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00:00:01
E19: CEO of PLINX on safety, efficiency & sustainability in construction
59 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Jason & Carlos are joined by Tommy, Co-Founder & CEO of PLINX.
They discuss his varied background as a product invention designer, through to his current mission to improve communication, collaboration, and coordination on construction projects.
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Transcript
Introduction to Offsite Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 19 of the Offsite Podcast where we chat all things construction and technology. My name's Carlos Cabolo. And I'm Jason Lancini. Good day, Carlos. How are you doing? Pretty good. Thanks to yourself.
00:00:13
Speaker
Yeah, good. I, um, I think last week when we, uh, recorded this, I turned up with like a one line joke, if you remember. Yeah. This time I'm turning up with a fun fact, like just before I was, I got a notification on LinkedIn that someone commented on something that I posted the other day. And apparently if you have a whiteboard with a permanent marker on it, you can get rid of the permanent marker by drawing over the permanent marker with a, like an erasable marker.
00:00:42
Speaker
And you can then erase both the permanent and the erasable marker. I don't know how that works. That makes no sense, but, uh, I haven't tried it. So this is total like misinformation, but that's allegedly what a very trustworthy source on LinkedIn says.
00:01:02
Speaker
All the best tips for how to remove pain points from life come out this podcast. Aside from that, I'm actually pretty excited for today's guests. I've only spoken with August once before, but to be honest, we had a really engaging conversation and so pretty excited to dive in further.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, let's get stuck straight in. So today we have, as Jason mentioned, a familiar face, someone we know within the space, someone who I am part of a sort of rail tech group, a cohort of sort of companies and organizations trying to drive improvements to productivity and safety within construction. He's also the co-founder and CEO of a company called Plix.
00:01:44
Speaker
Hey Tommy, how are you? Yeah, hi everyone. It's good to be on the podcast. That's good to have you on.
Tommy's Journey to Plix
00:01:51
Speaker
So, Tommy, every time we get a guest on, I go on LinkedIn, have a little poke in the pub on some of the details. You started as a furniture designer. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that and how you actually ended up founding Plinks?
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, okay. I guess it's a pretty strange place to start. So originally started as a products and venture designer. So doing everything from consumer appliances, so like vacuum cleaners, power tools, garden product, that kind of thing, and also did furniture to a degree, didn't really know what I wanted to do when I started doing, you know, products and venture design, but
00:02:29
Speaker
And it was all to do with, you know, creatively solving problems. And then my career spanned into more R&D management, which was looking at how you could take a completely new concept to industry. So we did wild stuff like robotics and
00:02:47
Speaker
really early actually on in the electric bike space so pretty pioneering products from a consumer point of view and i got really interested in wearables in connectivity where the iot space started to it started evolving at that time and i'm a keen surper snowboarder mountain miker
00:03:03
Speaker
So I identified an opportunity where people were putting themselves in hazardous spaces, you know remote spaces, avalanche prone areas out in the ocean where they were also disconnected. So originally just as a hobby project built a connected wearable that you could sew into a wetsuit or put in your ski jacket where you could stay connected with other people in those remote spaces but also called for help if you needed to or
00:03:29
Speaker
Notify someone if you went into an unsafe area so that's where it initially started we did some work with Red Bull with Suunto with Casio G-Shock and some other energy brands and built this product to monitor surfers that were in the biggest waves Nazarene Portugal.
00:03:45
Speaker
But really, over time, I started to identify the opportunity to understanding how that technology could be deployed in industrial settings. Virgin Startup actually partnered us up with a tier one contractor and said, look, you know, this technology could be really powerful in construction.
Focus on Safety and Connectivity in Construction
00:04:05
Speaker
And from there, really, we did look back, I was sort of 2018, I suppose, two years into
00:04:10
Speaker
developing the product and, you know, right from a hobby sort of business into something that we thought, oh, wow, this could be could be really useful. And yes, I suppose since 2018, we're back and we've been focused exclusively on construction and how we can benefit exactly the same use case really, you know, can remotely disconnected people and hazardous spaces with
00:04:30
Speaker
others that can help them, whether that be management or their colleagues, you know, it doesn't really matter. So yeah, we seem like a random starting point, but where we are today, but yeah, it's quite a simple story, really. It's good to hear that one of those accelerators or incubators are actually giving real proper advice about where the business should go, not just sort of...
00:04:52
Speaker
Yeah, if I'm doing give you a call office. You're pretty jaded, Carlos. Yeah, yeah. I guess. So for anyone listening, he touched a bit on what Plix is all about there. What's your sort of one minute, what is Plix and why it exists for anyone, obviously from a construction background, thinking like, what are you actually doing on sites today?
00:05:11
Speaker
So we are connected construction specialists, so we focus on connecting job sites. So whether that be people, plan or places, and we're connecting them so that we can improve safety, productivity and sustainability. We essentially connect loads of
00:05:28
Speaker
produce a load of new connections and we monitor how they interact with one another and we identify risk and that risk can lead to better design, better planning, changes in site layout and really ultimately continuously improving site performance.
00:05:46
Speaker
and we variance degrees and different degrees of success with different projects but ultimately there is improvements to be made in all those areas, significant improvements to be made in all those areas on nearly any project that we work on.
Challenges in Technology Adoption
00:06:01
Speaker
We're making a conscious effort not to talk over each other at the moment so I could see Jason to chat with some questions.
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'm mainly sitting here revisiting my previous CV and how boring it is compared to Tommy's, but that's fine. Tommy, I guess when I think about construction and it's renowned and probably even maligned as being stuck in the mud, hard to change. People always talk about the stats around how undigitized and how people still do stuff the same they did it 15, 20 years ago.
00:06:37
Speaker
And, uh, when I think about like in our space in like planning and the software that we make, we have this challenge of changing behavior, but we're literally just getting someone to like click another button that they, you know, like it's arbitrarily, it's like changing what they click on a stream. Hmm.
00:06:53
Speaker
But what you do requires changing people's actual behaviors on site. And so I imagine that the challenge and the thought and the like intelligent design about how you change behavior. Yeah, it must be hard. And do you know, are there any tactics? Are there any tricks or anything that you do? How do you, how do you go about thinking about that when you're working on a new project?
00:07:16
Speaker
I think, yeah, I mean, anyone in a business, in a hardware business probably heard the phrase, hardware is hard about a billion times. It does get a bit boring after a while. I think to a degree, when you're thinking about, I've never really thought about it in the way that you've explained it, but there's two, I suppose there's two ways to think about it. One, there's a physical thing because it's hard because you have to potentially change the way people are thinking about what you're providing, you know, is it tracking me?
00:07:44
Speaker
it isn't but you know that's good common misconception and that kind of thing but then the other point is that actually we have a physical tangible thing so that's got to be a reminder whereas a button could be it could be lost on screen and you could just forget about it so I suppose there is two sides to that coin if I'm talking about the first side of the coin to start with we have a lot of problems with
00:08:06
Speaker
social adoption and those problems with the social adoption are driven by poor communication, poor management and I suppose from a communication standpoint a lesser understanding of what it is that we're actually trying to do and we see huge changes or huge differences between good and bad sides and typically that comes from a part of the top level or
00:08:28
Speaker
works manager or health and safety management on site and the good ones really do well. We actually see that the experience from the workforce, they're positively promoting our product back to management once they've experienced it and that initial reluctance to use new technology, which I think you get regardless of what technology is, is set to one side.
00:08:53
Speaker
Whereas when we get to a site where it's poor, where the management and the not so much enforcement, but the communication of what it is that we're trying to do is poor, the uptake is really bad. And it's very difficult to then turn that around. So we're still in a position where we have to do a lot, like we have to really help our customers communicate.
00:09:17
Speaker
what it is that we're doing because they don't necessarily always understand it but I'm hoping that over time the understanding of what our objectives are in terms of improving safety for the guys on the ground and improving performance which doesn't necessarily mean less jobs it means better working experience will actually help drive adoption going forward so
Hardware Design and Development Insights
00:09:43
Speaker
I don't have any secret weapon other than helping to really communicate, helping trying to get the right management, the right sponsors, the right cheerleaders on site that are going to help drive adoption. It's been really tough, but it's getting easier. I think we are seeing industry change.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's good to hear you've got no tricks or secrets because then I would be a second guessing what we'd been doing. But like the, the amount of times we've pulled apart rebuild, how we deploy, how we onboard, how we train when, when we deploy our software on projects.
00:10:23
Speaker
And the sweet spot that we found is like this balance between this kind of push and pull thing, this top down bottom up thing. And having that, trying to like have both of them in sync where there's a management, a directive decision because there's a benefit for them, but not like really spending most of our time talking about the benefit and showing the benefit for the person that is the end user. Is that a similar thing to what you see?
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, everyone's got to, it's got to be something in it for everyone, right? Like, and I think that the problem is when I'm talking about communication is that that bit isn't clear. And so someone's looking at new technology, not status, other
00:11:07
Speaker
technologies that we show on site and they're saying, well, I'm fine, but I'm not going to use it because I don't know what it is. I don't really know what is it, what's in it for me. So I just won't. It's in the, I've made colors and thought about it before, but it's in the too difficult box. It's in the, I don't understand what that is box. Like we're not, I'm not even going to get into it. I don't even want to understand someone hasn't explained it to me clear enough. So I don't care. I'm not even going to, you know, and, and that may be a cultural thing that we need to figure out how we negotiate, you know,
00:11:34
Speaker
How do we get people interested in doing better? Because if they don't do that, then how's the industry going to improve?
00:11:43
Speaker
Well, I was talking to Carlos before we came on air, I guess, um, about, uh, I guess something that was quite similar that's in the news occasionally here in Australia, where, um, there's a technology that's being used and deployed in the mining industry for, uh, big heavy haul truck drivers, where it's like an eye tracking technology that is monitoring the drivers and like the primary use cases around safety for the drivers, you know, alerting them when they're tired or when then, you know, learning when they're not alert.
Balancing Safety Technology and Privacy
00:12:13
Speaker
But the flip side of it is this idea or thought or perception that it's about, you know, big brother, about tracking, about measuring people's performance. And that has been a big hurdle that that industry is really like, I guess, struggling to overcome. It maybe is like kind of similar to what you were talking about, I guess, culturally.
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it is. I think one of the biggest things that still shocked me today when I'm talking to teams, construction workers is who really has got the time to go through and monitor individuals, like say one person watching, one other person, what they're doing.
00:12:56
Speaker
I think that is the attitude of someone thinking that they want to watch someone else is the bit that's wrong. No one's got time for that. We should be producing team performance data for sure. We should know how good we are, how much output we can actually achieve because otherwise, we're never going to get it right in the future when we're
00:13:18
Speaker
projecting how much work we're going to be able to achieve with a gang of how many people over winter months, over summer months. That's all really useful information, but it should never be driven down to the individual. We've built mechanisms into our software which prevents
00:13:37
Speaker
uh, management from being able to, to really identify people for that reason, because we need to make it as tricky as possible to, to prevent punishment. You know, there's no point in doing that. It is good to be able to identify safety risk, you know, if there's a, uh, potential incident and take lessons learned from that. Um, but that's slightly different again. You don't need to really know the individual. You just need to know the circumstances which lead up to the incident or lead up to potential incident. So yeah, it's just, I think it's, I think what we're getting to is it's a way of thinking, you know,
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. To maybe change subject a little bit and going back onto your background in, I guess, design and product design and maybe furniture design.
00:14:18
Speaker
We spend a ton of time in the world of user experience design here. And when we're thinking about a problem in software, there's almost no limitations to what we theoretically could do. And we can start solving a user goal or user story. Obviously, in the hardware world,
00:14:39
Speaker
that you've got a lot of like actual physical constraints. That puts a bigger burden on, on you as a designer to properly understand those physical constraints. Like it, I imagine it's much closer to like what I totally projecting on my own personal experience here, but like it's pro I'm imagining it's much closer to what it was like for me as an engineer on a construction site, trying to be created within like physical constraints that it would be for me as like a.
00:15:07
Speaker
head of product at a software company where we've got almost limitless options about how we solve a user story. For the audience of me, is that true? I suppose you've always got the same constraints, if it's a good dialogue.
00:15:24
Speaker
anthropometrics, if you're talking about the way in which people interact with products, if you talk about, you know, so like, for example, just talking about the wearable, we've got a variety of different senses, but if you're just talking about the wearable, it's probably the most difficult because
00:15:41
Speaker
We had to attach it to something that was standard, so we chose the construction helmet for a number of reasons. One, it's out of the way of the body, the torso, which is a huge volume of water which really decreases the performance from a localisation and a proximity perspective.
00:16:00
Speaker
The higher we could get it, the more out of the way of the torso, the better. But then you're putting it on someone's head, so you've got to consider, oh yeah, if it's heavy, there's going to be some strain on the neck, or it's going to feel heavy. And then you're talking about, OK, well, if it's got to be smaller and lighter, well, how long will the battery last? How are we going to recharge it? What is a reasonable form of background in terms of size so that it can be easily held when it's removed?
00:16:29
Speaker
These are all things that they're not specific to construction. There are some specific construction related issues or challenges, should I say. But the vast majority of design you can utilize existing experiences, understandings of how things are built.
00:16:45
Speaker
And then you just have to iterate until, and test, iterate, test, just like you would with software, iterate, test, until you arrive at a bump back to the works. And, you know, what we've got today isn't perfect. I mean, there's still things we change now, but, you know, you have to go through that cycle of understanding and learning and really engaging with your users to improve it going forward. So I think the answer is very similar to software.
00:17:09
Speaker
the process of the creative process of starting off with an object and then working through the constraints with the human-born factories. It's widely understood. And then getting it into the environment and testing it and finding out what doesn't work with bits of plastic fall off. How big can you make it a little bit bigger so the batteries last a little bit longer?
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah, you don't have to start from scratch every time you come up with a new concept. Yeah, but it's interesting. I was curious as to how iterative the process was because there's obviously that cost iteration, there's the time frame to make prototypes, test prototypes and stuff. So it sounds like it is very, very, very iterative.
00:17:54
Speaker
Just to give you a flavor of what the development life cycle looks like, realistically, about two years for a mechanical product. So you'd be looking at two years of the actual mechanical design, and then we'd be doing the embedded development alongside that. So it takes us two years.
00:18:11
Speaker
with two teams working in parallel to be able to build the product and then constantly iterate it because the electronics, one needs a tweak here and then the mechanical needs a tweak here and then it goes back and then we probably did a year of large scale testing until we arrived at a design off the back of that. So three years, but you know, sort of five years of effort if you're talking about teams working on something.
Hardware Development Limitations
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah, I take, I take my hat off to my backwards cap. I take that off to you like the, um, yeah, the thought and the precision required. And then, you know, you find, you know, you have to not only think of all the things that you covered, but I presume you have to also think about ways that people want to gain the system tamper with the device, all sorts of things like that, that, you know, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of other considerations. And then, and then, you know, the classic, Oh, can it just do this? And, um, you know, you find that.
00:19:05
Speaker
Well, we're asking logically seems quite obvious, you know, maybe a new set, a new sector or where there's a special requirement or it's just a software feature, but it's like, yeah, it could do, but you have to draw a line somewhere. You have to, you have to like consider your changes really methodically. And those are some of the limits. I think there's a limitation of everything, right? But like.
00:19:30
Speaker
especially in hardware, because you're releasing something and it does essentially go out of date after a period of time, you do have to consider releasing big blocks rather than small iterative changes which you can do with software.
00:19:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's super impressive. I guess the other question I had, I was talking to Carlos about this earlier, I'm always interested in origin stories of company names. What's the background of Plinks? I think I said it in the opening gambit, but we protect people from people, plant and places. And we're a connectivity focused company. So the business name is actually wearable link.
00:20:08
Speaker
limited that we trade as Plinks. And when we changed our name in 2019, I think it was, or when we started trading at Plinks, we needed something that summarized the fact that we connect. We connect people, planet, places, so Plinks.
00:20:25
Speaker
Oh, that actually has a meaning. That makes me feel better. Yeah. And it also had to be, it had to be unique. Yeah. Yeah. That makes, that actually makes total sense now that you mentioned it. Cool. Carlos, back to you, mate. Yeah. Just one question, actually. Your like core value pillar and you get into a project like is safety. You've then got information that can help sort of think about production rates and efficiencies and how with delivering projects into what sort of rates.
00:20:56
Speaker
What's what's the road map? What's what's past
Future Plans for Plix's Connectivity Solutions
00:20:58
Speaker
that point? So if you want to play them every project in the UK, they're using you for safety They're doing production rates. What would be the next thing for you guys to make so?
00:21:07
Speaker
Yes, our core pillars are safety, which is the main benefit for the operatives or the operators on site. We then offer efficiency improvements and that's through understanding what's going on on site, which I think is where we've identified some opportunities just to work together in understanding what went wrong, how can we do it better next time.
00:21:32
Speaker
And then also sustainability, so things like identifying. So we have a protocol machine sense, which understands how machines are being used. So if they're idling, if they're being used inefficiently, so what their CO2 output is, so we can do stuff around sustainability as well. And I think sustainability of projects in general is something that we will be able to provide greater compliance-led information on.
00:22:02
Speaker
as there's a greater focus on the environmental impact of the work that we're doing. We're now focusing on building a lot of software features off the back of the hardware because, as we've spoken about already, the hardware cycle is real slow. Sorry, it's not real slow, but it's much slower than software.
00:22:18
Speaker
compare the two, they were able to build a lot of new software functionality off the back of the hardware capability. So we're really focusing on a lot of integration, offering a lot of value add from integration between two companies.
00:22:35
Speaker
potentially where our customers will be able to benefit from us building, connecting two systems together, one plus one equals four or five or six or whatever it is, the other value they can get. From a product perspective, we're really also focused on understanding how movement of materials, the movement of tools and equipment, especially high value assets. So we have the capability to do that.
00:22:58
Speaker
In the next couple of weeks, we'll be launching our Project 5G connectivity, which moves the connectivity capability that we provide away from our proprietary solution, which is connecting our sensors to connecting smartphones, to connecting drones, to connecting autonomous machines, survey equipment, whatever is needed, remote teams, essentially. And that's where our business
00:23:27
Speaker
I think we'll change in a complete system integration. So, you know, we do sensors, we do connectivity already, we have a platform, but I believe that us tying together those systems with other companies like Aphex.
00:23:42
Speaker
like Sense that, like really repo, like, you know, all of those kinds of companies into a solution that is token essentially for our customers. So that's also the roadmap is improving what we've already got in terms of hardware, providing greater connectivity, capacity, and then software functionality off the back of the hardware that's already out in the field, including things like material tracking and tool tracking.
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah, Tommy, I think you've, uh, I've hit, think you've hit the now on the head there. Like there's a, there's, uh, so many different systems that do parts of the, like what you're offering, you know, you might have a, you might have a vision sensor on a machine that does part of the safety around human machine interaction, but that's not that that is only, you know, you, you go and deploy that, but you've only got a small fraction of what you can get. Once you're collecting the data from the machine, the plants and the places, like you were saying.
00:24:37
Speaker
It unlocks all sorts of stuff that you can do with that data without having to try and connect this system that's doing a machine thing over here. And there's something for people in their phone over there or whatever. I think definitely that is the right track and I see massive value in that direction, mate.
00:24:55
Speaker
I also don't think that we need to be the company that does everything. I'm sort of maybe contradicting the big statement that I made, apart from system integration. But what I actually mean by that is that I don't think we need to do everything. There are other companies that we're working with at the moment that are doing
00:25:14
Speaker
really, really clever stuff on movement analysis. So for example, using our sensor data, but doing the analysis layer on top of that, they take our data, they analyze it, they give it back to us or they give it to the customer. So for example, they're able to use the accelerometer to tell exactly what task that person is doing at the time. It still should be desensitized. We still should be looking at a whole team performance, but the biggest problem that we see is that
00:25:44
Speaker
our customers don't know what is going on on site at any one point in time and to give them that knowledge will allow them to change the way they're working which should in theory improve the way that the sites perform and that's better for everyone you know even if we're talking about improving construction output
00:26:07
Speaker
and rather than reducing the amount of people that are needed for a specific task, improving speed of output, improving likelihood of hitting a project on time. They all come from understanding and knowing what's going on and a lot of plans get made, but I'd be interested to know how many projects go and do a retro on how well they actually did after the fact.
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, definitely there's this, so many construction technology providers do this thing where they get drawn into trying to be the everything they, you know, a customer asks for this feature, customer asks for that feature, and the product grows and grows and grows so they don't even know what they do anymore.
00:26:47
Speaker
Um, and I think you're totally right. There's like a whole bunch of things that would sit on top of your platform. I would say, which would combine your data and other data and analysis and spots and stuff that, that you, the other people would definitely do. But I definitely see that there's being this one reliable source of that people place equipment thing that feeds that is, uh, miles better than trying to cobble together.
00:27:11
Speaker
Well, we've got five different machine manufacturers scooted around the site with data going into 10 different API places and some of them don't have it. And then we can't track half the people because they didn't download the app on their phone, whatever it is. I think that is a, I think that is really a valuable thing to keep pushing for.
00:27:32
Speaker
I'm going to have to cut you both off there. We have massively overshot our time. Joe looks pretty stressed right now. Tommy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast today. Yeah, that was really interesting. But yeah, gonna have to cut it off there. So thank you very much everyone for listening.