This episode features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Arnaud Langer, Global Managing Partner Edge and IoT at Atos. At Atos, Arnaud is focused on helping customers navigate their legacy-to-edge or cloud-to-edge transformations, leveraging the power of 5G, Edge, and IoT technologies. They discuss Arnaud’s work in the energy industry and the complexities of digital transformations in that space.
This episode features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Arnaud Langer, Global Managing Partner Edge and IoT at Atos. At Atos, Arnaud is focused on helping customers navigate their legacy-to-edge or cloud-to-edge transformations, leveraging the power of 5G, Edge, and IoT technologies.
They dive into Arnaud’s work in the energy industry and the complexities of digital transformations in that space. They also discuss sustainability, optimization, and forward looking edge trends.
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“When you think about the inertia of a power plant, think about a gas or oil based power plant, you've got about a 24-hour inertia on it. So, that means that you need to plan ahead 24 hours how much power will be consumed. A nuclear power plant is about a week and solar is about 10 seconds. If you've got a cloud your solar array shuts down. So we're definitely looking at a different type of management for the grid.”
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Timestamps:
01:15 How Arnaud got started in tech
05:53 The complexity of the tech stack needed to solve business problems
09:22 The intricacies of edge and IoT in the energy industry
13:26 Coordinating energy consumption and use
17:02 Modernizing old tech
19:36 The OT mindset in the energy industry and refresh cycles
26:02 The surprising cost of sensors
30:13 Forward looking edge and IoT trends
36:12 Advice for companies on edges strategies
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko.
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Follow Bill on LinkedIn
Connect with Arnaud Langer on LinkedIn
Learn more about Atos and Dell Technologies collaboration on the NativeEdge platform to unlock new business value across edge environments (Case Study / Video)
Learn more about Atos
Narrator: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Over the Edge. This episode features an interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Arnaud Longer, the global managing partner of Edge and IoT at Atos, a leader in digital transformation. At Atos, Arnaud is focused on helping customers navigate their legacy to edge or cloud to edge transformations.
Leveraging the power of 5G, Edge, and IoT technologies. In this conversation, Bill and Arnaud dive into Arnaud's work in the energy industry and the complexities of digital transformations in that space. They also discuss sustainability, optimization, and forward looking edge trends. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsors.
Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations across your entire multi cloud environment, we're here to help you simplify your edge so that you can generate more value. [00:01:00] Learn more by visiting dell.
com slash edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes. And now please enjoy this interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Arnaud Langer, the global managing partner of edge and IOT.
Bill Pfeifer: So Arnul, I have seen you present in a number of different places in a number of different ways. I've read some of your stuff. It feels like we've had tons of conversations, but through the magic of the internet, we actually haven't. So I'm really excited to have you on the podcast. This will be fun. And definitely welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for, thanks for making the time for us. Thank you for having me. It's always great to get a little background. So can you tell us how did you get started in tech? How did you get here?
Arnaud Langer: Well, I'm not sure I want to go that far back, but I've been pretty much born with a computer in my hands. I think I cracked a few programs when I was definitely underage, and then definitely got into tech as soon as engineering school in France.[00:02:00]
And got into development and application architecture into IOT later on, big data and analytics when I joined the U. S. side of our company, and then later on product building, strategy thinking, and now I'm a global managing partner for technology consulting, responsible for the edge domain. So definitely a global reach for what we are doing in terms of Edge, a bit of IoT as well, but mostly bringing business value to our customers.
Bill Pfeifer: Fantastic. So you work on these really large projects around Edge, IoT, Integrating that into your customers businesses. It's taking it from an idea to actual execution, so it's not theoretical, it's not, you know, like the back end, you're right, you're right on the sharp end of that stick of actually making things work, making things happen for your customers.
And I imagine They're calling on you because they're not really sure what to do. They don't really know how to make that happen and it's integrating IT [00:03:00] and OT and the business and the latest technology and pulling all of that stuff together. Can you give us kind of a sense of what sort of projects you really get involved with in your day to day and how you make that happen, right?
Bringing a client who has this idea. but needs the full range of execution and transformation and integration. And that's a lot. That's really a lot.
Arnaud Langer: It is a lot, indeed. We built this capability over, over the years, indeed. If you think about a business problem that our customers usually have, they know their problem.
They don't necessarily know how to get to the solution or how to solve it. And that's where we come into play, right? If you should look at a bit of history, if you look at IoT about 15 years ago, the goal was to Connect everything and therefore to gather data from all the objects you had produced as a company to, in order to do something about it.
Well, [00:04:00] after a few years, we know a few companies, if not most of the companies who are in IoT, who found out that the value was not there. The cost of connecting all these objects was so high. That it was difficult for them to get value and get an actual return on investment on the investment for connecting all that.
Same thing happened a few years later with big data. Big data, the goal was to collect everything and like build a big data lake within the company and gather data from all the systems to finally, hopefully do something about it. Same thing, the investment for the infrastructure and the processes and the transformation of data along the way.
did not necessarily bring the right outcome or at least the expected outcome from our customers. Really the start of our engagement is what is your business problem? Is it like a margin that's too low? Is it a business process that needs improvement? Is this something else? And so we start from there [00:05:00] and then we start to be as lean as we can from the data acquisition all the way up to the analytics.
ai, so artificial intelligence, machine learning that we train to solve that problem so that we have an investment from the customer that's as, as little as possible so that we provide the value and the value that they're requiring.
Bill Pfeifer: So I think that's probably something that customers really struggle with, right?
You have a, a pile of technology and technologists, you have a pile of business problems. How do you pick a business problem? Identify the technology that's going to solve it, connect that through all of your processes and organization until you actually get to KPIs, outcomes that you can measure and support.
And that's, that's probably as much of an art form as anything else that you do, I would
Arnaud Langer: guess. Yeah. And, uh, the whole technology stack that goes in the middle of all that is pretty complex if you think about it, but thankfully we, we packaged it all in one, Bugs that we would like to [00:06:00] be black box, but most customers would like to look into it.
Where we start from the hardware all the way up. So hardware, OS, virtualization layer, containerization, application, artificial intelligence, all the way up from that vertical standpoint. And then you've got like most of the cases, two to three tiers of deployment. So what we call the far edge. where you have like specific types of hardware designed to be, again, very small in the field, close to where the data is generated to acquire the data.
And then the edge where you've got some of the artificial intelligence inference, and then the core where you store long term data, you get your historical dashboard and stuff like that, that's run there. When you get that whole chain, you And you've got thousands of sites sometimes. This becomes a headache to manage, to deploy first, then to manage, and then to monitor, and then to like do your regular run and [00:07:00] operate of tasks, to, to, to have like a compliance applied to the machines.
Even more so when some of that is on the OT side of the scope where it's then completely isolated. So we have developed the right technology and we are now supported by some of our partners technology as well to have the processes to really automate and be efficient from the get go and deployment and automated provisioning of the hardware, automated provisioning of the software deployed on the hardware.
And, and all that stack to be very, again, lean on the cost for the customers in order to look at the end result, which is the DROI, the business value that we provide. So, Yes, the stack is pretty complex and we know that because it took us about, say, four years to get it like figured out in one simple and single package to deliver to our customers.
But yes, once you have that figured out, our customers [00:08:00] usually find that, yes, it did take some time and then they are glad that they did not take that journey because it's, it's pretty complex. One of the complexities with the Edge is that you're kind of bringing the cloud on prem And so you have that flexibility that the cloud provides, but in the same time you have the complexity of the management that cloud providers usually tend to provide somehow.
But having that on prem, you become responsible for it. So you have to embed all the principles that the cloud usually have, like redundancy of hardware, redundancy of software, et cetera, et cetera. But in the meantime, you want to be very lean. in, in, in order to optimize your operations. So there are, there is a few angles that we have fine tuned, I would say, in order to, to get to the right business value.
And
Bill Pfeifer: connecting from you have many sites and what IOT devices and what pieces of technology on up through to providing value and connecting it straight into the [00:09:00] business because that's what we need to do so that it's not a technology science experiment or a business thought experiment or, right, like, Actually making that happen and connecting it is, wow, there are just so many moving pieces.
And some of these projects are huge. Earlier we had spoken about, you work on projects across a number of different industries, but right now you're working on one that's in the energy industry. You had mentioned. And can you tell us some about what that project is, what that looks like to you, how you got involved with it without getting into proprietary stuff and, you know, divulging secrets and things like that?
We don't want to get in trouble, but it's a really interesting story. Which
Arnaud Langer: is funny actually, because I think one of the things we tend to, um, to forget when we sell services and when we sell stuff as a service is that utility was the first thing that was selling stuff as a service. I mean, literally when you turn on your faucet, you get water coming in, you pay for the water that comes out of your [00:10:00] faucet, nothing else.
You don't pay for the pumps repaired. You don't pay for the pipes that are laying in the ground for, from the city and stuff like that. Same thing for electricity. You just pay for when you turn on the light, that's it. So yeah. The as a service model has been here for quite some time and we've been using it without knowing it.
But it seems like we make a big fluff out of it for IT services when it comes as a service. At the end of the day, we're not reinventing the wheel, we're just doing like we've been doing for for quite some time now.
Bill Pfeifer: We're becoming more mature as an industry, right? That's a super mature industry. You turn on the faucet, you expect water to come out, you know it's going to, you turn on the light, you know there's electricity.
It's not like, Ooh, is it rebooting right now? No. And so now as, as an industry, we have to get to the point of just, it's a utility. You pay for what you use. It's right there.
Arnaud Langer: Exactly. And, and that, that has been our, our goal for us is to really provide a service to our customers where We, uh, become a commodity [00:11:00] where we become something that is expected to work because I don't know about you or our viewers, but it has been a common knowledge that IT fails.
And well, IT has a reputation to fail and IT has a reputation to not be reliable or it's difficult to maintain. Well, it's difficult because in my opinion, we've been doing that the wrong way. If we have automation, if we have redundancy like we have in utility companies, we should not have the same issues.
So that's working with, with this kind of industry is interesting because You get to understand how much redundant they are and how much reliability is at the core of their focus. It's really interesting for us to get there and the size of their network is huge. I mean, if you think about an electric, like a utility provider and the electricity side, you have Let's say as a scale of a small country, say European size of a country, you've got [00:12:00] about 800 stations that are here to transform the current from very high voltage to lower voltage.
And that distributes again in a, in a store type of design into 40 to 50, 000 substations, which are for now in most countries. not smart and they are just expecting, expected to work. And when they don't work, it means that there is a failure and then you have to dispatch technician on site because people are without light on.
Right.
Bill Pfeifer: And hundreds or thousands of people because it's just the scale. I mean, we talk, we talk easily about, Oh, the edge is higher scale. Sure, whatever. But 50, 000 sites.
Arnaud Langer: Yeah. And that's, and that's, I would say a small country. If you look at larger countries like France, Germany. They are five, 600, 000 sites like that [00:13:00] in, within the country.
I don't have numbers for, for the U. S., but I think we are looking at about a few thousand locations per county or state, depending on the density in our states. It's definitely a very large scale. And if you want to have a smarter grid where you start completely incorporating new energy sources, like renewable energies, like wind, solar.
These are micro generation points that are part of the grid. They are at the end of the star, not at the core of the star in the star diagram type of distribution that the Network is used to work and therefore it's complex to integrate because you are producing where it's consumed. So yeah, it's, it's super easy to say, but it's a lot more difficult to integrate because you don't want to overload the network.
You don't want to have it under load and therefore have more requests to, to supply from the, the big generation points. So it's, it's, it's pretty complex ecosystem [00:14:00] to manage. And then you want to get into the anticipation of consumption, of production, and therefore you. have to have the knowledge for that, and therefore data, and therefore you need connected stuff somewhere.
Bill Pfeifer: It's pretty amazing to think from a power perspective, what I didn't realize until I started brushing up against the edges of the industry. I just never thought of it. When you generate power, you put it on the transmission line. It has to go somewhere. It can't just orbit until someone needs it. It has to go someplace.
So the consumption and the production has to be so tightly coupled. Wow. I mean, the scope of that problem alone, how do you know how much power thousands and thousands of people and businesses and transportation networks and all that stuff will be generating in the next minute? Entune your
Arnaud Langer: And when you think about the inertia of a power plant, think about a, say, gas or [00:15:00] oil based power plant.
You've got about a 24 hour inertia on it. So that means that you need to plan ahead 24 hours how much power will be consumed. Nuclear power plant is about a week and solar is about 10 seconds. If you've got a cloud, your solar, your solar ratio is down. So we're definitely looking at a different type of management for the grid.
And that's why, I mean, don't even think about people buying more electric vehicles and then charging them at home, completely changing the type of needs that we have to make that utility be reliable again. So we have a bunch of interesting customers on that domain.
Bill Pfeifer: And then thinking in terms of the investment, right?
So much of the power infrastructure across the world, you know, I, I know in the United States, most of our power infrastructure was installed like 1950s ish. And so it's this huge solid [00:16:00] state indestructible, well, nearly indestructible stuff. That's a little bit of a threat there, but nearly indestructible stuff that was installed and is running.
And it just keeps running and there's no point in investing in it because it works. But now all of a sudden we have all of this solar and wind farms and we're getting so much more dynamic in terms of how much power we need and where we need it and how, where it's being generated. And I mean, that's, then we talk about, Oh, we're modernizing that, but it's not like, You know, modernizing a data center where it's high tech stuff and you're making it higher tech stuff.
Ooh, small change, but it feels big. This is like 1950s solid state stuff. And now we're putting the internet on it. Boom, the change, the level of change and the environments that you've got to be working in. I mean, putting sensors on stuff that's been sitting in place for Decades, I would imagine. How do you do that?
Arnaud Langer: That's [00:17:00] an interesting question and the answer is even more interesting. It's like, like every brownfield, right? You have to work with what you have. And sometimes you just don't have what you need in order to render the service that you're asked for. So it goes all the way from like putting the right sensor in the existing circuits.
to get the data into being able to run analytics on it. One point I want to touch upon, you said that nearly indestructible network that we have for electricity. Well, you've probably never been on the highway when a hurricane passes somewhere. Nope. I've seen, I stopped counting at 300 trucks that were coming back the other way because the hurricane passed.
That's how many trucks were deployed to repair power lines. And thankfully that hurricane didn't make any landfall, so it didn't make any damage. But yeah, and I was on the highway for like maybe a couple hours and I saw 300 trucks. That's how big of a [00:18:00] fear that the power lines going down will just create damage.
And therefore, having that much workforce deployed in a preventive way, it's not even because they were damaged, just because they were there in case they were damaged. Just because it was coming. Yeah. Because the hurricane was supposed to be there and to create damage. And, and when you think about that, like 300 trucks, 600 people, at least, in a response for preventive maintenance, it's like, can we be smarter about that?
Can we be more efficient? I mean, it's just, I mean, and I'm just taking one example of personal experience, but it's I'm sure there were probably more trucks than that.
Bill Pfeifer: Sure. Yeah. Once again, the scale of the, the edge problem is just, it's very different than most people can really get their heads wrapped around.
It's just, and the energy industry is just [00:19:00] like, it exemplifies that. There's, there's so much infrastructure everywhere.
Arnaud Langer: Another example I saw the other day, an electricity provider was to expand their network. So just put down a new cable basically to expand on one city. It was a one and a half billion dollar project.
Oh, okay. So yeah, again, the edges can be big. Yeah, yeah.
Bill Pfeifer: And then. Energy's really heavily driven by the OT mindset, operational technologists, right? You put something in place, you leave it for 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, however long you can. And now we're putting technology in there straight out of data centers.
That tends to be like three to five year refresh cycles. And it may reboot periodically and you know, things like that. So like it's fragile and it's got a short lifespan and it's not super reliable and it's going into Put it in place and 50 years later, it's 100 percent reliable. It's never [00:20:00] gone down.
How do you get those two things together? How do you find the midpoint of like, what's the actual refresh cycle? What's the actual reliability? You can build stuff for 100 percent reliability, but boy, is it expensive and I'm sure they don't want to pay. You know, 50, 000 for one little monitoring PC.
Arnaud Langer: Well, indeed not.
I mean, uh, especially when you think about the scale that the Edge has, you want to be very lean on your spend at each site because you've got many sites. So what we usually have is we don't work with warranty or product shelf life. We usually work with mean time between failures. So we basically take a statistical approach on the hardware and say, okay, meant to last 15 years.
So we'll say build a spare repo somewhere where we have stuff just in case something breaks down earlier. But for the IT parts, yes, I mean, we, the IT boxes that we put [00:21:00] there, the gateways or any other small computer that has been ruggedized and therefore designed with. Components that last longer than data center servers are designed and therefore built to last longer, but not an eternity, right?
I mean, we all know like the, the old computer that we might have some of our shelves and we like to. boot up once or twice a year just to hear the hard drive clicking or the sound of the modem that we get nostalgic about. But at the end of the day, these things are not meant to last very long and probably don't work exactly like on day one.
But for these things, you expect them to work like on day one. And you need that to work that long. So it is a challenge. We have definitely worked with some of our partners in order to get the right hardware, we get the, I would say the, the lens that we need in order to provide the service that we need.
Bill Pfeifer: Now, the concept of IOT in the energy industry is also a little bit different, right? We tend to think of IOT devices [00:22:00] as tiny cheap sensors that you just throw out there all over the place and they feed information back, but then monitoring the energy. Usage in these high voltage things, these are not tiny cheap appliances that you just toss out there, right?
They have to be installed in high voltage lines and in harsh environments and places that aren't easy to get to. And so when you install those, that's what you're going to have for the next 10, 15, 20 years, whatever, whatever the lifespan of that thing is, because many thousands of devices in hard to reach locations, et cetera.
How do you plan for that long of a lifespan on these devices?
Arnaud Langer: We work with different setups here. On the IT side, we're looking at different products that will replace the existing model, if you will, if that one comes out of support. So we've got like a continued compatibility [00:23:00] And again, working with partners like Dell, for example, they have a great policy on continuity of products that mean that the new product will do at least as much as the one the previous one was doing.
That way, when a new model comes out, we can definitely replace and swap the old one by the new one if one of the old one was coming to fail. That kind of policy is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to ensure. the viability of the continuous life of the, of a project or of a deployment. Then you've got other issues and then utility is one where you've got like a, one sensor can cost thousands of dollars or you get into other industries like theme parks where one box will manage and be connected to thousands of sensors.
Thankfully, they are cheaper, but the asset that you, that we monitor in that case, which is the ride on which people are on, then that costs [00:24:00] millions of dollars, right? So it's interesting to see the range of interaction we have, either like having a couple sensors that are like thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each.
or thousands of dollars of sensors worth for one entity that costs millions. But at the end of the day, this is what we consider the far edge. This is where the data comes from. And all that, in all cases, is what creates value for our customers. When we are able to ensure that this thing that we connect holds value and delivers what it's supposed to deliver, that's where we make our customers happy.
So I know
Bill Pfeifer: even just thinking about this conversation and prepping for it, I was thinking about the energy industry in a more granular way. And there were a couple things, there were a couple of those like, holy cow moments and aha moments of, wow, I just hadn't even thought about the complexity. That it takes to put modern [00:25:00] technology into something that's been so solid state, running without interruption, that you can't take down for service.
You can't rebuild, all that stuff. What about this project caught you by surprise? What was your biggest Aha thing, or the most fun.
Arnaud Langer: That's a good one. I think the price of a sensor and then having the first capability to transform a 10 kilovolt, so 10, 000 volts current or tension in that case, into a few volts so that we can ingest it and get data from it.
That was like, I mean, having an electrical background, I know this is possible, but still having that made In a repeatable way and in a way that the sensor is like accurate enough so that we can run analytics out of it and drive the distribution of the current out of that. That was impressive to me, even though these sensors are.
extremely expensive for what something that would be a lot [00:26:00] smaller would cost like cents. So that was one of them. And then it's interesting to see the redundancy and the lack of redundancy in some of the designs. So for example, most of the electricity providers have a star design. I was mentioning earlier, that means that they have one central point of energy production, and then Stations to transform that into 10 kilovolt, let's say, and then substations to transform that further to consumable electricity.
And I was like, is there not a way to manage that like a bit smarter, like having cross lines between substations to like, if one falls down, electricity goes through another one and then provide that from another one. And they ended up telling me that it's actually the case, but they only started doing that recently.
And that, that was kind of surprising to me because that, that would be like, if you are putting redundancy, like X3 at every substation, you probably want to think about like, how different [00:27:00] feeds to their substations in order to guarantee the redundancy at this stage, right? When you think about a data center, you've got like a two to three power sources, two to three internet feeds, and same thing for conditioned air.
So I'm like, okay, so why are we being not that careful about provision of the electricity where you put three switches within the substation just to make sure that the flip actually switches? So I don't know. Right.
Bill Pfeifer: So the substation is super redundant, but then the power feed going into the substation dies and you just sigh.
Aww. Yeah.
Arnaud Langer: And you've got a million people without light. Right.
Bill Pfeifer: But then I guess, I mean, even just pushing the power through the primary line versus the secondary line. And I mean, again, you can't have power just like Cycling around waiting for a home. It's got to go somewhere pretty fast. So I don't know how you balance that stuff.
Is it like intelligent switches or I don't know. Anyway, that's probably getting too deep into the energy industry.
Arnaud Langer: That's why you see, I mean, I don't know if you've seen [00:28:00] that, but there is some innovation done in that. It's always interesting to see innovation coming up in a field that has not evolved for 50 years, roughly.
And you see like innovation being coming there in energy storage, for example. You see all sorts of pretty efficient now energy storage solutions that can not necessarily take a huge amount of space. And also get, get the, the, the right efficiency. I mean, if you look at energy storage, one of the, the, the most interesting one I came across in this field is like a water reservoir in, in mountainous area, where when too much electricity was produced and not enough was consumed, they would pump water up the mountain to create like a reservoir, literally like a, um, uh, energy backup.
And when they needed energy, they would just pump it up. Turbine that down and just use gravity to produce energy. So that's, it's a big infrastructure if you think about it. I mean, you're basically creating two mini [00:29:00] dams and one up, one down and putting like a pump and a turbine in between. But at the end of the day, this is very smart and very efficient.
Bill Pfeifer: Physical energy storage. Kind of cool.
Arnaud Langer: Yeah. And that's another solution that electricity providers have been using in quite some time. So hopefully we'll see more and more of this. I mean, still having a sustainable mindset for, for energy providers, which is. Definitely good to see that we are seeing more and more green energy storage and energy generation.
That's
Bill Pfeifer: good. So it's not lost on me. We've been talking for a while now about energy, but that's not actually your job. You run the edge and IOT consulting globally. And so you work with amusement parks and retail and manufacturing and everything. And energy just happens to be one of the industries and yet you're so well educated on it.
That's just fantastic. So thanks for that. That was a fun part of the conversation. Moving on to the rest of the world, outside [00:30:00] just the energy industry, what are some forward looking trends about the edge and the capabilities that we're adding to the world, to our Business capabilities. What are you excited to see coming?
Arnaud Langer: Well, I think the trend I see and I'm really happy about is I would say sustainability and optimization. And it goes both ways and then one with the other, right? Sustainability, not only for the green side of things, but also for how do we consume less? How do we make it more optimized in terms of spend, in terms of processes, in terms of people use, in terms of time spent?
I think all that. In my opinion, The Edge is really here to provide that optimization to existing processes, existing behaviors. I mean, we did talk a lot about energy, but not only that, I mean, when we talk about the industry, manufacturing or, or theme parks, they are all the same. If you think about it, they're all here to have a [00:31:00] machine that represents a significant investment, work as often as it can in order to.
really provide the value that it was intended to provide when it was designed for. In manufacturing, you've got like, let's say a conveyor belt, you expect that conveyor belt to work all the time the manufacturing process sends stuff on the conveyor belt. When theme park, you have a ride, you expect the ride to be carrying people during the open hours of the park.
If something happens Against that, you lose money. For a manufacturing company, it's about, depending on the type of manufacturing, of course, but a failure of a critical equipment on a manufacturing line is anywhere between 500k and a million dollars an hour. For a theme park, it's about 100k an hour. So of course the investment, the first [00:32:00] investment is not the same.
The end goal is not the same. The sole goal for a manufacturing line is to produce. Something. The theme park, of course, doesn't only produce something, even though theme parks usually tell me that they produce happiness. So I'm happy to hear that. Yeah. And at the end of the day, the, the goal is to have operational efficiency and for the asset.
We see that everywhere and being able to provide customers with about 30 percent return on investment. on their edge investment and provide them with a bigger value than what they invested in on top of all the other things that we can't measure, like people satisfaction. Can it be people on a ride or workers in a factory line?
Remove all that frustration from people, being lower on stock from spare parts because we can anticipate failures and therefore just provide spare parts for what's going to fail and not the whole chain, which [00:33:00] happens. I've seen that. Well, you have all these optimizations that at the end of the day. With good organization and, and then good process makes everyone life's easier.
And I think we all deserve some of that.
Bill Pfeifer: So going in a different direction, and this may be a little bit of an unfair question. Is there an industry that you really like working in? Because it's just, you can get such good wins. The people are fun. What that may be asking, like, which one of your kids you love more?
I don't know. But it's kind
Arnaud Langer: of unfair indeed. That's an interesting one. Cause I've been working in so many industries. I mean, manufacturing is interesting because you work with big numbers usually. So it's, you can save a lot, but the original investment is big, but you can save a lot. And by investment, I mean that the investment that the, the industry company has made to create their manufacturing line.
The edge investment is pretty much the [00:34:00] same across the board. Work environment wise, Team Park is indeed fun, for sure. But it's equivalently complex environment to work in because you've got different rules on safety and that you don't necessarily have on the manufacturing line.
Bill Pfeifer: That's interesting. I hadn't thought of safety as the primary thing with a theme park, but I guess it kind of would be.
It's hard to get repeat business when you damage your customers. They don't really want to come back. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind of a hidden thing. And I would imagine they wouldn't want to tell you that because then you're thinking, But why would I need to worry about safety? So yeah. Okay. We'll just, we'll just press that.
Well, if
Arnaud Langer: you think about it, when you get on a ride, the first thing they ensure that you are strapped on properly. Safety is across the industry in, in, in, have many different clients in this industry. Safety is at the core of all. their operations overall. And if you think about it, that's kind of reassuring when you are going into theme parks, but in the meantime, it's also reassuring [00:35:00] because we see the trend going really down when it comes to incidents in the industry of theme parks.
So that's kind of reassuring. It's like, The equivalent of self driving cars really improving the number of incidents per mile driven, right? So overall, it's good to see technology improving lives,
Bill Pfeifer: I would say. Yeah. Yeah. As much as we sensationalize any sort of failure, it's nice to know that overall, the trend is in our favor.
That's good. What should organizations be thinking about as they start to build out their edge strategies more, as they start to develop it? I'm sure you've seen companies come starting up projects with you that have really solid strategies and it's a straightforward project and some that are probably havoc and mayhem and they really just don't know what they're trying to do and you have to corral them first.
How can companies get more organized and structured around driving success with their edge strategies?
Arnaud Langer: It's probably selfish to say that but rely on experts. [00:36:00] You don't necessarily have the expertise in the house. We're Biggest competitor across the board is our customers. We see most of our customers being smart about what they do, but trying to be smarter about what they do by having some technology within the mix of what they're doing.
And we always come and say, Okay, your expertise is what you do. Our expertise is to help you do what you do better. And, and it's often the case where we have buy in from C level in the organization, but not necessarily from the technical level of the lower strides in the, in the organization, if you will.
And it's, it's interesting to see that trend all over, really. It's as if you had like a multi headed monster where one is Please help us. And the other one is like, no, I know what I'm doing. And basically you're in the middle of saying, okay, I trust, you know what you're doing, but how about you could do that better and you don't know how.
It's really been a common theme and [00:37:00] we've really been looking at a lot of customers. Crying for help, and in the meantime, telling us how to do our job. So you've got those memes and other things that you can find on the internet. Like, I bill you 50 an hour and I'll bill you 100 if you watch, and I'll bill you 200 if you tell me what to do.
That's the kind of thing that we are experiencing all over. That makes
Bill Pfeifer: sense. That makes sense. Especially looking at Your organization, what you do is come in and drive these big projects, these big changes, so you know exactly how to do that. They know how to do the steady state stuff, they know they want to be better, but what does that look like?
So it makes sense that, you know, that change action kind of requires a specialist that's yeah, I like it. Arno, this has been wonderful. How can people find you online and keep up with the latest work
Arnaud Langer: that you're doing? Matos website, matos. net or my LinkedIn, Arnold Langer on LinkedIn.
Bill Pfeifer: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for making the time.
I really appreciated [00:38:00] the conversation. I learned a lot about the energy industry. And again, I know that's just one of many that you work on. It's, it's fantastic having a chance to talk to you face
Arnaud Langer: to face. Well, thank you for the great exchange and conversation.
Narrator: That does it for this episode of Over the Edge.
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