you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcast i'm your host ryan cohen and on today's episode we have david bernden the chief customer officer at wellington drive technologies who are a leading supplier in advanced electronic iot solutions designated and focused on the commercial refrigeration industry so we actually dive a lot into that industry kind of what it is how it what what what opportunities exist when it comes to iot and how iot is currently being used in the commercial refrigeration industry we also kind of break away and talk a little bit more high level around what customers need to understand when you are kind of embarking on your iot implementation journey and the commitment that's required to really see true potential when it comes to deploying iot but before we get into that if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverages iot solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything dot com that's iot changes everything dot com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome david to the iot for all show thanks for being here this week thanks very much ryan great to be here yes it's fantastic to have you all the way from australia um so let's start off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience they have a little more context on who they're listening to yeah sure so uh i'm the chief customer officer for wellington drive um i've been involved in a number of technology startups over the years and i got involved with wellington drive which i suppose a little bit of a different direction for me um but uh we got involved in um we sold our business eye proximity uh into wellington and uh since that time i've been working closely in developing their iot side of the business and and now as chief customer officer working closely with with our customers and helping them adopt iot oh fantastic my next question is actually going to be what does a chief customer officer do but you already here to answer that so so is that are you handling more of the early stage conversations and the educational components kind of of what how iot can benefit their business and getting them all the way through to launching with with your the tech team or how does that work yeah so we the within our customer team is is all of those components right from the the early stage team that help our customers understand iot and and and get the head around what uh they will get from a return from investment um from iot and commercial refrigeration and a very large part of our solution is actually helping a customer through that journey because as we all know implementation of iot is not easy it requires a lot of change within a business to to do it right so we have our customer success team and we embed people from that team into a customer to help them adopt their solution or the solution across the journey fantastic and so tell us a little bit more about wellington and kind of the overall focus that you all have um what you uh you know what you've built kind of your role in in the iot space and kind of go from there yeah well we're pretty proud to be one of the leading innovators in terms of hardware and software for commercial refrigeration we work with some of the world's leading food and beverage companies uh and we develop these solutions that really focus on helping them lift sales uh reduce their service and maintenance costs at overall fleet costs around commercial refrigeration and also improves their sustainability which is a very important aspect we have three main areas that we we focus on which is our connect iot platform um where we bring together both the hardware that we build and create with the software and the solutions to really develop that valuable data stream to keep customers informed and drive their business decisions that's one element we also have a a business stream which uses and develops ecr motors so these are a highly efficient electronically controlled motor for commercial refrigeration and this is often up to 300 times more efficient in terms of energy use and that's a popular a popular product that we have and lastly we get involved in consumer engagement again for food and beverage mainly uh where we're helping our customers talk to their consumers right at the point of sale gotcha and are you all building these solutions completely in-house do you have a partner network that you work with kind of how have you structured the software and the hardware components together which is usually a tricky thing for a company to do all themselves yeah we're we're again pretty lucky to have one of the world's largest teams of refrigeration uh engineers uh on board based both in new zealand and in our global offices and all of that design work ryan has done in-house so i've been designed everything from hardware through firmware through all the software we develop uh we partner with a number of different manufacturers because that's an element that's a little bit difficult so we have manufacturing partners who we work with in china um vietnam and mexico and the us uh to actually build uh build the product um but all the design work uh is done in-house at washington and when we're talking about commercial refrigeration for our audience that may be not as familiar with the space talk a little bit about more this more specific use cases and how the technology the iot technology is applied to commercial refrigeration units or you know that whole process just to kind of for you know more like layman terms so they can understand it yes so we started off um back in 2015 on this journey by when our team invented the first iot based electronic controller for what we call a bottle cooler so a bottle is what you would see in a in a in a supermarket or or the corner store and often branded you know by the uh by the beverage company coke pepsi or a beer cooler and these are these are refrigeration units usually put in into these stores to to sell the product at obviously the optimum temperature so i mean you might be thinking well why do you actually need iot uh in those devices um and and what's the you know the payback for for the customer um well essentially the you know these are assets and usually a beverage company in a country would have hundreds of thousands of these assets scattered around the place and you know at a cost of between five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars that adds up quite quickly so one of the the biggest um uh paybacks on on the investment is knowing where they are that's often um a case because uh they're an attractive asset that they look good in your backyard next to your barbecue so knowing where all your assets are is often a very important use case being able to get information back from the uh the callers on their performance is also really um important because it helps uh the company tune their service and maintenance uh around keeping these equipment uh operational one of the the biggest factors too is also controlling temperature so when you've got a distributed fleet of several hundred thousand units selling your product at the right temperature is absolutely absolutely vital and a case study we've just finished for a bottler in south america has shown that by keeping the product at the right temperature they will increase their sales by 55 so controlling a fleet of several hundred thousand uh coolers becomes pretty important to understand what the temperature all those units are that that makes a lot of sense that's um that's you know really good insights into a space that i don't think a lot of us are that familiar with but we see commercial refrigeration units i'm sure you know we come across them but there's a lot of technology in in things like that that you know really provide value that we kind of maybe take for granted at times and don't realize it's actually occurring yeah that's right and it's it's it's you're right it's not a space that people think about a lot but it's really important because it maximizes sales so this little bottle caller that stands inside your corner shop is really the window for that brand it is their sales outlet so having the product at the right temperature having the um you know it's set out and laid out um imperfectly having the planogram optimized so people you know know exactly where the product is on what shelf from store to store is also really and and then being able to use some technology to interact with the consumer and help them choose uh our customers product over a competitor's product is also one of the features that we provide oh that's fantastic so talk to me let's move out a little high level here and talk to me about the biggest challenges you all have seen in the iot space and you could take this from any angle you wish whether it's challenges you all have encountered that you've worked to overcome challenges you've seen in this space for maybe your customers perspective just where are you seeing kind of the biggest challenges that are i guess are hindering or affecting adoption within iot yeah i suppose i'll i'll come at that more from from our point of view um and i'll stay clear of the the the common covert problems that we're all facing the availability of components etc but um really on our adoption um curve um it's been able to firstly convince customers about the return on investment from adopting iot and as we said many of our customers focused in in food and beverage think about technology within their manufacturing plant but they don't often think about technology outside in their distribution plant so um this by using our technology distributed in each of their bottle callers it allows them to get a you know a pretty clear view of that right we find that customers adopting technology is probably um one of the greatest challenges and this is why over the years we've really developed our customer success team and embed embed this team with uh our customers to help them on the journey of adoption to do this correctly and successfully you really need to make some changes within your business to get the benefit from iot to understand the insights that have been delivered from your fleet uh in the field and then putting in place programs that take action on those insights and help develop uh your business and and especially around service and maintenance of you know a fleet of 300 000 contr units in a country um it takes some uh takes a little bit of effort to bring all that together so that's been um one of the the big learning um items for us um and it's where we focus a lot of our time and just helping the adoption process by a customer and integrating it deeply into their business i think that's a very common challenge and and thus focus for organizations when it comes to iot implementation and adoption across the board regardless of industry you know i talk to tons of people on here about the educational component the just the you know what does iot actually do for their business how is it going to implement change what do they need to do to adopt what kind of buy-in do they need how does the whole process work and all of those things are super important to um to getting this you know through to the finish line to be something that they can actually utilize and see the value of on a daily basis so so i completely understand where you're coming from with that yeah they all want to know okay so what is return on investment how soon am i going to get payback on this investment that's probably our most common initial question and because we can roll out uh our solution in phases many of our customers choose to start with the the simple solution of knowing where their assets are and regularly getting the temperature of those devices and we and we've shown most of these customers now that they can get a complete payback just using that particular facility with inside two years of their investment so okay there is definite roi if they roll out all the rest of the uh the advantages they can get paid back even quicker but generally we try and stage it because just of the learning curve inside that business so let me ask you then as it relates to the commercial refrigeration kind of industry as a whole and the companies that you deal with how are you i guess what are the biggest rois that they're looking for when it comes to iot or maybe they don't know they're looking for but you kind of push you kind of educate them on what iot can do as it goes to you know potentially finding lost assets um keeping helping increase sales you know what are kind of the what does it look like on the roi side that really um makes this success for those companies we start off usually on the asset side asset location side okay and um and that that can be around two things one most of these large come and we're talking you know large global brands here and we've got operations in many different countries and some even have many bottlers um many different bottlers of their brand within those countries so we normally start off with um knowing where the assets are that's really the first big one most of these companies run an annual audit of their assets um and this is a fleet that's often worth hundreds of millions of dollars uh so knowing exactly where they are is one of the the first things their auditors ask and normally a process which takes them a lot of time it costs a lot of money so we do that regularly um about 20 times a year per cooler on average so they know the location so that sort of solves problem one um recovering loss coolers lost or missing coolers uh is the second aspect of that and um you know we've got a company that uh uh recently recovered 40 of their lost callers saving them tens of millions of dollars of new investment simply because they turned on a feature that we have that allows them to locate them um and uh you know for them that was a that was a great win uh in not having to invest in new callers because they found their old ones the the uh the service and maintenance side is often where these companies will see the greatest benefit so we've got one one customer in actually down here in australia who is forecast they're going to save 40 of their service and maintenance costs across their fleet in a year through the introduction of iot and that is a huge saving that's many tens of millions of dollars for them um and they're automating a lot of that process tying it into their into their existing systems and delivering a an on-time maintenance schedule and really lastly uh ron the sales component is really really important so we're able to work with our customers and right size of cooler for a location so we can you know based on how often uh consumers are interacting with that cooler and the size of it you know some sometimes a um a refrigeration unit is too big or too small for a particular location um and uh if it's too big it's costing money because it is too big it's an asset that's wrongly uh poorly located and if it's too small normally the product temperature is increasing because the door is open so often so and the other side of that is really that product temperature where um we've shown that you can improve sales by 55 if you're constantly selling product at the right temperature and that's sometimes a challenge in some of these smaller stores where you've got the store owners saving electricity by turning the coolers off at night thinking they're doing the right thing but of course when they come in in the morning it takes a while for the the product to be optimized um so often they're not selling the product at the best at the best spec makes a lot of sense and as we kind of relate it back to the data that's being able to be collected from these solutions how are you seeing that really affect the overall productivity of these organizations or for their strategies or how is that leading to maybe what it allows them to now do to grow their business to invest in other areas bring in other types of iot technologies um how are you seeing that kind of great at the granule more granular level of data really you know kind of perking up their ears and getting excited getting them excited for things like that yeah i suppose that the the biggest action that we first see is a degree of proactivity and you know again we're talking about uh the interesting niche of uh commercial refrigeration um but uh you know as we know that these are the major sales outlets for these particular big brands so when we um when they see things like the compressor of a cooler over over been overworked and that the product temperatures start to increase um they can be a little more proactive uh in terms of helping the storekeeper first up solve that problem you know sending him information around you know is is the caller blocked have you got stock stacked around it which is blocking the airflow into that cooler or so they can take start to take proactive action first with the store keeper directly saving a service call and then if they need to take uh to make a service call we can give them some pretty strong direction about what is going wrong in that caller so the technical can arrive with the parts that he needs to be able to one time fix on on that product so that's a level of proactivity being able to give them alerts firstly about what's going wrong in their fleet uh and secondly helping them make the right decision about what type of service and parts may be required to uh to rectify the problem so it's a very multi-faceted kind of value prop for these organizations not just the tracking of but it helps with the preventative and predictive maintenance it helps really understand what's happening to be more efficient on the support and technician side of things it helps them get more insight into the control and or the quality control side as well so it seems like there are a lot of interesting touch points that the iot technology really influences with any of these refrigeration units um in in the commercial space yeah exactly and um it's either it's also driving uh adoption of always-on connectivity in a lot of cases um in the in the countries where the workforce is quite large and relatively inexpensive and the workforce for our customer is offered in the stores working with customers directly right we use bluetooth generally on their devices that runs in the background and just pulls the data out of the caller and sticks it into the cloud because there's no cost extra cost with that solution and right customers are very cost conscious but increasingly because of the insights that they're generating many of these customers want the data more quickly and many of them or their prime locations are turning to an always-on solution where any alerts or issues with the refrigeration assets are notified immediately so we're starting to see that shift so it sort of means that the customers are now accepting um the importance of iot in these assets and really getting behind it and saying well we want this information now in real time yep it makes a lot of sense uh dave it's been a fantastic conversation this is you know whenever we're able to dive into a particular area a particular kind of more niche focus uh rather than going super broad i think our audience gets a ton of value out of it so i really appreciate you spending time kind of sharing your insights into the commercial refrigeration youth space because i think it really is a good testament to what iot is and what it's trying to solve so um so thank you for sharing that and i wanted to make sure we had a second here to share with our audience where they can learn more about the company where they can ask any questions any follow-up information just kind of stay up to date on everything going on on your end yeah absolutely well thanks for the opportunity ron our website is wdt.com wellington drive technologies and you'll find all our information there we've got a global team that's ready to help anyone who's got an interest fantastic well david thanks again so much for your time it's been a great conversation i appreciate you being here thanks very much ron have a great day thank you you too all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iit fall podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
2022-02-26