It’s a real thing: many customers are so won over by Augury’s technology they end up working for the company. What’s going on? In the first part of a series, we hear from convert Christian Smith, now Augury’s Manager of Reliability Operations, about why he crossed over to the Augury side.
Prior to joining Augury, I was an engineer for a large pharmaceutical and consumer goods company, working in their infant formula division. My responsibilities included process improvement projects and reliability engineering initiatives – one of which was our vibration analysis program.
We were already getting many benefits from vibration analysis, such as the ability to identify root causes of failure and proactively plan repairs through our route-based program, but I knew the industry was changing, and both wired and wireless online monitoring systems were becoming more cost-effective.
Legacy Vs New Kids
As I researched solutions on the market, I found the big names in the industry were being slow to adapt and either didn’t have wireless or IoT solutions at all or were still trying to make them fit with on-premise software programs they’d already built. Their pricing and service models were also outdated.
On the other hand, there were several new players in the game, and the IoT hardware was really slick and the platforms user-friendly. It was clear that the installation and maintenance of these systems would be simple, and they would offer several advantages to our route-based program such as data collected 24/7 rather than monthly, no need to walk routes, unlimited users in the software, email and text alerts, and the ability to review the data from anywhere with an internet connection.
The problem with the new kids on the block was they didn’t have the hardware specs and software capabilities I’d come to expect from the legacy solutions. I was trying to decide whether to sacrifice the specs and tools for a sleek IoT solution when my boss got a cold call from Augury.
Getting The Right Answers
He set a meeting with them, which I was reluctant to join, thinking they would be similar to the other new kids on the block. They weren’t. While Augury had cloud-based software and IoT hardware, which was similar to their competitors from a 30,000-foot view, once I pressed them on the details, I finally got the answers I’d been wanting to hear.
The collection specifications were by far the best, which gave me confidence the fault conditions would show up in the data. On top of this, the analysis tools in the platform were at a level where I knew I could identify those faults even if the algorithms they were touting turned out to be a flop (full disclosure: the AI was definitely not a flop). It was a solution that married the best of the legacy solutions with that of the IoT.
Seeing Is Believing
After about six months of working with Augury, I knew they had something special that I wanted to be a part of, and when an industry colleague I’d collaborated with in the past showed up at my facility wearing an Augury shirt, I started asking how I could get my foot in the door.
It’s been a wild ride through the pandemic and everything else that’s happened these last years, and there is a lot of work that still needs to be done. But it remains super fulfilling to meet those challenges and constantly improve the products and services we provide.
Augury is changing an industry – and changed my life in the process. Now I am able to do what I am passionate about not just for one infant formula manufacturer, but for the entire world.
Want to learn more? Just reach out and contact us!
