Engineers are primed to think on their feet and solve problems in record times, but dealing with the weight of a whole country’s emergency call service requires lightning approaches and a ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude.

Today we dive into the world of the most important telecommunications operation in the country, the Emergency Call Answering Service (ECAS). We learn how the service operates in ways people may never consider and the contingency plans that help it weather any storm, or pandemic.

Our expert guest has been at the cutting edge of data and communications in Ireland since the introduction of the internet and is now Head of Operations with ECAS, Michael Kelly.

Listen below or on your podcast player:

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• How Emergency Call Answering Service (ECAS) operates
• Problem solving in an industry with 99.999% uptime
• Adapting to weather and pandemic phenomena
• Lessons learned from introducing the internet to Ireland
• Why we shouldn’t fear AI and start seeing it as an asset

GUEST DETAILS
Michael Kelly - Head of Operations - Emergency Call Answering Service (ECAS)

Michael has extensive experience in the telecommunications industry including his role with PostGEM where he helped introduce the public internet during the late 80s/early 90s. He has also served as Director of the Internet Services Provider Association of Ireland until he joined BT as their Head of Engineering Planning & Design. Since 2012, he has been Head of Operations for the 112/999  Emergency Call Answering Service (ECAS).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kelly-a5312810/

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:00

Right now on AMPLIFIED the Engineers Ireland podcast, we get behind the scenes at 999 and hear how their engineers handled the biggest emergency of our time.

Michael Kelly  00:09

We brainstormed on Thursday afternoon. We had a prototype on the Friday morning. We proved the prototype Friday night. We built our production officers on Saturday and Sunday. And the first calls were taken from home Monday afternoon.

Dusty Rhodes  00:26

Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes and you welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. In this episode, we're about to dive into the world of telecommunications and hear how an engineering mindset is vital to keeping up with operations in a fast paced industry. Our guest today has worked extensively in the area where his career has taken him from the birth of the Internet in Ireland to the last few years, where he's acted as the head of operations of the emergency call answering service with BT. I'm delighted to welcome Michael Kelly. Hi, how are you doing?

Michael Kelly  01:02

I'm great. Dusty great to see you. Thanks for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:08

Listen, can I start with the emergency call answering service, it's kind of something that we take for granted, you just dial 112 or 999. But a few of us very few of us understand how it actually works. How do you explain the service to people simply? Well,

Michael Kelly  01:24

I think everybody's familiar with the concept of dial 909, or 112. And you're put through to the emergency services, I think the majority people probably assume that it's a guard, call taker or a guard who actually takes the call. That's not how it works. And in most countries, that's not how it works. Generally, there's what we call a stage one service. And that takes the emergency call and determines with you the caller, what is the emergency service that you really need. And in our case in Ireland, that can be Garda, ambulance, fire or Coast Guard. So that determination is made, we gather some information, we also are gathering some technical information in the background that you wouldn't be aware of. And then that is passed as a package, the video, the data, the metadata, to the emergency service, and that you get the help that that you need.

Dusty Rhodes  02:19

I have in my imagination that people are making a phone call, you talk about gathering information that people aren't aware of are you able to take things like you know, could the location of a person's mobile phone or their number or where the area they might even be? While

Michael Kelly  02:34

like most things in life, it's about location, location location. If we can find you, we can help you. If we can't find you, we can't help you. It's as simple as that. So the technology has been improved, I suppose from 99 goes back to about the 1930s, where location would have been communicated verbally. But the problem with that is that the caller may not be particularly variable, or they may be completely unaware of where they actually are, or they have unfortunately met with such an incident that they no longer remember where they are. So to get over that technology has become even more important than actually getting an address or location from the caller. So over the last probably seven or eight years, we've improved our mobile communications, particularly such that how it works now for the majority of calls and the majority of calls these days, probably 75 80% of emergency calls are made on a mobile phone as opposed to a fixed limit. In the background, the handset is using various location technology is giving a GPS coordinates of exactly where you are. And in parallel to the call, we use SMS, where there is no record on the phone at all of us. But it's used to transmit and transmit continuously updated locations. Typically, the first location that we get is relatively inaccurate, it might be maybe 200 meters accuracy, but by the time we get the second or third one, it may be down to two meters accuracy. And that happens within 15 to 20 seconds.

Dusty Rhodes  04:18

First problem I can see coming up with this is GDPR and data protection, they're held to how do you get over that problem? Very,

Michael Kelly  04:25

very simple. There is an actual carve out in the data protection legislation, which basically says in layman's language, well, if this is an emergency, then all bets are off, and it's in your best interest that we're able to find you. Now having said that, we go to enormous lengths to protect that information. People probably assumed that you know, we just pass on the location willy nilly. No we don't. It's only passed to the emergency services. Occasionally we will get requests for call recordings and other info about calls. And it is only when people have satisfied the very, very stringent, most stringent requirements that our call recording might be released. And of course, it has to be strictly relevant to the person themselves.

Dusty Rhodes  05:12

Giving people help and getting them help fast and knowing where they are. I mean, they're all very important of what kind of levels are you dealing with? I mean, how many calls you get a day or across a year? How quickly do you answer calls, that kind of stuff uptime is another?

Michael Kelly  05:25

Yeah, uptime is another thing. I'll come back to that. to your first question. We do 2.4 million calls. So 200,000 a month 50,000. A week 6000 A day. Having said that, that isn't a complete answer. Because it's, I suppose I would say that emergency calls are extremely predictable. We're dealing with human beings worldwide. And they work in very predictable patterns. And that's an area that I'm very interested myself to share predictability of it is is quite fascinating. But 6000 calls a day, it probably folds to maybe five and a half 1000. During the week. As the weekends come in, it gets a little bit busier. And in particular than Friday nights, and Saturday nights would be the busiest of all. And clearly, Friday nights and Saturday nights can also fall into the small hours of the following morning as well. It also has a there's a little bit of a different pattern between emergency calls to police, our guard and to ambulance ambulance, the volumes grow through the day on a very, very gradual basis, peaking probably around 11 or 12 o'clock at night, whereas Garda calls would probably start to peak earlier in the day will be much more erratic, up and down. The other thing that's fascinating as well about it is that a guard a call from start to finish, and one of them one of our jobs is that we record everything and all data for evidence purposes for the courts and for for investigations. The guard call typically takes about two minutes, 120 seconds, the average ambulance call takes about six minutes. But with a very, very long statistical tail, we would have some cards that would go up to 2425 minutes. This could be for a number of reasons. Either there's a difficulty with finding the person, or actually there is a paramedic providing information or instructions to the call or or the the victim Unfortunately, while the ambulance arrives. If I'd say one thing about e commerce, it's all about data. It's really, really very statistically driven. I'm

Dusty Rhodes  07:38

fascinated to hear how you say that the calls to emergency lines are very predictable. It's not anything I would have expected you to said, Can you give me an example of that kind of predictability on on a call? Well,

Michael Kelly  07:51

I can tell you that the this if you like what I would call the safest time of the week, is about 1030 on a Tuesday morning. And basically how I would rationalize it is that everybody has either gone to work, or they've gotten they're already in school, or haven't gotten out of bed yet. But they're not going anywhere. Because actually the chief determinant of nine on calls, believe it or not, is weather. If the weather is bad, we'll get more calls. Now, that doesn't mean that more people are necessarily out and about, it just means that they're more likely to get themselves into a spot of bother more likely to have a car accident, they're more likely to trip, they're more likely to slip. And obviously, the more severe the weather becomes, the more accidents that are likely to have. Ironically, even though there are probably fewer fewer people out in the boat. The other way of looking at it is that and I suppose unfortunately, and this is not unique to our but in most countries in the world, Friday nights and Saturday nights are where people get themselves into the most trouble, probably the most severe trouble. And it's it's when response times by the emergency services tend to backup a bit. Now, I would say that emergency services are built around the peace. But during busy periods, there's always going to be some sort of a of a wait. But the job of Ecosse is to somehow ease the path through to the emergency services. And even if they are busy, and they're not in a position to answer that particular emergency call that we will do a decision to reassure the caller make sure that they don't title because, again, in a panic I think a lot of people's instinct is I'll hang up and dial again. Well, if you do that, you'd go back to the beginning of the of the queue. So our advice is always just stick with us. Listen to the instructions. We'll get you there.

Dusty Rhodes  09:51

Can I ask you that as well about uptime? It's a phenomenal statistic. What is it? What is your uptime guarantee? Our uptime

Michael Kelly  09:58

guarantee as well, first and foremost, some people say, Oh, well, it must be 100%. Well, as an engineer, I know that nothing is ever 100%. So what we commit to contractually, and I don't think this is a state secret in our contract with government, but it is what we call five nines, 99.999%. Now, that's a very glib figure. But the truth is to make that work, we have to duplicate replicate quadruplicate systems, so that we've got a huge amount of redundancy in the various systems. Basically, no one issue can take out the entire platform. But the bigger challenge for us is that the system itself, we we, we need to maintain it, we need to patch software, we need to replace hardware, but it's it's like the It's like that old adage about the 747 in the air, we're changing the engines without landing the plane, we cannot say to the public, oh, we need to do a big job on E casts. So I'll tell you what, we're going to take it down nine o'clock on Friday, but we'll be back on Monday morning. That doesn't work. So there's never a good time for us to do maintenance. So therefore we do, we're constantly working on the system round the clock, and making sure that our change control is absolutely state of the art engineering was so that, even if we do make a mistake, or if we have a problem, we can roll back without anybody realizing that there was ever a problem in the first place.

Dusty Rhodes  11:31

It sounds like you have your system and then the backup for the system and then a backup for the backup system. And then a backup backup for the backup system, which you know, I'm delighted to hear that but from an engineering perspective, can you give me an example of the kind of infrastructure that you have in place? Okay,

Michael Kelly  11:47

yes, we have two operator centers. So this is where call takers can take calls. We also have connections to them, they can also work from home, which is also part of our contingency in case, we have big storms or something like that. We have two data centers, we have to backup operator centers. And we have to backup data centers, all interlinked using multiple carriers by multiple telecoms companies. Some people think one, once they hear that BT operate this, that it's all BT telecommunications links in between all of the sites. And with that number of sites, it gets incredibly complex to make sure that we've got redundant paths, and resilient links and so on. No, we actually use every telecoms provider in the state. So we use ESB telecoms, we use IE Nash, we use air, we use BT in all honesty, and a couple of other players as well. And we use a variety of even within those telecommunications networks, a variety of different telecommunications protocols and techniques, so that we're not reliant on just one protocol, like IP or something like that. We have we have backups, little backups.

Dusty Rhodes  13:06

And tell me about the engineers that are in the organization because engineers play a very important role within the cancer organization, what kind of problems that they have to solve on on a regular basis, I

Michael Kelly  13:17

suppose the basis would be that they would be all IT specialists with a very heavy emphasis on telecommunications as well. But on top of that layered in, they would have skills in in software, but also a very, very good working knowledge of handsets, particularly mobile phone headsets. And you must remember as well that we've got to be able to support calls the highest level with the highest bandwidth that we could get from the humblest, oldest Nokia phone that somebody only uses once or twice a year, all the way up to the latest Apple and Samsung handsets. The other thing that we need to watch out for is software changes on the handsets, sometimes inadvertently, depending on the manufacturer. And I won't mention any names. But sometimes issues creep in with regard to emergency calls, that were actually designed to help the more ordinary run of the mill, cause a good example of a of this year was it was in the, let's say, the Android sphere. But it had an impact on all manufacturers of Android handset. So it wasn't a particular manufacturer, a change was introduced. So that if you picked up your Android handset irrespective of make if you pressed a number of times on the side and I don't want to specify the number for obvious reasons. If she pressed a button on the side of the phone a number of times it would automatically make an emergency call. Now that generated over about a year. I don't want to put a finger on it either but a shoe huge number of silent calls, calls that should never have been made. Because people didn't know when they might notice that that evening when they pick up their phone, and they see all these 112 calls, and that that was just basically down to a software change that was designed to help other issues within within the phone. As emergency services, we don't want it to be too easy to make emergency calls, we want it to be delivered. Okay? Because otherwise, you can have a situation where, you know, people literally walking down the road with the phone in the back of their jeans in their back pocket. It can it can ring emergency services. So it was well intentioned, but it went wrong. I suspect that problem generated probably a billion calls worldwide. Wow, it would have affected every country. Well, what I can say is because because of our engineers, I'm one in particular, I think we were probably the first country to identify what the problem was. And then in conjunction with, say, our colleagues and other in other European countries, and we do work very, very closely together. And because, as I say, dealing with human beings who do tend to behave in the same way, they use the same sorts of equipment to interact with emergency services. If we see a problem in one country, 10 to one, you're gonna see it in every other country. So we do cooperate very, very closely. So that's probably the best recent example that I can give you. I

Dusty Rhodes  16:28

don't want to dwell on this because it's over, fingers crossed. But when COVID hit, that was an emergency that was developing so fast, and everybody just had to run with it. I'm sure E. CASS was no exception. And everybody was told to work from home. How did you handle that problem?

Michael Kelly  16:44

Well, right up to that point, that was the middle of March and in that year, and I can't remember which year it is now, because it's all a blur. But up to that point we didn't have working from though there was never any requirement for us. And in fact, if I'm honest, Our preference would be to have people working in centers, because all the technology is there. And they have access to engineers. They have it. They're working in centers, which are designed to work 24/7 have generators, if there's a power outage, and so on, which is completely unlike our own homes. So I think it was a Thursday. And we said right, we need to build a remote working as solution. So we brainstormed on Thursday afternoon, we had a prototype on the Friday morning. We proved the prototype Friday night. And we built it or productionize it on Saturday and Sunday. And the first calls were taken from home live calls, not test calls, Monday afternoon. Now, I will be the first one to say that, you know, we work in in BT, which is, you know, really as an engineering lead company, I think if I had put out a request, let's develop that capability in normal time, it probably would have taken six months, because we would have gone through all of the things that you have to do in terms of testing. And, and so I'm not to say that we didn't do all that we just did a hell of a lot quicker, which much, much more focus. But we then moved over to a situation where very, very quickly, I think probably 70% of calls were taken from home. The other thing that we had to do, of course, is that staff were used to working with a workstation rather than a laptop, so would have had a purpose built PC, essentially in old money on the desk in front of them. So we had to we've we've about 6570 people taking calls around 24/7. So we had to procure 70 laptops plus spares at a time when everybody else was looking for laptops. Now luckily, I was able to pull in a few favors and BJs a big company. So we were able to get you know, access to certain stocks and so on. But that was the other worry, you know, it's one thing to get the technology right. But then are you actually will you have the tools to use. And I think that's probably where a lot of companies organizations probably slipped up well meaning in a well meaning manner, they were able to get the technology to do what they want, but it just kind of fell off the last part.

Dusty Rhodes  19:18

That was an amazing feat. And all I can think of is as you tell that story is this is why we need engineers in the world. Boom, boom, boom, problem solved. Tell me aside from COVID, because that is an exceptional circumstance. What would you say was the was the second biggest emergency that you've had to deal with in your time?

Michael Kelly  19:35

Well, I did say before that the biggest determinant of emergency calls, particularly when it gets out of that predictability phase is weather. And I will think back to the various storms that we've had on this one back in 2016. We've had some years where we've had maybe one or two kind of hurricane type storms and then over years we We've had maybe nine or 10 success weekends, where we've had really, really bad storms, that has an effect on the public because that, you know, there's going to be more accidents, even if they don't leave the house, they might fall down the stairs, and that that still creates challenges. But what it meant was the weather was so bad on these occasions. And don't forget that we had not got home working, or remote working available at that stage, we still needed to get people in sites. So what we did was we increased the number of sites. And that's when we, in addition to our two permanent sites, we brought in we built contingency centers, so that the centers were actually closer to staff. And then the other thing was, with great cooperation from our staff, I have to say, we, we said, Well, look, we might, we may have to work longer shifts, but we will put you up, we may even put you up in in centers, right with sleeping bags. Now actually, as it turned out, we didn't we didn't really have to go that far. But what we did do was we would put staff up in hotels next door, so that they didn't have to go home. And our only ask of them was look, bring a bag, we'll bring it back for, you know, five days or a week, we really don't know how long this is gonna go on. But we will, you know, a bit of, I suppose bit of thought goes into us while it's stressful at the time, and you think, Oh, how are we going to solve this problem? Nothing is impossible, if you set your mind to it. And that, you know, genuinely is our mantra is has to be that way. We can't just give up. So I think I think that would probably be the the other the other issue. Obviously, we've had technical challenges over the years. But generally, through a combination of backups, and so on, we've been able to overcome that. And the great Irish public wouldn't have even been aware, Michael,

Dusty Rhodes  21:51

you're very much at the cutting edge. If you want of technology. I hate that phrase. But you're dealing with Watson now, which is fantastic. And you're probably looking at what's coming in the near future, which is fantastic. Let me take you back, though. To many, many moons ago, when you worked with post gem, which was a section of on post. And I love I only learned this recently post gem stands for Global electronic messaging. That's how far back we go and pre email all those are pre texts or pre SMS or whatever, maybe. Can you describe to me what post jam was but also of key interest, the set up between them and Ireland's first internet service provider at the time? Ireland online?

Michael Kelly  22:31

Okay, yeah, well, it's a whole subject in itself. But to start with, with post, Jim, it was a subsidiary of, of unparsed, actually decentral as a as a separate company, abroad in people with I suppose a certain amount of it or telecommunications, background plus a lot of marketing, because it was essentially what it was set up to do was to try and develop a new market. And if you if you could cast your mind back to the very late 80s 1989. This is pre mail, or builds went in the post. And that's where on POS came in. But thanks to the foresight of of a couple of very, very clever people, even then they realize that hard copy as it used to be referred to probably wasn't going to be there forever. And the on POS needed to start thinking about the future. And it was it was certainly the first, I think, a pulse office in the whole world that started to think that way. It was very, very pioneering. But when we got the was all very well saying it was electronic mail was very much in its infancy. I think I had you know, I had used it in my previous IT career to probably, you know, communicate with a few other people and maybe with some some vendors, but it wasn't in general use. And it was also quite slow. You know, you didn't get an email instantly wait like we did today. But once post jam got up and running. Initially, I think our first service was people could send in communications like bills or RS circulars electronically. And then we would actually print them and put them into a letter. So it was electronic to hard copy. But it's amazing. That sounds ridiculous now, but it actually got people into the idea. The other thing that we introduced was Electronic Data Interchange, which was electronic to electronic. And basically that was sending purchase orders and invoices from one company to another, completely electronically. And using a set of standards that worked very well. But as become the precursor of what we know now, I would say even pretty much like if you were to go on the various well known websites and order books or whatever, whatever it is definitely the precursor of that. And then also the third service that we we introduced and was pretty much the precursor of electronic mail today. At the only difference was that it was it was a connection rather than to the intranet. It was connected to an A network of other nodes around the country around the world. And only people who were subscribed to those those services or don't note could send and receive emails, it wasn't completely open system like we have today, where you can send an email to someone you don't know or you've never you've never met. So with those three services in mind, they began to pick up traction, and people began saying, okay, and actually, we had a lot of visits from other post offices interested in what we were doing, and then to underlie that. And I suppose maybe this is something that I brought to it, I realized that in order to really make this work, we needed to have our own network at that time, due to legislation and licensing. And so really, the underlying telecommunications had to be telecom era, which as we know, was the monopoly back then. So we got the first value added services license, a value added services license allowed you to offer value ads over a telecom service. But then we went, we said, right, we will build our own data network, our own packet switched network. And that actually became the precursor to our our cooperation with Arvind online. So to answer your second question, Arland online, or IOL, was becoming very, very successful in the in the marketplace, there was a real appetite there for communications. And I think also as well, because we have a certain amount of time, we had a certain amount of insight into the demographics, Ireland was becoming more open. People were emigration, there was a lot of immigration, people needed to communicate. And, you know, instant communication was was what it was all about. And bear in mind, mobile phones were still expensive to you know, to ring somebody for five minutes, or even landlines for five minutes. Whereas electronic mail was free. And you could send as much as you wanted, you could set it say as much as you wanted to mommy or daddy, there were there were no limitations.

Dusty Rhodes  27:10

It was a huge time of change around then, and very exciting. And it was kind of like Ireland was dragging itself out of the darkness of the 70s and the 80s. And all of a sudden, I mean, we we were winning Eurovision, every year, that's what I remember the 90s. All right, and it meant we could do anything. And then we have the football. And we were actually at a World Cup, we could do anything. And then you start talking about this electronic mail, email and mobile phones were becoming more common, as you say. They were very expensive. It was an amazing time. And then Ireland online. I was working with to FM at the time. And I remember, you know, kind of because we were in the younger end of RT, it was myself and Barry Lange. were kind of interested in this internet thing and what it was all about. And then we started incorporating it as part of our programs. And then everybody then wanted an email address. And of course, we were using@aol.ie every day on on the air. And the story goes is that Bertie Ahern, who was T shock at the time was listening. And he went, What's that? I want one. And so that's that's it from my point of view in that I thought those kinds of Eddie, very early days of the Internet were quite heavy. What how was it from your point of view introduced the internet to the great Irish public.

Michael Kelly  28:23

It was really, really exciting times. I mean, very exhausting, very, very long days. But we were we really were making it up as we went along. You know, the pioneers and IOL Colin Greeley. And Barry Flanagan like we're real flagbearers for the whole thing. But what I suppose what we wanted to do was try and let them get on with what they were good at doing. And I think what post Shem brought to it was we were pretty good. We mastered the art of infrastructure, and also how we could we could post modems and so on out these days, you'd probably say, well, modem, why would you use a modem. But, you know, back then, the Internet was about getting a CD on that stuck to a magazine, and you'd stuck that CD into your PC. And it gave you a certain amount of software, which allows you to control a modem, which you have to use the home telephone line. And we it was it was quite slow, but it worked. In order to make IOL work and make it successful. We needed to have modems all over the country, because what we discovered very, very quickly was that someone in in Cork or Limerick, probably some of our listeners would say for obvious reasons, they wouldn't be prepared to die of Dublin. They wanted a local number. They wanted a local cork number or Limerick number and so on and so forth. And I think at the end, we ended up with 26 points of protests around the country in order to take in those calls. And we also had to build a fairly substantial backbone, network to form through all of that internet traffic, I think what made it even more exciting was that we just could not have anticipated the demand. As fast as we could put in infrastructure, it was gobbled up. So much so that I was dealing with. And at that time, most of them would have been Silicon Valley based companies that provided the equipment, they wanted to send us the very latest equipment, we'd be the first in Europe to use it, they might only have one or two been used maybe buy AT and T or America Online in the States, they could see that something was really, really happening here. And it was it was growing really, really quickly. And the other thing that we were able to do was because nobody had any real experience in this, we were recruiting from the universe, universities, just graduate engineers, guys that we guys and girls that we taught, you know, which would really enjoy this. And it just threw them in at the coalface and learn what needed to be done. And I can't say there was a plan, the plan probably changed every week. But it worked. And it it's it's one of the things that I'm proud of Southern way all career, I have to say. Because the internet now we moved from a situation where I think when when we went on post Bosch, Ireland online with post Sham, I think we was about 14,000 subscribers. Now there were a couple of other voted, but there was probably probably 25,000 Internet subscribers in the whole country. And that was in 9697. Now everybody use that ubiquitous, you couldn't do without it?

Dusty Rhodes  31:37

Do you have a particular story you'd like to share from that time?

Michael Kelly  31:42

Well, I do, I don't know whether it's a good story or not. But one of our struggles in Ireland online particularly was the connections to the internet. These days, people don't need to really understand how it all works. But back then we needed a connection to the outside world. And bandwidth are the pipes from Dublin to the rest of the world. Were extremely expensive. One stage I we had a 1.5 megabit connection to the outside world. Nowadays, people have, you know, I think over a gigabit into my home, just my house. So we were doing everything that we possibly called we were trading bandwidth with various providers, talking like in lots of money, like it was getting into the millions of pounds at the time. So one of the things that we did do was we we did a deal with a satellite company. Now everybody talks about satellite and you know, watch what Elon Musk is doing. And there's lots of satellite companies. But we had a headquarters on them Earth's for terrorists. At that time, we got special permission. And we did lots of licenses, because nobody was doing it to put this great big, huge satellite dish up on the roof. So Barry Flanagan and I got it working. And we said that we will look let's let's try it, you know before and we'll have it to ourselves, right? See what we can do. So Barry and I were up on the roof. This is a six story roof, where we probably really shouldn't debate to be perfectly honest. But we we plugged in a laptop into the back of it, just to see how it will perform. And it was it was going great and we tried different things. And then I pitched my arm and the laptop fell off the wall or word straight down onto the ground. It's fair to say it didn't work after that. Luckily, it didn't land on everybody. I

Dusty Rhodes  33:37

could just i All the picture in my head is just a pair of you looking. And then there's pure silence. jaws dropped pure silence. It

Michael Kelly  33:45

was it was the longest, probably 15 seconds of my life. Because a bit like Icarus, when things are going badly, time just seems to slow down. A

Dusty Rhodes  33:56

lot of what you're talking about Michael is you're talking about introducing the Internet to Ireland and satellite connections and a one five point 1.5 meg for the entire country. It's ridiculous when you think about it. Now. Another thing that we talk about all the time here, and we're very blase about it because we're one of the huge biggest centers in the world for it with Facebook and Google, Microsoft and data centers. They're everywhere. It takes 20% of the power of the country in Ireland goes just on data centers. You are the man who installed Ireland's first ever data center Tell Me More

Michael Kelly  34:32

probably some politicians would prefer that I had not done this but it yes it is true. I joined I became part of East that telecom as supposed to finish the the post Jeremiah Well story was sold to Dennis O'Brien, you may have heard of. So I moved into to ESA telecom and you know, there was there was a bit of a change around responsibilities and so on. So Oh, Dennis, as, as he did said, Well, look, are you looking for a challenge? Foolishly? I said, Yes. And he said, Well, look, one of the things that we need to do this this thing, data data centers, that's that's going to, that's going to be the next big thing. And I'll be honest, which I was skeptical myself, or really did what he said, but think your demand for this because, you know, it's datacenters are what's going to drive the internet. And I think up to that point, I certainly thought I didn't have as foresight sure, is foresight was that the internet needs lots of power and lots of space disk space, and it needs performance, these availability. And that that basically is a one line summary description of a data center. So he said, right, got to do this. So he said, I think we could get a building out and citywest, which was only really been built at that stage. Now, of course, a very mature business. But back then, it was it was nothing and it had no fiber or any of the telecommunications into its, which was what we really needed. So I think he said this to me at the end of November. And he said, I needed up and running at seven months. Now, I hadn't even seen the building when he said this, and the building was only half built. What that was the challenge. And it was, it probably was the most stressful period of my career. When we did it, by the end of June, with a very, very small team. We built a data center, it was the first of its kind, I did go and have a look at a couple of data centers in the States. I think we brought back some good ideas about it, particularly around availability, we hadn't been thinking about that. So generators was something that we spent a lot of money on. And we also had to fight tooth and nail to get telecommunications in from the various providers so that we could connect these these data service servers. And we got it up and running. I think we had our first customers running probably the month before, and probably about 18 months later was false.

Dusty Rhodes  37:07

Michael, I could chat to you all day. So just let me wrap up one or two little questions about new technologies. Because like everything you're saying, you you literally have been at the development end of everything right throughout your career. So AI is continuous learning. This is what I want to ask you about. I mean, it's not vital for engineers working telecommunications that don't mean is that something nicer is CPD something you should do? Is it vital for working in telecommunications in areas like that.

Michael Kelly  37:37

It's absolutely vital. I think when I started out my career, there was probably a very much of an emphasis on third level education. And it had, it definitely had its at its place. But however you were trained, or whatever you were qualified, and it was seen as a means to promotion. I think organizations are definitely a lot flatter now. And if you want to be really valuable to an organization may be having that master's degree or even a primary degree is not going to help you it gives you some of the tools to learn and maybe to be curious. But I think you know, CPD, getting short courses and technology is really, really valuable, you become much more valuable to an organization.

Dusty Rhodes  38:20

So it's going to ask you was how do you do? I mean, how have you done that CPD just to keep up to because you do you're right, you get your degree and you get on the first rung of the ladder. And that's it, your degree is worthless. After that. You need to keep educating yourself keeping up to speed How did you do at work in such a high level?

Michael Kelly  38:36

Well, the 1990s that is certainly the late 80s 19 1990s, even though we had the internet, and it was still an emphasis on books, and you would you would buy books, and you would learn that way. And you would experiment. Then something changed in the in the vendors, the people who sold the routers or the routers and all this telecommunications equipment, they realized that it was changing very, very quickly. And some of those got into training themselves. Good examples would be Cisco, with their certification schemes, relatively short courses, but they weren't internationally recognized. And I saw people so well, not only would it make them better at their job, but it made them internationally market. So if you know one of our young engineers, and suddenly did decide to go off to Australia or America, they had a recognised qualification. But I think that that's probably brought us up to maybe the 2010s. Now, I think it's it's almost going back. I think you do need the hard qualifications, like the masters and the bachelor's degrees. And so with the speed of change is so much that by the time of course comes out and more importantly is recognized. It's nearly out of date. So you've got to become a sponge. So to answer your question, I think I went from a very much a kind of a rigid book learning type of individual because that's what I was. That's what I was taught to maybe true the experience and so on that you've got to have your antenna, working all the time, operate as a sponge, soak up as much information as you possibly can. Some of its useful, some of it might actually lead you in a different direction that maybe didn't even know was was there. But that curiosity is something that that makes you valuable to the organization. And the more valuable to an organization, the more successful you will become.

Dusty Rhodes  40:32

Let me ask you a humdinger of an awful question. Just to wrap it up. Right. Right, because we haven't mentioned AI. I'm just interested for you who has been so successful, seeing things with potential and then seeing how they could work in the future and then successfully getting them there. You're looking at AI for the last year, we do you think AI will have us in 10 years time,

Michael Kelly  41:00

I think in 10 years time, I think it'll be slower than we thought everybody likes thick. Obviously, there's a lot of hype, I see it first and foremost, in the next 10 years as maybe an eight in your ear, whatever it is that you're doing. Say it could be anything from working in a contact center, it could be a programmer trying to write a difficult bit of code, almost that kind of help or coach in the ear. I see it as specially in them hectic areas. I don't know much about us, if anything at all. But a good example to me would be something like air traffic control, right? If an air traffic controller were to miss something, there's enough technology out there that you know, by tracking people's eyes on the screen, that the AI or some system feeding AI could say, I think he's missed that vital piece of information. Or let I think I should whisper this piece of information in her ear. It sounds incredible Bush a lot of the things that AI can already do were incredible, even five years ago. So I on the one hand, I think it will be slower. But I really do see it as as eight, I do think it will be transformative as well in certain industries. I think the first area where it could really transform is in contact centers, because it AI should be able to deal with different accents, and should be able to deal with different languages, it will be building up databases and other types of bases that are going to apply. And with just the laws of physics, you're able to apply that at the speed of light, either to a screen or you know, to generate something that you call out in the air of somebody, it to me it it has to be transformative. I don't think it's something to be frightened of. That's something that really annoys me. It's like all technology. But I think back probably 200 years ago, when the steam engine was invented, there were probably people given out about that as well. And it wasn't the be all and end all the steam engine transformed into something else. And AI and time will transform into something again,

Dusty Rhodes  43:18

I often see AI as being like the early days of the Internet, which we both experienced in the in the 80s and 90s. And it was the wild west of the Internet back then. Whereas I think we're seeing the A it's the wild west of AI right now. Michael, unfortunately, we've run out of time if you're listening and you'd like to find out more about Michael or some of the topics that we talked about today. There's some notes and link details in the description area of the podcast but for now, Michael Kelly, head of operations of the Emergency Call Answering Service at BT Ireland. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Kelly  43:49

Not at all Dusty, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Dusty Rhodes  43:53

Do remember for advanced episodes of our Engineers Ireland podcast, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. Also do share a podcast with a friend in the business just tell them search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. Until next time from myself Dusty Rhodes. Thank you so much for listening. Take care

Digital advances, from 3D models in public planning to patients living with pacemakers, are pushing sectors into new spaces which present unique opportunities but not without challenges.

In the final part of our mini-series we discover how digitalisation has shaped the automation, manufacturing and aviation industries here in Ireland.  Our guests share real-world examples of phrases we hear bandied about daily from circularity to 360 and industry 4.0.

Lots of sparks fly in this discussion with John O'Sullivan MD of Douglas Control and Automation, Lufthansa Technik’s Engineering Manager Barry Lowe and Chief Innovation Officer at IMR Andrew Lynch.

Listen below or on your podcast player!

Topics we discussed include:
 

• Why future generations will look back on this time and consider us ‘quaint’
• Can paper and digital systems co-exist
• Lufthansa’s LEAN journey
• Things you must consider when investing in plant
• A brilliant explanation and example of circularity & 360
• When is AI not AI
• How Digital Twin works
• Real examples of how CPD drives success

Guest details:

Barry Lowe: Engineering Manager at Lufthansa Technik Turbine Shannon.

Barry is a native of Athlone, graduate of Mechanical Engineering. Commenced career as Product Development Engineer with Hyster Automated Handling in Dublin. Gained international experience working in USA & Germany in a variety of technical roles.

Joined Lufthansa Technik as Marketing & Sales Manager and transferred to current role as Engineering Manager with responsibility for product engineering, process engineering and new product introductions. Promoted to Head of Mobile Engine Services Dublin with Lufthansa Technik, effective January 2023.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-lowe-58403877/

John O’Sullivan: Managing Director at Douglas Control and Automation

John has an engineering degree in Electrical Engineering from University College Cork, a science degree in Astronomy and Planetary Science from the Open University and a Diploma in Project Management from the Cork Institute of Technology. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of Engineers Ireland and a Project Management Professional with the Project Management Institute. He is a Functional Safety Professional and Certified Machine Safety Expert, both certified by TÜV. He has completed a Masters in management at the Smurfit Business School at University College Dublin and is currently conducting Doctoral research in Management Information Systems at UCC's Cork University Business School. His area of research is automation projects in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnosullivanie/

Andrew Lynch: Chief Innovation officer Irish Manufacturing Research

Andrew is also the international Vice President of the EUREKA SMART Manufacturing Board of Directors, he chairs the ManuFuture ETP Working Group (State Aid Strategies- Research & Innovation) and is the national delegate to the European manufacturing policy platform, ManuFuture High Level Group (HLG). Andrew has recently been nominated by the EFFRA Board to the Made in Europe Partnership Board, an expert board which meets regularly with the European Commission to discuss the scope and modalities of the Partnership and future call topics.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/irish-manufacturing-research/

More information

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer.

https://www.engineersireland.ie/

Quotes

3.50 - Andrew Lynch

In a hundred years’ time, people are going to look back at these five or six years and say that is when everything changed. They’ll say we used to manufacture goods which we drove on trucks to put into shops and people bought stuff using a credit card. And they're going to say you guys were the ones who burnt the planet. It’s a wonderful time to be alive in this space.

Transcription text

Dusty Rhodes  0:39 

Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes and you're welcome to our engineers journal amplified podcast and the third in our special series shining a light on digitalization of the impact it has had on Irish business and society. From 3d models in public planning to patients living with pacemakers. It's clear from the experts we spoke to so far that digital advances are pushing sectors into new spaces that present them with unique opportunities, but not without the challenges to assist us with our final dig into the world of digitalization. I'm joined today by John O'Sullivan, Managing Director of DRS control and automation, who has over 25 years experience in the sector. Barry Lowe is engineering manager at Lufthansa technique turbine and Shannon. Barry has a ton of international experience working in the USA and Germany in a variety of technical roles. And Andrew Lynch, Chief Innovation Officer at Irish manufacturing research, and also a contributing expert on several key international policy directors for manufacturing. Gentlemen, you're all very welcome. Before we get into some specific projects, I kind of just want to talk generally about how technology plays a part in your day to day work. And if I could start with you how has digitalization shaped advanced manufacturing over the past 20 years or so?

Andrew Lynch  1:59 

A great question, I'm old enough for those who can't see me are gray beards, I'm in my mid I would say early 50s. I'm still very pretty man and very lucky in that context. But if you consider me as a young Production Manager, General Manager manufacturing site all those years ago, and how I manage the facility and how I gathered information and how you how you made decisions based on the output of the data from that from from that facility, and so on, it was very manual and manually driven filling in manual charts and so on. digitalization is just a complete step change, it's a transformation, we now have the capability to look at optimization of a manufacturing facility, if you've got 60 different machines, you've got 150 different customers, you've got 1000 Or a million SK use, you know, we cannot put that into a platform, it will figure out the fastest way that we can manufacture that good, it can even figure out the best way to do with how much you know, the most cashflow in the month are on time and full highest metrics that we can meet. So if we make a change on a digital twin, for example, we can see this at at a digital or a non real level, we can interrogate the system itself, we can optimize it, and then we can execute in the real world. So there's, there's no financial commitment to doing something, we can see the impact of doing that thing, we can do it and execute it in the real world. So it's transformed everything I mean, you know, when you think about it, we can scan in a part electronically into a machine and build a park there. And then using 3d printing, you know, we've got AR VR goggles, you can put them on your head, and when you're looking into the bed of the machine, and arrow will come down and it will point into a particular dial that should be at seven instead of eight. And you could change that dial, you know, we can use you know, we're at the edge of using, you know, IoT sensors, I remember when an IoT sensor was, you know, $1,000 Now they're less than five years, we could put these things anywhere in 100 years time just to really encapsulate your question. 100 years time, people are gonna look back right now at these five or six years, and they're gonna say that is when everything changed. And I will be telling my grandkids in years, the company's got if I live and exist, I'd be saying, you know, I'll tell you what we used to do manufacturing, and you're gonna get a laugh. We used to put a manufacturing facility out in the middle of nowhere, we put people into it, we manufacture goods, and we'd manufacture we do many of them. And then we put them on trucks, you're going to love this. And we drive the truck to another big warehouse, and we put all the stuff in the big warehouse, and then we'd fly all over the world. And you're going to love this. We put it into more warehouses, and then we drive from that warehouse, we put it into a shop and people actually does shopping used to walk through the door of a big house. And there's lots of stuff for sale, and you bought stuff using a credit card. Our God forbid money. Let me tell you about how money worked. So our grandkids are going to look at this. And they're going to say you guys were not the one you burnt the planet. Because there's so many things changing in terms of how we do this. It's fantastic. A wonderful time to be alive in this space.

Dusty Rhodes  4:45 

Let me go to John next to John. How has digitalization shaped the automation industry in the last 20 years?

John O'Sullivan  4:52 

It's a path it's a it's a journey that we're on and my own personal situation. I'm Doing some research and I'm researching techniques and technologies that that we can bring to manufacturing. And it's basically it's how we get these new innovative ideas onto the factory floor. So what I've discovered just thinking about this for this podcast, I was thinking about what we do with what we've been offering to customers for last 40 years has been digitalization, and, you know, parts of industry 4.0 For a long time. So, you know, we, part of our projects in process industry would be an electronic controller that controls the plant, then followed by a human machine interface screen where the operator can can see, visualize the plant and visualize the process up into the supervisory level where the supervisors are dealing with batch management and recipe management, and then up into the business where data becomes the product. And the business has to evaluate life cycles and supply chains. So we've been offering this digital journey to our customers for decades. But the ironic thing is our own business wasn't digital at all, because we're in this pharmaceutical regulated environment, a lot of paper, a lot of signatures that have ink. So I've got two little stories, I suppose there's the story of how we're changing what we offer the customer. And then we have the how we change ourselves. So COVID was a great accelerator of our digital journey. And even before that, we started moving to Office 365. Instead of having licenses on site, we're dealing with subscription based licensing, Moving Storage, from the site to the cloud. And even in COVID, we were at the stage where we were doing remote testing with customers in different locations. And right now we've moved our timesheet packaging to the cloud, we're moving accounting to the cloud where because when people are working at home, they need to access all this data that we're producing. So I think after 40 years, we're finally digitalizing ourselves. My colleagues in Siemens would have a phrase about drink your own champagne, don't take your product and use it. And I've heard other people use the phrase which is eat your own dog food, which isn't as nice as drink your own champagne. So I prefer drinking champagne.

Dusty Rhodes  7:06 

I got to stick with the latter. Definitely John. Barry, can you can you tell us because you're in the aviation industry, how has digitalization journey changed things at Lufthansa?

Barry Lowe  7:17 

So I suppose I'd like to go back to our Lean journey. And when we talked about digitalization, we didn't relate it to lean. But if I look back at our Lean journey started in 2001, and is still a very active program within the facility in the company at the moment. And it certainly is a journey that doesn't really have a destination at this, there's always further improvement you can make. And when we looked at digitalization said, we kind of started by looking at industry 4.0, we've heard a lot of talk about industry 4.0. And we didn't really know what that would mean for for our company, Lufthansa here and Shannon, as John pointed out, we're a highly regulated industry as well. And historically, everything is paid for everything is stamped and signatures and all of that. So to make improvements, I suppose a lot of our improvements were Kaizen events where we found more efficient ways to do the physical work we do, and make improvements to our processes, very focused on our value stream map and, and and eliminating waste. And then we looked at as industry 4.0. As soon as we started looking at one was automation and two was information. We looked at analysis of our our labor where labor goes and the highest utilization of our labor was on blending, which is a very manual to repair the parts during the repair process. And I think the second one was blasting because we don't manufacture we repair parts, every part coming in can be slightly different. So therefore we need to have an adaptive process that can adapt to the condition of the incoming part. And that was really challenging, I suppose for the blending. So we looked at robotic blending and we also looked at Adaptive machining and we came up with technical feasible solutions, but we couldn't, couldn't take justify them from a commercial point of view. We tend to have our second significant manual operation was just blasting and we've successfully implemented robotic blasting for that and eliminated the manual element of that. Our plant is 30 years old. A lot of our equipment is old and it needs replacements over the last three years, we were going through an upgrading of a lot of our big piece of equipment like milling machines, lasers. So whenever we're buying new machines, we're buying them not for our current process, but looking ahead to what we might need for the future. So that was a big change for us was was to look for the future and up of what we believed was required for the future. And then we have new technologies like we've got 3d printing, which is laser blown powder directed energy deposition. So it's, it's effectively taking parts that come out of an engine that are worn, and been able to rebuild the material using this technology, which allows you to print like a honeycomb type structure. And that in the aviation industry was new technology, and very difficult to get approval to do it. So we've been working with one of the aeroengine OEMs, to develop the repair. And it's been in development for about 10 years, we started production two years ago. And one of the things we wanted to do was, was to try and find a way that would reduce the amount of testing of parts to validate parts leaving the facility. So we've done a lot of work through digitalization capturing the key process variables, the other big areas, all of the parts we bring in that we have to repair, we have to restore the dimension. So we've got to try and take a warm part and build up a surfaces add material to it, and then re machinery and grinders and, and coat it and bring it back to finish dimensions that comply with the requirements of the engine manufacturer. And a big part of that, then is the whole quality control of the product, making sure the parts are dimensionally Correct. Historically, that was all done manually measuring it with maybe a micrometer or a vernier type calipers. And the inspector, verifying the the dimensions within the required tolerance, we now are moving to CMM coordinate measuring machines, or we have a number of other digital measuring pieces of equipment where we can capture all of that data digitally. And that has the benefit of allowing us to actually have the theory, the measurements that were measured, rather than simply saying, looking at a record saying yes, they were measured and found to be within the specification, we actually have the measurements, we have it measured automatically. So you're not you're eliminating the human error already. Once you've your system, measuring system validated and calibrated, then you you have a much higher level of confidence because you're eliminating that human element in it. So it's bringing about a lot of change on our production floor. But what we're looking at now really is looking more on the other processes where whether it's our customer service or finance looking for where we can use digitalization to improve that. And one of the big changes for us was we identified an IoT platform ThingWorx, which effectively allows us to dump data from our machines, from our measuring systems from our ERP system, we can extract whatever information and dashboards we want from that going forward. So that that, for me is probably the most significant step that we now have that platform that we can build on.

Dusty Rhodes  13:06 

So all three of you are saying that, you know, you're all from vastly different sectors, both are all becoming reliant on digital systems and speed and efficiency and accuracy, are all seeing a huge improvement because of this. Let me go back to Andrew because Andrew, you kind of work on on a bit of an overview level because you're doing a lot of things in the EU as well. And another thing that you're very conscious of in our changing business these days is circularity what what exactly does that phrase circularity mean?

Andrew Lynch  13:37 

circularity is quite interesting, because it's this idea that we're, we're in a circular environment. In other words, you take something, you create something, you break that down and use some of the breakdown product back into the system itself. Again, it's like trees, for example, they grow up, the leaves go down to become compost and nourish the tree and away we go again. And it's that idea around circularity in that context. And I think it's, it's a beautiful idea, but one of the key key key key tenants that I keep saying to people is that there is no circularity without the manufacturing sector. So when we look at manufacturing at a European level, I like to do this every so often because I think it contextualize it, we do not have the raw materials that we need to support ourselves in this geopolitical region. We've got to go into Africa or China or Russia, as we've seen more lately, to get the raw materials that we need for everything from an iPhone to a tractor to a transistor to a bicycle. So it doesn't really matter what we're building or manufacturing if you'd like the raw materials don't necessarily exist in their natural sense on this continent. So we, as we do, in many cases, certainly in the sustainability sector, we have an onus on us to make sure that this idea of circularity, this example of using raw materials that are over and over again, in a circular sense is critically important, not just from some sort of esoteric, you know, we must pay to save the planet and all of that kids which is incredibly important, but just from a purely economic place we can get access forever to raw materials that are going to run out. I'll give you one very simple example. I am a carpenter. I hope you hear that accent from from what you're hearing online here. My wife is a beautiful woman. And we both live in the beautiful county of Longford in the Midlands, lovely, lovely part of the world. And we've been here for the last two decades wonderful people a great environment to grow a family and to live. And there are two beautiful companies near me one is pinata foods. pinata was beautiful organization large company they built a paninis and specialist breads products for Lidl and Aldi and different different groups right right throughout the country. Brilliant organization right next door to them in the city literally in the same building a state our business state. They have you have a lovely small brewery called St. Mary's brewery from St. Mary's a massive name here in Longford. Mel, as we all know was St. Patrick's first bishop I did not like him here. One of my best friends down here is called Mel this this a huge Demir so statements, and they make fantastic craft beers. I'm a man who loves his craft beer. So one of the things we did a lovely project supported by the EPA, for example, and our own circle air circulator is a is a PPP that that IMR and manages here on behalf of the stage and as the platform for policy on circularity. So if you're interested in that space, certainly check that out. And one of the projects that we funded out of that problem was in this sim bio beers, because we took the waste product waste bread that came out of out of food, we use that as a yeast starter in segments beer. So we had this lovely idea of a waste product coming out of one area as a starter to another. And that gives you a lovely example of the circularity model. Now I should say that they created a fantastic Belgian beer very strong, very beautiful. And it's exported all over the world and the first cousin in New York, who actually had a glass of St. Mel's Belgian brew coming from this particular sin by a beer project, EPA, and ourselves in it, Mr.

Dusty Rhodes  16:51 

Andrew, a lot of the technologies that we're talking about and Addgene, looking into the future, how long have these things trials for and researched before they actually go into mass production and become an everyday thing.

Andrew Lynch  17:04 

They're a very negative man, dusty, good.

Dusty Rhodes  17:09 

I just want to be safe. We say, My late

Andrew Lynch  17:12 

father, God be good to us to say that if what happens if concrete doesn't last beyond 100 years, the whole the whole world will collapse around us. There's an extraordinary amount of technologies out there, when we consider there where Barry was saying, Oh, look standard, what they're doing, that's an incredibly regulated sector. And rightfully so I fly on planes myself all the time, it's the safest form of travel, as we know, it's getting more accessible, more safe, you know, and again, we know the green agenda is coming hugely into that space. So a lot of these regulators are the farmer plants and medical devices or anything into the human system, etc. All of these are foodstuffs are foodstuffs, extraordinary, if you walk into any of the food production companies on the side, which we're very proud of, of that, in particular, from a green perspective, you know, green island green agenda, and this idea of St. Patrick green all over the world. So we've got extraordinary opportunities at an international level around this. So we know these are incredibly regulated and safe sectors that we're feeding into these technologies coming on board and the example the caregivers there, for example, earlier on around, you know, adding deposition onto some of these plants, etc, is very, very safe, very regulated. This is about grasping the opportunity. From a technology perspective, we know that in 10 years time, we're going to be using a way more than we're using now we're in that transition phase, if you'd like to get to that point. And I think I mentioned earlier on off off off air, and I'm sure around this idea of AI envision systems, we know that AI and vision systems can now read an oncology scan better than a human equivalent. And instead of doing up to eight to 10 an hour, we can do over 11,000 to an hour. And that's where we find huge help within our our systems, because we know that it can, it can add huge amounts of computational power, and the parts that we're finding difficult the bottlenecks that we have, and in everything from our health system to developing aircrafts, and all of these design capabilities, all of that can be brought to bear. Now, that doesn't mean that the human takes a step back or that cognition exits the state of and so on. There's this whole idea around human in the loop. We don't have decision systems, we have decision support systems. So if you consider technology, for example, is a bit like, how would you say, you know, Google Maps and you're driving along in your car, Google Maps tells you this is the fastest route to go from A to B. Now you might decide, well, do you know why I had an ex girlfriend used to live down there, I go down and see how that house is like this, and you go left at that particular junction, and we'll just readjust and say, Okay, I get it, we're going somewhere else, but you're still going to point B, and you want to be able to find a plot that is it isn't that it's going to take over the world. This isn't. We're not quite as Huxley's Brave New World at this point. But I think that doesn't mean that we should abdicate our responsibilities in the human element in this and as I mentioned there to John and Barry, I'm not altogether sure that you know, AI systems coming in and we know how people feel about AI and this is very which an age thing is? Well, I should, I should point out that, you know, when your young daughter son picks up an iPhone or an iPad, and they're sliding passenger using that technology them is the most natural thing in the world because it existed when they were born. Whereas if you look at how your parents are looking at to say, Oh, I don't know, young kids, they're always on the screens, I think it's negative, and so on. Because that didn't exist. We know, for example, AI gets an awful rap because our AI is everywhere, the minute it becomes a useful technology that we can understand it stops being called AI, and it starts being called Google Maps or Google search engine or something else that we're used to seeing, you know, how we how we, you know, Alexa, and all these things. That's all a, but there's stuff that we don't know. And there were still cognising about and that we're pushing forward is conceptual basis on that has that term AI? So I think those are, those are things that we should be very, very conscious of. But I don't I don't think that as I was saying, I don't think we should abdicate the human role in this. From a psychology perspective, from birth and Africa perspective, I'm not altogether convinced that, you know, people who get this type of technology, people who understand it, people who are advocates like myself that we should be using and can see positive contribution. So on, there is a whole pile, including a charter for AI, you know, What rights does an AI entity have, for example, there's already a, as there is a human chapter, we now have an AI chapter, which is accepted as an international level. So how we how we engage with this is something that keeps, as I said, not just the human in the loop, but the human at the center of that loop.

Dusty Rhodes  21:25 

John, let me go to you and ask you about because of something yourself and Barry, both mentioned, industry 4.0 What is industry? 4.0?

John O'Sullivan  21:33 

That's a $64,000 question. Yeah, I started, as I said, my own personal research, and I had a look around and because what is industry 4.0 It's a buzzword, it came out of Germany came from the German government back in the early 2000s, as how they would, what's the next step in industry? So industry, one was the, the manual labor transforming to steam power, then industry, two was electrification. And an industry three was electronics and automation. So we're up to the 80s. And now we're on industry 4.2. Our as Andrew said, we're an industry 5.0. And a lot of industries now are coming along with pharmaceutical 4.0. And food, 4.0, and so on. So what we're doing here with the industry 4.0 is it's about cyber physical systems. So we're linking the, the technology with the hardware and getting data. And I found the OECD came up with nine technologies and techniques that they would call industry for bio autonomous robots, autonomous machines, IoT Internet of Things, big data, cybersecurity, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, Andrew covered. So it's really a hodgepodge of lots of new things. And I think the one that I built I'm focusing on next is the is the simulation and what what people are calling digital twin, which is going to be the next phase of I think the next kind of accelerator for manufacturing.

Dusty Rhodes  23:07 

Okay, well, come on. You said so yeah, you have to explain your you're talking about paper, you're talking about digitization, tell us about digital twin digital

John O'Sullivan  23:16 

twin is, it's very exciting. So the first time I saw a digital twin was about 10 years ago, and it was the, you know, the diving bells that go down to the divers use to service the platforms at sea. So there was the ship where they went out to the platforms at sea, they had this big Diving Bell, and they brought down the divers, and they had to acclimatized and so on. So to do the training, and bring that ship into dark and do training, it was costing them hundreds of 1000s of pounds a day, you know, because the ship wasn't producing or wasn't being effective. So they developed an entire simulation of the diving bell, the pressures it would it would encounter, the technology is on board, the control room on the ship, and they put it on shore and they had cameras, they had animation. So everyone felt they were performing in the real world. And it saved a fortune you could train, you could commission you could make changes. And if you wanted to make a change to the actual machine, you could make the change virtually first and test it and then bring it to the real machine. So digital twin is we've we've digital twin cities with digital twin machines with digital twin products.

Dusty Rhodes  24:25 

So this has been happening for me for years. I know in the aviation industry with wind tunnels and modeling and, and all that kind of stuff. So you do have a twin. Are you saying that this is happening now more and more in say regular life?

John O'Sullivan  24:37 

Well, on the one hand, it's to do with cost. You can virtualize your process, virtualize your product and commission and train your operators and your your staff before you invest in the product. But even now I'm finding people who would never have used digital twin are now saying well I have supply chain issues. I'm not going to get the parts for two years. What are we going to do in the meantime? So let's build A virtual machine. And then let's train and develop it while we're waiting for this, this hardware to arrive. So it's interesting. It's probably the next thing we'll be looking at because we haven't got there yet.

Dusty Rhodes  25:14 

I was ready to ask do you do it a yourself but you're thinking about it. And it's something you get into. Speaking of out of aviation, Barry, you're with Lufthansa and I mean, digital twin must be something you've been doing for years, is it?

Barry Lowe  25:28 

No, it's interesting. When John spoke about it, I was speaking with Connor McCarthy from confirm the organization here and UL, and we're going to have a postdoc come on site in the new year, to look at developing a digital twin for our additive manufacturing process. We've got a lot of data that we've gathered, as part of our research, we have a lot of results from metallurgical evaluation of samples. And the idea is to build a digital twin of the process, and then use the digital twin then to help us optimize the process. But it was interesting, John, you're talking about using a digital twin, maybe where you don't have material or whatever, when when we have a new engine type that we need to develop repairs really typically don't have parts to work from. So for us to build the 3d model of the parts, and then to model the process and create a digital twin will be extremely beneficial to us going forward. So it's not something that we're unnecessarily using at the moment or stable, it's something that we see the opportunity, and really need to understand how best we can deploy it in in our business and get the most from it and to say we're starting off with that PhD or postdoc student who's going to work on a project for us to explore the value over two or three.

Dusty Rhodes  26:50 

Let me ask you, Barry, because you've worked in several different countries around the world. And we're kind of we're getting excited about digitalization and digital twins and all these things we could do. Is Arlen kind of lagging behind, or are we keeping you up to speed with, you know, other countries you'd have experience of?

Barry Lowe  27:06 

I think what's interesting to see is I think it was John mentioned this industry 4.0 originated out of Germany, back in the early 2000s. And one of our strategies is to try and collaborate as much as possible within the group. And certainly, when I compare what we're doing with push, our colleagues in Germany are doing very much aligned for maybe some hot on different parts, but they're looking more at the aircraft and the engines as a sort of a macro level. Whereas we're down on the detailed parts that we repair, looking at how we can apply digitalization to the actual processes used to repair departments. But I would say we're very much keeping abreast of of our colleagues in Germany, and trying to share as much or our knowledge and experience to to help each other and collaborate as much as possible.

Dusty Rhodes  27:59 

And do you find that there is a lot of that where you will go to Germany or other countries and you'll be inspired by something and then you'll throw in your tuppence worth, and they'll go, Oh, very good idea.

Barry Lowe  28:09 

Absolutely. Our key projects are what we call our latest projects, we would share that with them. The other area, I think is just within the region here we have a very active network called explore engineering. And that's an effort between the universities in the Midwest here and the industry in the Midwest. I think it was fascinating, really, because we talked about the manufacture of knees and hips, and that and we've got Stryker here in our region. And we've collaborated closely with them because they use a lot of the same technologies in the manufacture of hips and knees, as we do in the repair of air foils from aeroengine. So I think it just goes to show the great opportunity we have on this particular topic to collaborate. And over the years, we developed a very strong lean network, where companies collaborated on, on and shared experiences on their Lean journey. And I think it was a great opportunity for us to network industry together to share our experience on digitalization. And I suppose our most recent step forward was to consolidate our digitalization program in with our our Lean program, our CI program, because I guess when we set out on our journey, we saw digitalization as projects more like MPI projects, and we manage them with a gate process. And then we, I suppose one of the two spreads across the organization we looked at at training across the organization social we've had 20 of our staff across the organization do the UCD diploma in digital transformation. And it was out of that we really looked at are we looking at a transfer a digital transformation in our organization? Or was it more incremental improvement And really, we decided it's incremental improvement we're looking at. So when you talk about CI, continuous improvement under lean umbrella, we're effectively doing CI using digitalization. And so to bring the two programs together, made a lot of sense, because we're reusing and sharing the same resources. But it brings another dimension to our CI program when we talked about digitalization and opening up another world of opportunities for us. And part of the problem is we didn't have the knowledge in house, we didn't have the skill set maybe to really go after some of the digital opportunities. When we looked at CI, we looked at other non digital opportunities, let's say, and I think having trained 20 people on the diploma course, we now have people that are more aware of suppose hours and are looking for opportunities to make improvements to digitalization. And that's why I think def network would be really good to try and have companies share, experience and learn. If we're not competing against each other. We're actually collaborating and helping each other. And there's really a lot of opportunity there going forward.

Dusty Rhodes  31:12 

And do you kind of all need to speak the same language as well. And what you're doing is is helping them to do that. Just to wrap up our podcast for today. John, after listening to our barrier has been talking about or barrier listening to John, is there anything you would like to ask each other? I'll let John go first on that.

John O'Sullivan  31:28 

Barry, I I'd like to maybe touch base with you later about the digital twin journey you're on and your IoT solution you did you call it ThingWorx is the platform we're using. And it's the next step that we're looking at. And

Barry Lowe  31:43 

I like to like to talk to you, John, as well, because they call we're trying to do with Connor, in confirm. certainly interesting. Get your input.

Dusty Rhodes  31:51 

It started off as a podcast. And now it's Tinder. As like what's going on? So listen, John, what is it that interests you about what air Berry was saying that you're thinking,

John O'Sullivan  32:02 

not just the simulation, and the digital twin of the product associate and the digital twin of the process, and how that how that will affect the real manufacturing then, is fascinating. And the key is the feedback, you have to close that loop and get the data out of the factory floor and into the digital twin. Yeah, so that the digital twin is continuously improving in its true nature, you know that it's catching up with the real data, and you'll find that you're missing you have gaps, okay, we don't have enough data to be accurate. Let's add sensors, let's gather information so.

Dusty Rhodes  32:41 

And Barry, what is it wasn't that John was saying that you're gonna follow up with after the podcast.

Barry Lowe  32:46 

I suppose if I just take a step back, maybe just the one of the big challenges I found in trying to take an organization like ours, like we have 250 people. So we're a small company. We're a highly technical company. And yet I really struggled to guess digitalization embraced by the organization. I mean, if you look at from a financial controllers point of view, they're immediately looking at what's the return on investment. So I'm looking to try and get projects that I don't even know myself wanted to deliver. So we need to understand how the digital twin can do for our business. Before we can really put a project together without an ROI on it. I want to start with looking at some of the other projects where we're looking at process monitoring and dashboards, how do you see what the ROI is going to be on it? And if you want to invest in an IoT platform, before we even have a whole lot of projects that are gonna go on to it? It's really difficult. So one of the concerns I have for industry in general, if you take the smaller companies who maybe don't have the resources we have, how do you support companies like that, to take that step forward? That leap of faith as well as into digitalization and certainly is still seen as a buzzword, the industry 4.0 is a buzzword and some people it's like the engineers or our you know, it's it's a game or their toys to play an experiment with. And that's a big concern, I think.

Dusty Rhodes  34:05 

Well, let me ask Andrew about that, then. Because Andrew, we're talking about digitalization and developing things and you can do this answer. It's all amazing. And it sounds great for a big company that has the resources to do it. Because you've more of an overview of industry, do you find that this is filtering down into smaller players?

Andrew Lynch  34:25 

We've got to educate our own managers, not that this is something they could do, but this is something they have to do. And the problem is and I you know, I often give the example there of of hearing it, you're hearing aids went from went from just press or pressing, pressing or vacuum molded and so on to being 3d printed. It went from a couple of euros to a couple of pets. If you're an organization that was doing the latter, you are going to be out of business within nine months. It happens that quickly. We know that there's lots of medical device corporations at the moment at A at an international level that are looking 3d printing. Now if they get 3d printers in that manufactured product, what's that going to do to their supply chain, it's currently making plastic multipacks. And the tool makers that make the tools or molds for those plastic pipe manufacturers, that's a supply chain that could potentially be decimated. And we need to understand what that looks like and so on. We look at our car manufacturers, people supplying product into cars at the moment, as carriers transition from fossil fuels into electric, anybody who's making parts for all those, that's going to change significantly. If you're a company that makes buttons and panels for anything, what you're going to find is the buttons are gone, they're now on screens, we are one sided screens, and we press stuff, instead of having small plastic buttons, and so on. So there is a revolution in terms of what it is that consumers looking for. Were going from plastic parts to electronically enabled smart things. And we need to be on that journey. It doesn't matter what sector you're in, if you're a food manufacturer, for example. And you think the 3d printed food is something that will never happen, you're wrong. I've eaten a character that was 3d printed, you know, I've had a scan of my entire body and they gave me a little doll. It's not the cutest dog I've ever seen. It's a bit freaky, but it's, but it's a doll. Nonetheless, it doesn't matter what sector you're in, this is coming for you. And if you think that I can, I can stand still and do nothing. And I've got a good business, and I'm going to be alright Jack, you're not. Because regardless of whether it's the regulatory environment that's coming down from a circularity perspective, and is looking to manage and maintain the information to that data stream, or whether a multinational supplier for you is going to come through, or even a b2c customer, for example, there's a whole legislation coming down that I'm manufacturing machine given to a customer, I'm still responsible for the data infrastructures for that for 17 years after I started 14 years after itself. So these are things that are going to put huge pressure on on all systems, some of which, and most of which are going to be SMEs. But I think back to how I thought of ISR when I first came across, it's a good guy who never climbed this mountain. And now it's a hill, it's a very small hill, because we can all, you know, have the infrastructure and the knowledge and the mindset and the budgeting and so on to make that happen. This is just another hill in the making.

Dusty Rhodes  37:03 

I actually kind of gotta give you the last word, Andrew, in a way. All right, because is there anything from what Barry or John was talking about earlier that you'd like to add like to ask them?

Andrew Lynch  37:13 

John O'Sullivan, very serious question for you, my friend, collaborative robotics nonsense, are the wave of the future.

John O'Sullivan  37:24 

I would say for us, we've used them, and we ended up backing off from using them. There were limitations around the capacity and their accuracy. I suppose it's a trade off between the collaborative nature, and then what they can do, basically, how heavy can they lift? And how accurate can they repeat a task. So we've used them and then we've gone back to call it traditional robots from the big name manufacturers, Cuca, Mitsubishi, and then you have to install overarching safety systems around them. So for dusty if you're not familiar, a collaborative robot is where you can actually have a robot on the desk with you. And the human being is handing parts to the robot, the robot is taking parts. So it is it's in the it's in the name collaborative. But for that, you're dealing with a moving part that can be dangerous, and it has to be managed very carefully. So I would say there's a future there. But we've we've not had the case studies to use it. I just cannot. Can I just make a point on to reiterate something that the lead said about the SMEs in Ireland, I think you might say, Yes, Andrew, that we don't have robots per 100,000 robots per 100,000 people. But we're in a process industry where robots don't aren't required. Were moving liquids around more than parts. We don't have that OEM base that the Germans and the Italians have. So I would say we're probably digitalizing elsewhere, apart from robots. What we do need to do is this is this, this podcast is part of it. We need to build clusters of expertise, where companies like mine, we have the advantage over burying it, we can see what the other customers are doing. We can see what the other industries are doing. And we can take the best from each and deliver it to someone like Barry, we can take knowledge from the medical device from the the orthopedics and bring it to automotive bring it to aerospace. And those clusters are key to the to the growth of the industry in Ireland, I think.

Dusty Rhodes  39:30 

Well, James, it's been absolutely fascinating talking to all of you, I definitely get the impression that not only is digitalization alive and well in Ireland, but we are at where as good as anywhere else in the world, which is, which is good to say, Oh, I won't say we're better but we're as good as anybody else in the world, which is great. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast today. John O'Sullivan, Managing Director of Douglas control and automation Barry Lowe, engineering manager at Lufthansa Technik. Turbine in Shannon and Andrew Lynch, Chief Innovation Officer at Irish Manufacturing Research If you'd like to look up any of our guests, you'll find their contacts and LinkedIn profiles in the show notes area of your podcast player right now. Our amplified podcast was produced by dustpod.io. For engineers journal, you'll find advanced episodes on our website at engineers ireland.ie or just press follow on your podcast player right now to get our next episode automatically. Until next time, from a self destructs Thank you for listening

Discover how digitalisation has been woven into the fabrics of business and society, and how Irish engineers have risen to the challenge.

In episode two we explore how technology continues to redefine sectors of the engineering world and how these strides in digitalisation are increasing speed, accuracy and efficiency in business. 

We are joined by Michael O'Shaughnessy Digital Lead for Construction at PM Group, Ed Arnott Electrical Engineer at MMA Consulting and Darragh Ryan, a Design Manager at Horizon Offsite Ltd

Listen below or on your podcast player!

Topics we discussed include:

• Offsite engineering and its benefits (01.49)
• How digitalisation has changed how we approach project management (04.47)
• The benefits of moving away from manual work to software systems (08.21)
• Trimble and the role it plays in electrical engineering (09.29)
• The biggest challenges of working in a post covid world (16.08)

Guest details:

Michael O Shaughnessy is Digital Lead for Construction at PM Group with responsibility for delivering  PM Groups Strategic Digital Plan for Construction 2025.

Darragh Ryan is a Design Manager at Horizon Offsite Ltd. Darragh’s work focuses on the design and management of light gauge structural steel frame projects across both Ireland and the UK.

Ed Arnott, Ed is an electrical engineer at MMA Consulting. Ed’s background in the industrial gas and petrochemical industries and specialise in hazardous- area electrical design.

Contact details:

Ed Arnott Electrical Engineer at MMA Consulting Engineers
uk.linkedin.com/in/edward-arnott 

Darragh Ryan
www.linkedin.com/in/darraghryan1

Micheal O Shaughnessy
linkedin.com/in/michael-o-shaughnessy-92a5241b

More information

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/

Quotes

The cloud has probably been the biggest transformation. We've got people spread across the world working in the same environment in the same space and they're getting instant updates.

Michael O’Shaughnessy

Offsite construction is a relatively new industry and born out of digitalization. It's something that's becoming more and more possible as digitalization progresses. 
Darragh Ryan

The great advantage of the program I use, Trimble, is that it's actually designed around the regulations. So I know not only the capability of the equipment but I also know what is considered safe and legal. 
Ed Arnott

Transcription text

For your convenience, here is a 90% accurate automated transcript of the podcast.

Dusty Rhodes  0:39 

Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes Welcome to episode two of our digitization and engineering mini series, where experts at the forefront of their engineering fields explore how digitization has been woven into the fabric of business and society and how Irish engineers are rising to the challenge. Today we have a another three amazing guests for you. They are the digital lead for construction at pm group. Michael O'Shaughnessy. Michael is responsible for the delivery of pm group's strategic digital plan for construction. 2025 Darryl Orion is a design manager at Horizon off site whose work focuses on the design and management of light gauge structural steel frame projects across Ireland and the UK. And from m m a consulting we're joined by electrical engineer Ed Arnet. Ed's background is in the industrial gas and petrochemical industries and specializes in hazardous area electrical design. Let me start with Dara. Dara, you're an off site engineer. And I can't think of anyone more perfect to benefit from digitization. How has it shaped your industry over the last 10 to 15 years?

Darragh Ryan  1:49 

Yep. So offsite construction is a relatively new industry. And it is born out of digitalization, really. So it's something that's more and more possible, as digitalization progresses, when you do a building off sites, you need a lot of coordination up front in the design, you can't really figure it out, well, you can, you can figure it out on site, but that slows everything down. And that goes back to the more traditional way of doing things. But also construction you do your your drawings and model and 3d upfront, you coordinate where the m&e where the services are going, where all the steps where they act, tact wants, doors, windows, whatever. So all that is done upfront in advance, and then you manufacture the material before it comes to site. So, you know, without the digitalization, also construction will be, you know, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be where it is today anyway.

Dusty Rhodes  2:47 

And as an electrical engineer, how has digitization shaped your industry,

Ed Arnott  2:53 

I suppose the main impact has been the speed at which you can perform a calculation. Electrical Engineering has always been this sort of iterative process, every time you make a small change, you have to say, increase the size of a cable and maybe increase the size of a fuse, and maybe you change the cable route. And all of these little changes can have a big impact on the design. So having a system where you can calculate and recalculate very quickly is extremely useful. And then of course, there's the means of recording the information and sharing it with other fields. So some programs allow you to do that, and to keep a good record of all the equipment that you plan to use.

Dusty Rhodes  3:35 

And, Michael, I think the title of your job just shows the change that we have seen in some engineering firms, you are the digital lead ad pm construction, is this a sign of the importance that digitization is having at the company?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  3:49 

Absolutely. We have a strategic plan for 2025 led by I suppose a term we call D LPD. digitally enabled lean project delivery, digital being the enabler, lean being the foundation, you know, reducing waste from processes and, and trying to get gain real value for our customers down the line as we deliver projects. So it's somewhere we have to go it's primarily driven by a major skill shortage in the industry demands our true, you know, gone through the roof. Clients want buildings built immediately as the you know, they want to get the products on the market and, you know, we're seeing something just to go back to Gary's point, you know, we're seeing a huge amount of offsite manufacturing, and lean and digital underpins, you know, the speed of how we can now deliver so it's where the industry is going and, and pm grouper are trying to stay ahead of the curve and get there you know, you know, as the front runners you know,

Dusty Rhodes  4:47 

can I ask all of you these changes in digitization has changed the way that you approach a project in the first place? So if somebody says to you, we need x building facility in y place Has that changed how you start with your blank sheet of paper? What do you think? Darren?

Darragh Ryan  5:05 

Yeah, it would, it would like, first of all, the digitalization process allows you to visualize things very, very quickly. So site constraints, you know, that can be easily understood before every year on site, you know what what roadways are near is there's real networks near. So setting up the site and site safety. That's, that's a huge thing. Now that that can be done through digitalization, that couldn't be done previously. Also, what you can do with digitalization is get experts involved, that might necessarily be from that location. For example, you can get experts in from abroad from other parts of the country, you know, that have more experience with the problem at hand. And you can do that through digitalization whether it's, you know, video calls, or you know, remote working, things like that, you know, so. So on that side of things, it leads to more a collaborative working environment where things are safer, you get the experts there, and it leads to just better project delivery.

Dusty Rhodes  6:09 

And, Michael, how has digitization changed the way you approach a project?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  6:14 

Yeah, I think I think that's a really good question. And ultimately, it underpins, you know, the whole digital transformation. So, how we started this journey was we tried to understand what we do. And the key to doing that is identifying our our core processes. So once we defined and were very clear of what our processes were, we looked at where we potentially could strike value by optimizing how we deliver those processes. So what we found was, is in any project lifecycle, the construction side is where potentially the most risk is, it's where more things can go wrong, that's the longest time on site, you've got more people that are moving, you've got a lot of equipment moving in, you know, that's where the real efficiency has to need to start. So we looked at that in real detail. And we, I suppose, identified certain processes. And we felt that if we digitize those processes from, you know, making information better available to collecting data, we could ultimately remove some of the people and waste from from projects. So to do that, what we did was we identified core activities that we would not have typically done at design stage. So we would embed certain information into the models, we would do certain activities at design stage that when the information moved to the construction phase, that information was readily available, information was set up to be utilized efficiently accessed efficiently. But ultimately, we can try to drive back a, you know, an improved quality or an more efficient quality product, you know, when it wants to get to construction stage. So we put a huge amount of effort now up front, when planning out a project because, as I said, the risk is a construction stage. And that's where you have to plan better now to make these gains and drive these efficiencies.

Dusty Rhodes  8:02 

Alright, let's get away from talking about things in general and explore things a little bit more specifically, I'd like to start with Ed on this because Ed, you're very much into the digitization programs side of things, how does using software now differ from the way things used to be done by hand?

Ed Arnott  8:21 

Well, some of the guys I trained with will give you stories from the 70s about plotting on a graph, what a fuse would do and how much energy would go through it. Now, the great advantage of the program that I use at the moment tremble is that it's actually designed around the regulations. So I know not only the capability of the equipment, but I also know what is considered safe and legal. And therefore I can adjust my design accordingly. So for example, things like the tolerances of cables are based around standards that are actually derived from the British and Irish standards.

Dusty Rhodes  9:05 

And because you know what the standards are and you know what the regulations are and you know what is physically capable, then you know that the project is that you're working on so you're able to put all of this together within that software and boom, you can make it all happen much quicker.

Ed Arnott  9:19 

Precisely. So the software already knows that I have to comply with the standards. I just need to tell it what I intend to do and it figures out the best way to get there.

Dusty Rhodes  9:29 

Tell me about the software that you're using it's trembled pro design. Now I take it you don't work for them and you're not paid for them. This is not a sponsored feature or anything like that. Tell me in a sentence what tremble pro design does is it for electrical only or can be adapted elsewhere.

Ed Arnott  9:45 

It is only electrical, it is mostly a low voltage design tool. And explain to me what that is. So if I am designing a low voltage power system, and I want to decide what size of cable to use or what size of fuse I need, I can use this program to calculate those things. I can also simulate an overall power system, how much energy I'll need? What would be the effect? If there was a problem on that system? Where is it likely to fail? That sort of thing?

Dusty Rhodes  10:18 

And is this piece of software that you need to license and install on your network or various machines in your network? Or is it something that operates in the cloud?

Ed Arnott  10:27 

It's an installed piece of software, I understand. And then

Dusty Rhodes  10:31 

how does it update itself? How does it keep itself regulated with the regulations as at work?

Ed Arnott  10:37 

Well, the software developer tremble issues, regular updates, obviously, you need to maintain your license. But yes, each time the regulations are updated, or each time a manufacturer brings a new piece of equipment to the market, then the database is automatically updated with this extra information.

Dusty Rhodes  10:57 

So let me ask you about speed when you sit down and you're doing a project, and you're trying to decide what it is you're going to use and which cables you're going to use, and how long they need to be and all that. How long would that have taken to do on paper?

Ed Arnott  11:09 

Well, there are back of the envelope calculations, you could probably do, but to give an accurate calculation, it might take an hour or so to do a calculation, which might take a matter of minutes now.

Dusty Rhodes  11:22 

So you're literally saving hours on every project.

Ed Arnott  11:26 

Right? But the real benefit is if you need to make a change, because whereas you'd have to start again, from scratch on paper with this system, you simply click a button, see what would happen if the cable route was longer, for example? And you can do so instantaneously?

Dusty Rhodes  11:43 

Does that help you then when you're trying to design and you're trying to explore new ideas? And you say to yourself, What if you're able to make those changes and see what happens?

Ed Arnott  11:52 

It's good for what if scenarios, it's also good if there is say a late change in construction, say if you have to move a substation, or perhaps a different piece of equipment is proposed from what you originally intended, then you can see what the impact would be, and you can accommodate it very quickly.

Dusty Rhodes  12:11 

And do you find that that software also helps you to make better designs?

Ed Arnott  12:15 

I'd like to think it's both better and more efficient. You shouldn't need to build in such big tolerances if you can calculate accurately what to expect. Very good.

Dusty Rhodes  12:26 

Michael, let me move on to you when you are looking back on some of your work with renewable energy. How has digitization shaped some of those processes? Oh, I

Michael O'Shaughnessy  12:37 

suppose when I was working in renewable energy, I worked on a project or the products that we developed, was designed to be remote and actually below sea level. So getting information and data off that product was something that, you know, was a huge challenge, you know, there's a huge amount of research into, you know, what information should we gather? What information would tell us what would enhance the performance of the machine. So what we find now and how that's transferable to the type of sector I'm in at the moment is, we've got teams and teams of people that are spread across the world, from clients to design teams. So you're ultimately gathering similar types of data, and making it available that provides the right information, valuable information to all those that need it, regardless of where they are in the world. So

Dusty Rhodes  13:24 

Dara had referred to collaboration as being an advantage of the digital world, do you find that there is a lot of that collaboration going on?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  13:32 

Probably one of our main innovations or initiatives this year has been to release the what we call the collaboration portal is which ultimately is each project now has its own suppose website for want of a better term. It's got all the specific project information. It's got a shared collaboration space where you know, the entire team work and save all of their information or access their information. But I suppose where the benefits are, is each projects collaboration portal are structured identical. So where we have teams that are, you know, a bit more dynamic, that are moving from project to project, they can go to the very same location, regardless of the project and find that very same piece of information that's relevant to that project. So, you know, collaboration is key. Similarly to that we've, you know, launched an initiative called tiered agility, which is ultimately how we structure and manage our meetings, right down from the daily huddles that designers will have, you know, in relation to what their daily tasks are, right through to coordination between the different teams to the different trade partners that we work with, right through to management and then at leadership and governance level, or we're dealing with clients. So we've a real firm structure on how we want teams to communicate. So that means the people at the top have visibility and can access the core information that would matter to them and matters. to clients when they, you know, and gained and got gathered out efficiently, traditionally to projects would have typically, at the outset sort of set itself up, you know, in its own way, particularly large projects, you know, every project manager may have, historically may have had their own flavor of how they want to structure the project, but probably bringing in the standardization enables digital, and I suppose it enables efficiency. So, as people move around, they're working in a common environment.

Dusty Rhodes  15:28 

So, is this part of the strategic digital plan that you're putting together for PM?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  15:33 

Absolutely, yeah, it's that standardization. And that's key to success here, it would be very difficult to digitize, you know, multiple flavors of the one way of working. So you have, we have to standardize and, you know, if you have a common way of working, you can then enhance that way of working with it with one digital solution. Albeit, you can improve that digital solution over time. But I suppose all of these digital solutions, you know, require investment. So, you know, you need to, you know, invest and get benefitted out and use that investment, and products across multiple projects to gain value from it.

Dusty Rhodes  16:08 

We have a huge heavy hand from COVID, because it just accelerated everything that was digital last terrific. But now, we've been through that. And we've made a lot of advances in collaboration and being able to work across digital platforms, with your own strategic digital plan within PM, what's your biggest challenge over the next six months?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  16:30 

It's good question. Everybody's back to work. And everybody is traveling again. And the demands from the sector are huge, I suppose it's fixing on you know, certain processes, ensuring that we gain that real efficiency, you know, knowing exactly where we want to push our digital take our digital journey. That's the property the big push, but I suppose the demands on the business to accelerate and then the digital team to be able to maintain that speed is going to be the challenge. Dara

Dusty Rhodes  17:00 

offsite construction, that is your area and digitization must have made a huge difference in that. How do you explain to people the advantages of off site versus more traditional on site construction.

Darragh Ryan  17:14 

So off site what it aims to do, right? It's it aims to construct buildings more quickly, more reliably and sustainably, by taking work away from site and using off site construction. Right. So off site isn't just like gauge steel, what I do, there's two main types of it. There's there's two D Systems, and that includes like a steel frame, which is what I'm involved, that would also include timber frame, precast, panels CLT. But there's also 3d offsite systems as well volumetric systems, much modular systems, you know, so horizon where path of an E Text group now, so we mainly focus on residential buildings. So everything from high apartment blocks, concrete floors, to small houses, lightweight floors, student accommodation, hotels, healthcare, when you compare it to traditional construction, which is a more linear approach, first, the foundations get built, then the walls, then each floor and the roof, you know, whereas also construction teams can happen in parallel. And that ties in, you know, the digital process that allow that to happen. But, for example, while the foundations are being built, you can have walls being made in a factory. And then as the floors go up, you can be fitting out your internals. So things things happen in parallel, that speeds up time on site. So we can cut down, you know, a structural frame program for a superstructure of up to say, 50%. With like HCl, compared to traditional construction,

Dusty Rhodes  18:48 

I just want to double check that you're telling me that you can build the building 50% faster?

Darragh Ryan  18:54 

Yeah, true. We just do a structured frame, but we normally allow, like, if we're on a housing scheme, three days per house, that's walls, up floors in roof on watertight structure. Okay, so it's apartment block, I mean, it all vary in size, but you're talking a typical apartment block a week per floor to construct it, you know, so, so you are talking about 50% saving to say some of the more traditional methods, so also, if it's utilized, right, and that pre design stage goes in early, you can have massive savings and get reduced that site time, you can get revenue earlier, you know, from selling your buildings or renting it depends what they're being used for. So it has massive, massive advantages in terms of speed. I guess then another advantage, it will be the sustainability side of things. You know, it tends to be a lot lighter. It's less carbon footprint than say your your heavier, say more concrete based masonry block schemes. So sustainability is all So another general key advantage in it, and I suppose we touched on the other things earlier, but like quality control, it's in a factory environment, it's also leads to safety. You know, so there's a lot of advantages with like H and off site in general, that are coming into mainstream more and more now. And Michael will testify to that. But we saw the opportunity in the market, and you know, that that's why we're here today, really, that there is an opportunity, it has advantages, and it can, you know, deliver housing and buildings, you know, affordable. And quickly.

Dusty Rhodes  20:37 

How about digitization with clients? Because I mean, it's great for ourselves to know the industry, and we know all the parts. But what about trying to get the clients in understanding the design?

Darragh Ryan  20:48 

Yeah, so what we do is we develop a pre construction model is what we call it, we call it a pre con model for short. And we work in the Autodesk Revit environment. So we build a volumetric model, which is basically just shell elements of the walls, because our walls will have a certain thickness, you know, for the system build. So we build the volumetric model and coordinate that with the architect, you know, so the openings are in the right place, the right size, the walls are in the right place, steps in the slab, whatever, and then also bring in the other design team members. So mechanical and electrical is a huge part. So we would model in openings where the services need to be under huge openings. In buildings these days for mechanical ventilation, for example, we would model in them openings haven't pre made in the factory, so that no subsequent work needs to be done on site. And we would use this model as the basis to collaborate with the client and the clients design team, we would issue out the model with drawings. And that would be used as a tool to comment back to us to build this model accurately. We then use that model then to do everything internally becomes our kind of central design. So we use it to do the structural engineering, we export the steel if there's a hot rolled columns and beams in to the steel fabricators for fabrication. And we also then export it to our own in house detailing software to detail the studs. So that pre con model in Revit becomes a central model for all the coordination and all the design and, and then the manufacturing design as well.

Dusty Rhodes  22:31 

Let me ask you all, because there's pros and cons to everything in life. And we've been talking very much about the pros of digitization and wonderful is, what is the one thing that niggles you that is not being looked after? At the moment? I'll start with add on that one.

Ed Arnott  22:48 

Interesting question. I suppose for me, it's probably about sharing information amongst disciplines. So with my design software, I can export the information to Revit, for example, but it's a little bit harder to get information back from Revit if somebody else makes a change, so I have to maybe manually update the model or change the calculation myself.

Dusty Rhodes  23:15 

And why is that? Is it the same software that they're using? Are they using a different software to you?

Ed Arnott  23:21 

It's different software packages, I think part of the problem is that different disciplines require fundamentally different things in their calculation. So in my field, electrical, a lot of what I do is it's nebulous. We don't look at the physical equipment, per se, we look at its capabilities. But we must also be aware that the physical size of our equipment has an impact on other disciplines. So we have to allow space, as Dara was saying for rises and opes. And that sort of thing. And if somebody decides that we have to have root cables through a different route, that means they have to be longer, which means we might have to redesign them, and so on.

Dusty Rhodes  24:04 

And how do you think that that problem can be solved? Well,

Ed Arnott  24:07 

I suppose if they were one overarching program that could do everything will be nice. I sometimes wonder if something like a VR system might help if you could get a virtual design team and actually visualize what you're designing. So if you could meet together and say, This is my system, this is where I think it needs to go, this is how much space I need. And then you could change the virtual models or suit and agree things that way rather than exchanging drawings and then going through another iteration.

Dusty Rhodes  24:40 

Dara, do you think that that idea of virtual reality will work across the various disciplines?

Darragh Ryan  24:45 

Yeah, it could work and raise an interesting point. But I think the key what what Ed is trying to say there and it's very important is how the different software packages talk to each other. And that could be something that's sure Repeat when it should be something that's improved. It isn't great. We have something now and IFC, which is generally a 3d model type that can be imported into most older software packages, but it's still not perfect. And I think discussion between different software companies on how they can work together and import and export compatible formats, that that's, that's clear. I also think one of the big things might be training, there's new software updates every year for all the programs, but there'll be new things on Revit that we won't be able to use, because we're not trained to use them, we don't know about them. So I think there needs to be a more proactive approach in the industry to train people up and keep developing that skill set, you know, so that when the new things become available, we can pick them up straight away and realize their advantages straight away. I think that's something that the industry could do better, maybe have a training group or society. I know there's, you know, obviously, it's stuff it with engineers, Ireland and death, but perhaps a dedicated digital one,

Dusty Rhodes  26:09 

Michael, do you find with different disciplines wanting to work with each other? And then of course, having different pieces of software or even within one discipline, you've got variants of software? How are you getting across this problem with the strategic plan at PM,

Michael O'Shaughnessy  26:25 

we would have multiple tools, like Autodesk is probably a big product that's on the market. But we would also have a hexagon products, which is a competitor. And particularly in the complex projects that we work in. Certain products are preferred in industry for delivering complex pharma lines, for instance, whereas you know, Autodesk is probably the more collaborative suite, we go to great lengths to get coordination and collaboration happening between our disciplines. And I suppose, where information is not fully translatable, we've developed other processes to gather information from the specific tools to ensure that they are available to those who need it. And but it does take it takes a lot of people. And it takes good processes to ensure that that collaboration happens. And it doesn't come cheap, you know. And those processes, I suppose, are continuously improving. We'd have a team of people, part of our digital team working constantly on developing and improving those processes, ensure that we stick with what's going on in the market.

Dusty Rhodes  27:31 

Time is one thing and money is another and I'm quite sure that you find that people are in another area. Do you find that there is a reluctance for people to learn new digital tools?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  27:43 

No, I would think I would think there's a great lot of frustration in industry. And the demands external demands on on individuals, just due to the workload that's out there at the moment is probably tremendous. So people want to do better, and they want to get to work quicker. There's no doubt about that. And, you know, when this new technology comes, people really really do embrace it as what our experience is and you know, always are willing to go that extra go that extra effort to you know, upskill and develop their skills to understand what's now available in the market and how they can make life a little easier for themselves. I suppose.

Dusty Rhodes  28:24 

I'd like to wrap up today by giving each of you a chance to ask each other across questions, because I'm sure when you're listening to what everybody else has been saying that might be stuck in your head that you want to ask each other. Dara, is there anything you'd like to ask add or to ask Michael?

Darragh Ryan  28:38 

Yeah, Ed, obviously, coordination with m&e is a huge part of what we do. And the big thing that we find is there is a detachment between the consultants, the m&e, consultants and the contractors who are doing the work on site. You know, it seems that the consultants don't fully do the spatial design really of where docks need to go and it's more about performance spec. And I'm wondering how could we bring that design process in say mechanical electrical forward so that it could be coordinated at an earlier stage? Would it be worthwhile for clients to get you know, the m&e contractors in earlier as opposed to waiting for, you know, site to to happen, you know, to work alongside the design process.

Ed Arnott  29:29 

I can see some mileage in that I've had one project in particular where a building design was completed. And I was expected to find a way to get the m&e services from the basement to some heat pumps on the roof, with absolutely no service rises in the entire building. So I think you're right, possibly, some early discussions would help. And I suppose this goes back to my idea of virtual reality, the VR that you can talk through these things and maybe shift things around within your Virtual Building before you start drawing up plans.

Darragh Ryan  30:07 

Yeah, that's that's a good point, then for Michael, it seems that digitalization is more industry led, then legislation lead at the moment. And I think that's largely driven by what saves money we will use. So what do you think has been the biggest advancement quite recently in either your strategy or, or in digitalization that you that you can see, I guess,

Michael O'Shaughnessy  30:35 

access to information is probably been, you know, the the cloud really has transformed things. It's not long ago, since you know, every office in the world certainly in Dublin had a huge server room where, you know, you needed to be in the office, you needed to be on the network, to access files, access information, we've got people spread across the world, working in the same environment in the same space, and they're getting instant updates, information is updating in real time from, you know, locations right across so that what the cloud has has changed has just, you know, Ben, probably been the biggest transformation, I suppose. Yeah.

Darragh Ryan  31:17 

And just to add to that, I suppose it also has helped projects. I remember in the past, you know, when there wasn't the proper BIM system, and you know, file sharing system, you could have one set of consultants, whether they're destructure, or architect or whatever, working with revision six, and suddenly, actually, revision 10 is the latest revision. So having a kind of cloud based BIM service for a project as well has eliminated that from what it used to be, you know, so there's one true copy. And that's the latest file.

Dusty Rhodes  31:50 

Can I throw in a question for Ed, because we're talking about the cloud and everything being available everywhere at every time? Ed, you were saying that the software that you use tremble is based on the actual computer and getting updates doesn't happen as quick as you might have in the cloud? Do you have problems like that and keeping you up to speed with working with other people using that same software?

Ed Arnott  32:12 

Well, that's the program, but the files upon which you're working are obviously stored anywhere you like. So those can be on a project server, and often our

Dusty Rhodes  32:23 

Ra. Okay, see, you get around it that way. Edie? Have you got a question for Michael, or a question for Derek,

Ed Arnott  32:30 

I suppose. Probably best to excellent. Michael. With a design project, obviously, we've been discussing a lot about the upfront design and how we can deliver, say, a completed building. When it comes to the finished product. What happens with your, your as built drawings? Is there a way in which digitization can make the handover package better? So all the documentation, for example, for the end user or for the local authority, or whomever?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  33:06 

Tag said? That's a good question. It's certainly something that I spent a lot of time working on in recent times. So it's very fresh, in my mind, absolutely a. So the work we do typically upfront by developing the design, harvesting the data out of the design tools, and we we package that data and information into our portals. When we get to construction stage, we use digital applications to manage the inspection processes. And what we're doing in many cases, we're actually automatically populating some of the inspection forms from the data that's harvest added design. So you're, instead of using the old notepad or the the clipboard, where you're manually type writing in figures and tag numbers of equipment, and for part of the inspection processes, that's now all automated into the into the form. So an inspector will arrive to site, he's got a certain amount of inspections to do and all the forms are partially pre populated. And all they got to do is execute this step. So with that, then the asbestos and the inspection records all form part of the turnover package, because they're in a digital environment. And the models are all in a 3d environment that gets turned over as a combined package and ultimately then populates the operations and maintenance software package that they use for operating the system. The real value in that is is if something fails, or they have a maintenance strategy, they can go back and see who inspected a particular instrument or a particular piece of equipment when it was inspected by who what tests what were the figures and not shoot informed and how and when they might maintain a piece of equipment or roped off, you know, replace piece of equipment or service piece of equipment through the operation of the of the facility that they're working in. So it's just huge advancements in that space. But we probably have a lot more to do.

Dusty Rhodes  35:02 

Michael, I'll wrap up with yourself. Do you have a question for Edie or Dara?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  35:08 

Yeah, I got I'm not sure where to start, but I suppose maybe. Maybe for, for for Dara. Obviously, quality assurance now is a big thing. Certainly in our industry, I suspect it's the same as yours. And I'm a great believer in offsite manufacturing, do you find you have good quality processes or good digital quality processes for your product? Because obviously, when something gets shipped out your facility and lands on site, what's your kind of view on that?

Darragh Ryan  35:40 

Exactly? Yeah. So look, we've we've improved that massively over the last couple of months. But we've we're introduced a digital process here where each panel gets a QR code, and a QR code is stuck onto that panel with a sticker. Every time that panel goes through a different process in the factory, that he is rolling, that's when the QR code is stuck on, then it goes to assembly. And then it goes to add insulation and boarding and things like that, every time it's scanned and more information is imported in. And then eventually, when it comes out the other side of the factory and loaded onto a trailer before it's loaded. It's also scanned. So when you scan that panel, you can see who rolled it, who assembled it, who put the boards on what time what they when it was loaded on the truck when it was delivered to site. So it follows that process through and we know exactly, you know, it ties back to your quality process. But you know, who who did it? And where the responsibility were, if there's any problem, where was the breakdown. And then, you know, like the the processes then that you have talked about filling in the inspection forms. We also have something very similar. It's an app for site inspections, where we can take a photo, and we can drop a pin on the drawing. And it's all on the app. So the photo is at the pin. And there's a small comment, for example, please insert a new screw or something like that, you know, so we've got a full quality process that brings in the digital side of things that really benefits the end user as well because they have a higher quality product. Well,

Dusty Rhodes  37:19 

I think it might be fair to say that you're all very much proponents of digitization, but more collaboration, and more things working together would be helpful. Michael was shocked to see digital lead for construction pm group, Dara Ryan, Design Manager at Horizon off site, and Ed Arnett from MMA consulting. Thank you so much to you all, for joining us today. If you'd like to find out more about what we spoke about on the podcast because you'll find show notes and link details in the description area of your podcast player right now. Our amplified podcast was produced by dustpod.io for engineers journal, you will find advanced episodes on our website at engineers ireland.ie or just press follow on your podcast player to get our next episode automatically altered next time for me just erodes. Thanks for listening