 Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage ATG, brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we've had a great day talking with Smartsheet executives, analysts, users, and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time for me, Mangat Site Manager, wind power generation GE Renewable Energy. Great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Jeff. I'm really happy to be here. You're a user of Smartsheet, but you're also a renegade. So before we get into your renegade status, tell us a little bit about GE Renewable Energy and your role. You get a big role as Site Manager, what, 75 turbines across multiple locations. So let's talk about GE Renewable Energy and your role as Site Manager. Sure, no problem. So GE Renewable Energy, one of our mission statements is is to unleash limitless energy. How we do that, we harness the power of the sun, the water, and the wind. So try to produce clean, efficient energy to power countries, homes, businesses, whatever needs that power and energy. As a manager, I manage, like you said, three wind farms, three different customers, a very complex role to have. I'm coming right from not just operations, human resources, financials, so everything's required of someone like me to manage that business end to end. So it's a challenge at the same time. It's a seek opportunity in a lot of what's going on and leveraging Smartsheet as one of the tools. This is something I've been using over the past year to optimize the business and run those turbines. So it's so funny because I would say GE turbine farms and GE engines are the most quoted, often referenced IoT devices in this next gen conversation about IoT and data and how much data they throw off of any other kind of product out there. And you're sitting right in the middle of it actually managing the real machines and managing the real data. Yeah, exactly. So I mean the machines themselves are highly automated. They're spending a lot of data and we've got great systems in place to manage that information, make it transferable, viewable to a lot of the people that need it. The opportunity is not necessarily in the equipment that GE manufactures, but the backend business that drives that manufacturing, that drives those services. And so that's where, again, we leveraged Smartsheet over the last year to close a lot of data quality issues. We're ruling out and canceling out a lot of the human error of the process steps that we're seeing a lot of businesses today. We're really taking the initiative of managing our data, bringing us, making us actually competitive in the fourth industrial revolution. I mean, I've got a strong belief that if you're not managing your data correctly today, yeah, you'll market yourself out of the business, you won't stay ahead of the game. So I think, like I was saying before, the biggest opportunity right now is the backend of the business. Smartsheet does a great job at manufacturing and producing high quality products. I think there's huge opportunity in saving the backend and optimizing the process that runs that. When you say the backend, there's always a lot of conversation about going from reactive to predictive to prescriptive analytics. Again, everybody likes to talk about keeping the turbine up. Are you talking about those types of processes or is it more how that energy is fed into the grid and more kind of the connection to the broader ecosystem when you say backend? Let's talk about the proactive and reactive situation because that's really what we're trying to drive. Okay. There could be particular cases where a turbine could fail in the middle of winter or high wind season and the visibility's not great. So what we've done is we've taken Smartsheet, we've given our technicians a mobile application tool to collect data as they visit turbines. We take the information within Smartsheet, we aggregate it, we quantify it and now we're able to predict turbine behavior based on this information. A little bit faster than some of the tools that GE provides today. A perfect example is about a month ago we determined that a turbine needed a quarter million dollar repair before any GE tool told us that. And that was simply because of giving our technicians a tool, which is a Smartsheet web form and telling us what happens every day you visit that turbine that goes into the background. We take the information, aggregate it into a dashboard view and it gives us a great visual control and visual aid of our business. And that visibility. I was going to say, is he collecting different data or are you processing it in a different way with the tooling that you set up with Smartsheet that gives you that visibility? They are, so we are collecting different data. So GE gives us a lot of data on our turbine health efficiency, how it's operating, it might quantify the number of faults per megawatt hour and parade it for us, for example. But what we're creating with Smartsheet is we're creating our own organic KPIs, I'll call them, some metrics that we're creating ourselves to try to drive different behavior. So when the techs go in, we talk about parts consumptions. For example, so if this part's been consumed 20 times over the last month, you got to ask why? You know, why do you keep visiting this turbine to do that? So that visibility drives a different discussion now. So now we can engage with engineers with different type, different information. And they might be able to say, okay, you guys got some good data here, we think you're right, we should execute this repair. So you, just an example that you gave, and give me the number again, that working with Smartsheets, your team was able to find a, wouldn't you say $250 million? $250,000 repair, that's the cost of the repair, but it's a proactive repair versus reactive. So now we're not facing long lead time, finding a crane, bringing a crane on site, getting the paperwork in place to get the job done, because it's not an easy repair. But there's a very impressive snowball effect of the benefits back to the business. You found it faster, you were able to get the parts needed faster, repair it faster. Clearly that goes all the way back up the chain from a revenue perspective. But when I alluded to earlier, this Renegade status, you brought Smartsheet in from your previous job, and you've said this isn't able to find something faster than our branded technologies product would have been able to do. Talk to us about this conviction that you brought in, and is it kind of becoming viral within GE Renewable Energy? Good question. It's becoming viral, a lot of people are listening now. So we've talked to GE Digital VPs, they've talked to the ERP providers in Europe on what they're doing with GE. So we've essentially, I call it a success story, they're not going to adopt Smartsheet, they want to build their own enterprise solution, but the reason why I call it a success story is because I've changed the way that they are thinking today. That's huge, cultural change. I've presented a solution to them, I've essentially told them, you need to give us something that works for us faster. If you do this, it gives managers capacity to improve your business, really develop people that are working underneath you, engage them and empower them, and move the business forward, not on a typical five-year plan that most businesses have in place, but to step change. It takes you year over year, and you're stepping every year to something new. And I think in today's day and age, with how fast things are moving, you need that. And I'm curious to unpack a little bit on this example where you said it's this failing part that was giving you a leading indicator that there was a bigger problem. So that was just kind of a different way to look at the solution, right? You're identifying kind of a stupid consumption pattern on a spare part that shouldn't happen as opposed to the core data that's coming off that machine and that's what gave you kind of the unique insight. From you, does that come from techs who are in the field and have kind of a sense of maybe we should be looking at this, maybe we should be looking at that? I mean, how do you start to empower people or where do some of these different points of view that then can be backed up with data in this marching process come from? So it's all techs. Coming into the job last year, and I asked one of the techs, I said, why are you going into this turbine? And the question, why is such a powerful question to ask? They said, we're going to fix this. So what happened last time? They had no idea. So there's no information to support your visit today and you don't understand why you're going today. Is it as a result of something that was not done correctly before? So we fixed that part first. We started giving them the information upfront. We gave them a tool to collect the data. So now they are empowered to provide very direct feedback to myself as a manager and even to an engineering team like in New York, for example, something technicians never felt empowered to do before. So they are the driving factors for those data collection, the decision-making. I definitely appreciate that. I give them that feedback on a daily basis that what you guys are doing is changing the way that we manage the business. It's a very driven culture change by the front line. I mean, it's not something that I'm pushing down. I'm asking them to help me push it upwards to the senior level. And they got to love it, right? They got to love thinking that they've actually got input as opposed to just being called to go out and fix things when it breaks. Exactly, they are driving their day. They can go to work in the morning. They can look at the whole personality of a turbine, what's outstanding, what was done last time, and the conversations are very quick in the morning. It used to be a seven o'clock startup. They're not driving out till eight, eight, 39 o'clock by the time they get their stuff together. I mean, we're averaging the 7 a.m. to about a seven, 30 departure now. So each person is saving 60 to 90 minutes every day. Every day in a departure. That's a big roll-up. In fact, I was looking at some of the productivity stats that Smartsheet talks about on their website, and they say an average for individual user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours a year. An organization can save up to 60,000 hours a year. And I believe that. That's believable. I mean, there's just a technical aspect of managing a turbine. If we even talk about issuing a purchase order, managing contractor labor invoices, the tool that we're using today is a complete end-to-end P&L management tool. So it takes invoicing from subcontractors, labor, we are inventory tracking, we are tracking any health and safety issues, everything from end to end. So it's really done a great job for us. That's all built within your Smartsheet. Correct. Yeah, wow. And it's all mobile. So I mean, I'm not at my site this week, but on a daily basis I have visibility to my business. And you're talking about 70, 80 plus machines, that's over about $100 million in assets that have to be managed effectively, efficiently, and correctly. That you have visibility into every day from wherever you are. Exactly, yes. That's a huge transformation. So we talked about you being a renegade in other groups within GE, on divisions that are curious about this. I'm curious, have you heard anything today that they have announced that excites you, or maybe was any of this part of the feedback that you provided, as we've heard all day, Jeff, that they're very responsive to customer feedback in terms of product innovation? Anything you're going to go back to the office and be excited, like the next generation or what's coming available soon, is it going to enable me to do X, Y, Z now? That's a good question. So GE is a very tough company to change. So there's, there'll be a lot of takeaways from this trip. And when I go ahead back, after the last conversation at Howard GE, Digital and the team, they are going to hire a new resource and set budget aside to help close the gaps that we've identified. So I think after this visit, and some of the things I've learned throughout the conference, and when I head back, I'll only be able to identify a few more gaps that they need to fill. And I'll push that up to them probably the next week when I get back there, so hopefully they can appreciate that candid feedback and then take that and run with it. But you were able to fund your existing project just out of your own discretionary funds. Exactly. I mean, that's one of the benefits of Smartsheet. It costs really nothing to create something. And my job is to manage wind farms. So I've taken an initiative to create, I call it a mini ERP system, using Smartsheet with an associate of mine. And it's an organic creation. It didn't take us to run three wind farms. I started last April, and it probably took us less than six months to create a working system. And that's awesome feedback for Smartsheet. The tool is very user friendly. It's lightweight. It takes away the fear of coding that Excel gives to some people. If you're a new user of any application, you can kind of walk into it and run with it. And that's one of the reasons why we took it from nothing to something in such a short period of time. Wow. That's a groundswell in action that has some significant results. But you better be careful. And imagining your success is going to go so viral, you're going to have way more than 75 turbines and three wind farms. It's possible. It's going to reach an acquisition and there's other sites around me that my bosses or my director said, hey, what are you doing next week? Let's go visit this site for a few minutes. Okay, I know what you're getting at. It's kind of a good problem to have, but thanks so much for me for stopping by and sharing with us what you're doing as a renegade. It seems pretty contagious. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Thanks. For Jeff, Rick, I'm Lisa Martin. I'm live from Smart Sheet Engaged 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be back to wrap up the show in just a minute.