected Worker?” topic.

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Charter Engage: Know IT – Podcast ll – Solve Smart – Transcript

[Victoria, BC, Canada – March 13, 2023] 

[0:10] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Well, welcome to the second episode of our podcast series Charter Engage: Know IT. I'm your host, Mark George, the Director of Energy, Resources, and Industrial Markets, for Charter.

Today's session is entitled Solve Smart and continues our discussion centred on one of the top initiatives within a corporate Digital Transformation strategy - the Secure Connected Worker. In our first podcast, we focused on some of the business drivers that are making this whole topic of secure connected worker timely, in real life. Today, we're going to focus on “Why is now the right time to implement strategies, products, and services that tie together an environment to address the secure connected worker?” topic. 

It's my pleasure to welcome back with us today three industry executives. Roland Plett. Roland is the Global Lead of the Energy and Mining Industry Solution group, for Cisco. Tim Workman, Principle and Strategic Business Consultant from Presagient Solutions. And, Ronnie Scott, the Chief Technology Officer for Charter. All three of them have worked extensively across the globe, helping companies enhance operational performance, productivity, and safety to improve bottom-line results and successfully transform their businesses. 

Tim, do you want to kick us off?

[1:45] Tim Workman, Presagient Group, Principal and Strategic Business Consultant

Thanks, Mark. One of the things that we found when working with a lot of different customers is that they have historically had barriers to entry because of technology foundations. Obviously, being a connected worker implies that you have connectivity. And for a lot of organizations, it's only been in the last few years that they put full connectivity into field locations. Historically, they had to worry about very extensive or expensive communications, in remote locations - satellite, cellular. With the prevalence of new channels and new technologies, suddenly there is a higher layer of connectivity in these remote and field sites that for the first time really makes the practical enablement of these capabilities achievable with in-place infrastructure. So, the intent here is not to start by saying there's a massive change that you have to make to start. And what we find with a lot of companies is that they already have almost all of the right infrastructure, they just don't have the pieces of their systems put together in the right way. So, this is about helping them leverage their existing investments to simply layer in additive capabilities without significant further investment.

[2:52] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

And Roland, that must really create an opportunity for Cisco working together with Charter and Presagient, to provide these types of analysis and assessment as we sit down with our clients. 

[3:07] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining

Yeah, I think that it’s important, though, like Tim was saying. There's not a lot of leading edge here. This isn't a brand, brand new kind of, we’re trying to work the kinks out. A lot of this stuff has been around for a while. It's just getting it into some of these locations, that we're finding are really important, that we haven’t been able to before. Just even with the advent of more cost-effective satellite connections, right, and with larger bandwidth completely changed what it is you can do with workers in some of these very remote locations. And so, this has become a much more important conversation in places where it hasn't been before. Some of these conversations we've had for a while in the manufacturing space or in larger plants and refineries or mills, but not necessarily in remove locations. So, I think all of that makes now a really good time.

[3:58] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Ronnie, would you like to add anything to these points?

[4:02] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

Yeah, you actually mentioned a couple of words in your introduction; that being Digital Transformation. And one of the things that we really have to also just think about, and I think it's really important (what both Tim and Roland have spoken about) in that it's actually not that hard, but what's also important to realize is that it's also extremely capable of being disruptive. And, that can be both against you and for you. If you don't do this – if you don't take advantage of the capabilities you have, then you are going to potentially be wasting assets, wasting time, wasting money, and so on. 

To be honest, in some cases, it may even affect you in the competitive landscape. You may find that there are others who can do the same work for you better. And, I don't want to assume that we're just talking to mine owners here. It could be anyone who’s involved in industries supporting those mines. If a competitor can come in and do the job that you’re doing for 10, 15, or 20% less because they take advantage of these capabilities, that could affect you very dramatically. So, it's about leveraging those capabilities to transform. And we use that word very, very specifically. To transform, not just improve, but to change how your day-to-day business works. And I think that they can add massive, significant benefits to your organization. So, this is something that you should be looking at, and thinking about, now. 

[5:29] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

So Tim, in the first podcast we talked about some of the business drivers. Every organization will have different views on that. From your experience, in the work that you've been doing in the market, where is the best place to start?

[5:43] Tim Workman, Presagient Group, Principal and Strategic Business Consultant

This is the part where we called this episode Solve Smart, because we want to make sure that people have the time to recognize that sometimes doing something big doesn’t mean that you have to build big. When we talk about solving smart, we talk about not trying to create some new omnibus technology project that’s going to drive huge costs and uncertain value into your business. To Ronnie’s point [of] a minute ago, that will be disruptive but not in the beneficial way that you want it to be. 

So, when we talk about solving smart we're really talking about first understanding “What are the technology foundations we already have in place?” How close are you to doing some incremental adaptations that allow you to solve some of those first-value cases?” to really verify that your technology foundations are easily adaptable. When we talk about solving smart, we talk about solving business problems that are prevalent today. If you're forcing a technology into a fit or a solution that doesn't emulate or solve a worker problem, you may actually be adding burden to their daily work. Change resistance will be high and you can negatively impact their productivity. 

So, part of solving smart is looking at what use cases do we have today: i) where we know there are inefficiencies, ii) where we know that people feel frustrated, iii) where we know that people want there to be an improvement in their work environment. And if you can tie those three things together with a value outcome, leveraging existing technology foundations to solve a practical solution and have a measurable business outcome - that's part of how you solve smart. 

Not only does it give you the credibility with your business leaders, it makes the investment case much easier when you can say there was a tangible business problem we’re solving and there is a measurable business value that we're going to track at the end of this,

[7:38] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Roland, I know you work with a variety of different mining clients across the globe. What are some of the use cases that you're seeing and, more importantly, what are some of the near-term results that some of the clients are seeing as they begin to take these steps forward in a very smart and defined way?

[7:59] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining

Yeah, I think that exactly the approach that Tim was talking about is where you want to start. The important thing is to do an inventory of what you've got. And a really practical example is that you have a worker that goes out to fix something - a pump or something in the field - and they get out there. If they’re a new worker that’s not deep into the organization yet, they may not have everything in their head. So, they get out there and all of a sudden, they run into a scenario that maybe they weren't prepared for. 

Now, let's take a look at how that's different. You're connected versus not connected. If you're not connected, now you're walking back to the admin building, or driving back to the admin building, to pull a binder off the shelf and figure out what's going on. If you're connected you can actually take pictures of serial numbers and have that data at your fingertips to to take a look at exactly what information would need for that specific machine. This isn't information they didn't have, to Tim’s point. It's already there. It's just now you're bringing it out to where the workers are. 

Another example – inventory. We talked about location tracking in the first episode. Exactly that, right. You're out there, all of a sudden you realize you need a tool. Now you can look up where is the closest tool. You can have the contact information of experts at your fingertips, rather than having to go back to building somewhere to phone someone. All of these things that we're doing today as workers, but now you're putting that capability into their hands, wherever they happen to be.

[9:25] Tim Workman, Presagient Group, Principal and Strategic Business Consultant

The in real-time component of this in that it also creates a corporate record. One of the things that we don’t focus on enough is that the transactional things that happen over the radio – they might end up in a shift log, they might end up as a radio call that gets translated. But the patterns of the work over time aren’t actually captured outside of those logs. Imagine, and in the last episode, Roland talked about a response to a forest fire. Well, in the moment, knowing where all your people are, is really important and it can be super impactful. But imagine if once the incident has been resolved, the Emergency Management team can go back and look historically and say “Where were the muster points relative to the issues?,” “How did we deploy our emergency response teams?,” “Could we have accelerated our response time if you did a work analysis of your shift changeovers?,” understanding over a period of months what are the patterns of behavior, “What if we shifted our pre-positioning of equipment?,” “What if we moved different stores in the tool crib to different points of accessibility?” 

The learning that you get to be able to do because you've got these, now, patterns of movement within your organization can also create a profound tool for post-activity analysis that you simply can't do today. 

[10:43] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Ronnie, can you give us a sense of what you think the first steps are in real terms, based on the discussion that we’ve just been having?

[10:53] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

We talked in our last episode a bit about the idea of thinking big and getting these big ideas. So, now we have to begin to transition to reality. And in the third session, we’re going to get into a little bit more detail around that. But you need to start off with that - that balance.

And so, we talk about the site here, of cost versus benefit. And I'm sure most of you will know the simple grid of two by two is at high cost, high benefit; is it low-cost, high benefit; is it low cost, low benefit; or high cost, low benefit. And in doing that simple 4x4, you can see simple things that say “OK, this thing up here. This could really benefit for their business a lot.” The cost may not be that high. So then we may then begin to say “OK, what does that look like, how do we map that?” 

And of course, we would suggest that you want to work with experts, people who have done this before, who can tell you “Hey, this is - what you're asking here is actually very achievable, for very realistic costs.” And, that allows us to begin to focus, and allow us to begin to say “OK, here's an investment.” And, what we often find is some of those other things, the high benefit, higher-cost things, can often come as ancillary and build off those initial works. And, even some of the lower benefit, the low-cost things, can sometimes just fall out of the solution.

So, it all comes with “OK, let's begin to map, and let’s begin to structure our plan from here’s some big ideas - let's see how real they are, let’s bring in the experts, let's share my ideas, and see if we can build something out of this.” 

And, the other thing that I think is really important is that you also need to make sure that your ideas are not siloed into where you're thinking is. So, not only bring in outside experts, but broaden the conversation inside your own organization. If you're an executive who sees a bright idea, make sure that the workers, and the managers, and the people who are doing it are going to be able to do something practical. If you're out in the field and you see a problem and you share it, take it up through your management, get it to your exec and share the idea so that we can begin to see how those benefits can play out.

[12:59] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Roland, can you give our audience a sense of what you think some of the key technology enablers, that are either in the market today or that you know are being developed behind the scenes, that are going to help us bring some of these solutions into the secure connected worker environment?

[13:23] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining 

Yeah, we talked a little bit about a lot of this already, being in circulation from a technology perspective. Certainly the network piece is fairly well understood by most companies, in terms of switches and routers and Ethernet and lines and all that sort of thing – fiber. One of the things that's not as well understood is “How do we connect workers wirelessly?” “How do we get to the locations where people are?” that we couldn't before. A lot of that comes down to wireless connectivity. And, there's a number of different wireless technologies that that are really maturing. Wi-fi has been around forever, but now we're actually seeing much broader implementation of that in an industrial environment. So, hardened access point and ways to make wireless endpoints roam between access points better. So, a lot of the newest Wi-Fi iterations do a better job of that.

We've got LTE and 5G moving into the private space and, although there’s challenges with that, there's companies that are solving that and being able to reap the benefits of LTE and 5G for large areas, large private spaces. We have low bitrate wireless, like LoRaWAN and others that allow you to, for a really cost-effective amount of money, get out to really remote locations. You just have to move a little bit of data. 

Another one we just alluded to is satellite. Being able to connect to remote locations that we have no other way to get there but through a satellite dish. That's becoming much more cost effective and capable than it used to be. So, all of those wireless technologies are really, really important at connecting workers.

The other main technology area that's worth considering is “How do your employees communicate today?” “What are they doing for voice, video, and chat type of communication today?” And, leverage that into the industrial space. So, a lot of the hybrid work ideas that we've learnt through Covid, can actually be translated into the industrial environment and augment disconnected worker idea.

So, there's a lot of the technologies we've been developing in house and the integration points of that. We also bring in partners, connecting all the information and resource entities into a workflow environment that workers can take with them in a tablet. We don't do that in-house at Cisco. We probably never will. Some of those capabilities are new. We've got new partners that are being really, really excellent at gluing these things together. And we might refer to some of those in future podcasts. But, we need to go to partners for that. But, we do have visibility across all of that technology as a company.

[16:12] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

And Tim, ultimately when you’re with the clients that you're working with the market, as they’re looking at the different technology options that they have, and the costs and benefit and whether they use CapEX dollars or OPX dollars to implement some of these technologies, what are some of the business results that you are seeing?

[16:32] Tim Workman, Presagient Group, Principal and Strategic Business Consultant

There's two parts to it. The first is the technology investments that some of these companies have already made has been significant. To your point, specifically, we're working last year with a mining company. They use Cisco infrastructure. And, one of the advantages of the way that Cisco has put its products to market, as Roland was alluding to, is you will actually find multiple capabilities with a single piece of infrastructure. And, it's not something that every IT infrastructure technology has, but this company made some really smart choices in their selection of these particular Cisco access points and had built in the integration of multiple radio types. They had all these bits and pieces. The smart design choices from the networking team were in advance of the business understanding how they could take advantage of that. And, it was a pleasant surprise to the operational leaders that said, you know “What is going to cost us in terms of new infrastructure to try and capture all these things?” And, I think it was about a 30-minute configuration of the access points that their networking team did to simply turn things on. 

In this case what happens is you start to get a compounding return on that investment in your IT infrastructure. Ironically, for most companies the ubiquitous Wi-Fi environment simply to pass e-mail, to stay connected, to maintain your corporate information sharing - it's important, but it's not necessarily value-additive in terms of specific OPX cost reduction or value creation. When you take that existing investment and you layer in productivity returns, and again these are examples, we found thousands of hours of non-productive time over the run of the year.  Which aggregated up to millions of dollars in value added, particular around contractors being able to reduce their billable hours. The costs that they had historically incurred with respect to its investigations, that things are trying to manage their time around shift changeover - for any large organization with hundreds of employees moving around your job site, mitigating those even fraction is worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. And, you're not just building a new investment to get that return on investment, you're actually adding an incremental refresh of your existing technology to create that much more significant return on that original investment.

[18:51] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Tim thanks for your observations. Ronnie, obviously from Charter’s perspective, we're seeing a lot of different approaches that our clients are taking as they think about how to take this first step. Maybe you'd like to add some additional comments on specific things that you're seeing that may be valuable for our audience?

[19:07] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

Thanks, Mark. I think one thing we have to be very aware of is that there are going to be obvious things, like wireless proliferation that we can take advantage of. But, the other thing that you may need to be thinking about is that new technologies are coming along every day. 

When a year ago, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite wasn't a thing. And it was not cost effective to do satellite communications. Here we, are a year later, and you can have it on your camper van. 

And likewise, when we started planning out this session that we are doing now, which is just a couple of months ago, OpenAI's ChatGPT didn’t exist, and now it does. And what we've seen is all of a sudden artificial intelligence has come out of closet, from the universities and the science labs, and is now a mainstream technology anyone can get hold of and start messing with. And I'm not saying that there’s a direct use for that in your business today, but who knows, it might allow you to ask questions and solve problems you never thought of. (i) 

And, who knows what's going to be here next week. And so, we need to be aware that things are evolving very rapidly. And while some of these technologies build up over time, some can be sea changes, that we can take advantage of and completely change our business overnight. (ii)

So, you can't stop thinking about it. You can't stop saying “Here is a new technology. How can I use it?” and coming back to the question I mentioned in the first episode, “What if?” Keep evolving and keep thinking. And again, keep bringing in different inputs from other parties, both internally and externally to your organization. And that’s one of the things that Charter loves doing, is sitting with our customers and asking those “What if?” questions.

[21:00] Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Well, that's obviously why the three of us are all working together – Presagient, Cisco, and Charter. Because we're here together to collaborate and help our clients assess and recommend the right combination of people, processes, and technologies to cost effectively implement a secure connected worker solution. 

I want to thank Roland, Tim, and Ronnie for your contributions to this podcast, and for the tremendous insights that you continue to provide to our audience.

Sources:

(i) Introducing chatgpt (no date) Introducing ChatGPT. Available at: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt (Accessed: March 17, 2023).

(ii) TechTarget. (2020, February 10). Is that a C change or a sea change? WhatIs.com. Retrieved March 17, 2023, from https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Is-that-a-C-change-or-a-sea-change