Field Force Management

Field Force Management

Ken Walsh, London Hydro: How to Continuously Improve Your Field Force, from Field Service 2013

In this presentation from Field Service 2013, Ken Walsh, Vice President, Engineering and Operations, London Hydro, reveals how to continuously improve field force management. Walsh touches on various areas of management development, including training and recruiting.

Video transcript:

We reside in Ontario and we are a utility located in proximity halfway in Detroit and Toronto. So, if you have got that as your guide post, that's where we are located. We have about 150,000 in electric customers and we bill for another 200,000 water customers, so we are not large but we are not small either. Our territory is about 400 square kilometers and I grew up in the Imperial System… so … but I have become so accustomed too and I don’t know what that is in miles … in square miles anymore, but we are about 400 square kilometers and we have a peak load for about 700 megawatts and that’s a fair size utility and our main customers would be healthcare. We have one of the largest healthcare campuses spread throughout the city and probably in Canada for sure and we also have a lot of learning and from my sector we also have the universities, several colleges and they are our main sources of employment. How we are making up back there? Pretty good. Never mind. I can do it all.

You know, Ontario is a little bit of a funny place. Back years ago, there were 300 utilities and through dereg … the government that day you know, decided to do regulate and as we stand right now, there are about 70 out of the 300 utilities left and recent move by the government to further rationalize that so hopefully within about depending up on the winds of political change, who knows who can say what that is. They are looking probably within the next 10 years or so to have it down to maybe four or five utilities and at that point, then it’ll be easier from a regulating perspective. Okay. Great. So, this is working now. Should I try? Okay.

So, I would like to talk … for just a minute talking about drivers. You know, so, we created… I talked it in initially about our corporate drivers and they were safety and liability and cost efficiency. Now, I would like to just take a second and talk about what are the drivers re-creating a university and so we did some research, actually I did some research number of years ago and I came up with some very interesting facts and think about this, it doesn’t… not necessarily applicable… it’s applicable to all businesses. If you think about it for a minute, how fast does what we know change? Think of your business, think of your field techs. There they are out in the field, the new technologies that’s coming out, and the embedded technologies. How fast does what we know change and what is the speed of growth of human knowledge?

So, what I am trying to do here is talk about that for a bit, roll it back into what we did and then hopefully it’ll all come together because I have a closing slide at the end. Okay. There was a gentleman named Richard Buckminster Fuller, you may or may not remember him. He was an inventor, an engineer and an architect and he’s claimed the fame where that he built these geodesic domes, so you may had seen these and he won architectural awards because he actually build these things to be 20 stories tall and he actually supported themselves so it was quite… in the world of architecture, he was very well renowned. In the last year of his life before he died in 1982, he wrote a book called Critical Path and in that… he looked at a critical look at a research that several researchers had done in the past regarding knowledge. In the knowledge basically went like this, it said that if you press the button sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sorry. Okay. He worked on something called The Knowledge Doubling Curve and what basically happened was, these researches said if I take all the knowledge that we have in periodicals, books, papers, and I say that there is a certain volume of that, how fast does it multiply? And so they came up with something called The Knowledge Doubling Curve and the called The Knowledge Doubling Curve said that you can see that there is an exponential growth and they summarize at the end of it that they said, “The more you know, the faster you know”. So the more we know, the faster we know more. So, Buckminster Fuller basically took this idea and he expanded on and he went back and he said, “I am going to start back right at the time of Christian Era and I am going to call that one and I am going to say that all the knowledge in the world, that particular time was one knowledge of it and then he moved forward and he said his estimations, it took 1500 years for that to double. So, you think about it, the odds scribed passing down of where the mouth, myth, you know, all of those

Viking myths. Then something happened, it was the inventing of the printing press and all of a sudden there was a radical transformation that happened and the primary source that they were looking at were the religious texts, and now they could print these religious texts and disseminate the information very quickly. Well, they also disseminate a lot of other information as well as you can imagine, but now they have a means to get that out. No more scribes, no more myths, although they are still there

If you move forward, printing presses, they developed, they were faster, and so the time you can start to see from 1 to1500, 250 to 150 years down to 30 years and then something happened. And around 1930… there you go … I am way past and around in the 1950s, the computers were developed, and they were rudimentary at that time and took a large spaces, but you could see now we are moving down to 7 years. And then in the 1970s, the world wide web… and so we started with web 1, which was the ability to… for machines to talk with one another, then we went to web 2 which was that you could take the apps like you see right now, put them on and build them on machines and you could move ahead with it. And eventually, we are going to move a more sophisticated web 3. Some of it is already in place where we have our artificial intelligence where the human layer interfaces with the artificial layer. So, what does that mean?

IBM does a study a number of years ago and they predicted that by 2014, knowledge would double every 11 hours. At the end of this paper, I have some references, so if you are interested. So, think about it. When you leave here today, when you come back tomorrow, knowledge would have doubled and you could think about it like you look at your Blackberries. You have got the world scores, you know, we will get some more information from what happened in Boston, that terrible incident. We’ll hear what happened in Yugoslavia. It's just amazing, the amount of information. So, think about it. Now, think about you organization and the two questions I asked. How fast do you know, and how fast is what you know changed. There is one thing I don’t have in here and that is a companion, which is…was the expectation of your customers. If knowledge is doubling every 11 hours, then the way that you do business has changed as well. I mean that was our premise.

So, eventually we’ll move to something called what Kurzweil said, was an era of Singularity, and Singularity is this when the era in which intelligent will become non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today. In other words, artificial intelligence. And you know, I have thought about that and it seems like Kirk on the bridge of the Star Trek, but it's not because in my Blackberry or iPhone which I left home, much to my boss’s demand. Off the thing, but now I am free, okay. Free in Palm Springs, whatever that could mean. But anyway, he said that if I program certain rules into your program, right? So, for instance, if I get an e-mail from this person I wanted to go here, if to go to someone else. You don’t even see it. It comes in, machine talks to machine, interfaces and it's gone. So, it's starting to come. The point I am making is, as a driver we are moving more and more the information that we are getting. The technicians and the technical people in the fields are not able to keep up with. So, you need training and that’s the whole purpose of my talk today, but you can see every once, every 11 hours presents its unique challenge as well.

So, let’s go to my business. Everybody recognizes this. This big generator. Power flows, goes down to transmission lines, comes down. There is a fast body of knowledge developed over the last 100 years, vis-à-vis the standards protocol techniques of how to protect and build that system. So, if you have an outage at home of if you have a fault in system, there are rules, regulations, and all of those practice guidelines or the whole basis of IEEE was based on this, right? Everybody remembers that so … let's move forward to Ontario because what I want to talk to you in the next segment is what happens when the regulator decides that they want to have a mandate and I know what happens all over in some form or fashion, but this is what happened in Ontario.

In Ontario in early 2000, the government at that time said that they wanted to deregulate and it was full deregulation, like full, right. We are now in Ontario Business Corporation. We follow rules racks. We have balance sheet and bottom-lines. Provincial government mandates to eliminate coal fired plants. They wanted to get rid of coal fired plants. It was a green initiative and they were very serious about it and they put in a lot of steps to make sure that that happened. They went to market pricing of power, of course like all governments, once the public outcry decided that they didn’t want that. Well, they retracted that very fast. And they moved to some other forms that didn’t make any sense, but they are still trying to figure it out, any establishment of a new regulatory oversight regulation framework. We are a public utilities commission. I am sure a lot of you have had public utility commission, maybe they provide you power. Rock solid, stable. Well, we were, too. And then all of a sudden, we are not regulated by a provincial regulator who says you will supply us all the information, you will submit great applications, you will do this, you will do this. And now, went from one regulator to five people who regulate what we do and they created these things called the “distribution license.” And at first we thought that that was a nice idea so that we could operate in our territory, but they keep adding addendums to it that says, “You shall do this and/or it's not part of your distribution license, and/or we will impose financial penalties if you don’t.” So, interesting.

In 2005, they basically said this … my take on it. They said, “You are not moving fast enough to get rid of the coal fired plants. We are going to introduce smart meters?” Now, who have heard smart meters before? Yeah, just about … if you haven’t, it's basically a device that we replaces the electromechanical meter in your wall with something that through a radio or otherwise you can come and you can communicate with that in its storage. So, it's a smart meter, it's like Smartphones. You could take data from that smart meter and you can download it so that you can now… the government says, we will give you… through you … to the customers the opportunity to look so that they can manage. So, what does that mean? That means a whole new set of skill sets. These things are electronic. We have to write off all the old meters. Now, where we have a meter, go out and read. Now, we have a Wi-Fi systems. We have fiberoptic system. We have all kinds of radio communications in addition to what we had before which was still the customer’s expectation now has been elevated because the government said you shall be able to have this information because we wanted to get rid of the coal plants, we wanted to be a green community, which I am all in favor for it by the way. But it's just … So, what does that mean? If you take your electric all induction meter here for a hundred years, so this is our history. Remember, knowledge is doubling, training, what are you going to do with the data? So, we went from one read every two months because it was all guaranteed by the government then we have recourse in case people didn’t pay the bills to… when we became a corporation we said, “Our bottom-line, bad debt, problem once every month. We will read and review once every week, if we could right to eliminate the bad debt, but we settled on once a month.

In 2005, Smart Meters came in and all of a sudden we are reading every hour. So, we went from read of every six read per year. Right now, every year we have 1.3 billion reads. What does it mean? It means we implemented a brand new SAP system. SAP is great but it's complex and it needs a lot of work and we have been successful, but you can start to see that the customers now, all that data are being set up in that regard. So, think of all the people now in the training that was required in that regard. How do you do it? Then in 2009, they said, “You are still not moving fast enough. We are going to institute what's known as a Green Energy Act.” Do any of you here reside in states or provinces where they have instituted a Green Energy Acts? So basically, it establishes the right of anybody, anywhere to connect anything that generates electricity to the system and it had to meet economic and regulatory requirements. It’s not haphazard. You deserve rigid form that they do but they were still the utilities were mandated that they had to connect and initiated the implementation of a Smart Grid. Now, who’s heard of a Smart Grid? I am sure a lot of people have heard of Smart Grid and basically what it is, it allows the implementation of any power anywhere to be interconnected and of flow and they gave incentives for the integration of the new technologies such as electric currents, right?

Full immersion, photovoltaic wind, biomass, biogas and we have just about all of it in Ontario, right? We have wind, biomass, biogas and we have smart cars as well. So, remember that source plot, this is what the power looks like now. This is Ontario’s emerging power grid and my assistant did this for me so basically, that’s the way the power flows. So now, take a technical engineer, technologist, field service tech, whatever you want and say to them, you are in a paradigm shift. You are now not going… this is now what you have got to do. Whoever decides to connect you have now to have a code standards as practice as guidelines and where with all to be able to integrate that into the system and by the way, you have to be able to go out and service it and we have … the real issue here and we are going to talk about that a little bit tomorrow in the dispatch scenario is the fact of safety because before we can guarantee our field techs would be safe. Now, we are not so sure. So if this has not come to your area yet, it will. Trust me. Okay.

So, our tech staff said, “How can we keep up with this? How can I integrate all this into?” So, it’s simple. Okay. Keeps want to go back. How can you keep up with a rapid phase of evolving technology and close resulting skill gaps, keep your work force current and how do you effectively deliver a training program in the midst of all this? I would love to take all of my technical staff and send them back the University. Unfortunately, we still got work to do so I can’t do that and by the time they came out of the university, two days later if I applied Buckminster Fuller’s rule, 11 hours later, they are still out. The knowledge is dated. So, we decided… this is the kind of thing you have to think.

What is going to be my role? Am I going to be a follower or am I going to be a provider… an enabler, sorry. A follower means I am going to wait for the code standards practices guidelines to be developed and then I am going to implement them. This issue is associated with that. You are not at the head of the pack, your brand recognition maybe and I’ll talk about that in a minute. Are you going to be an enabler? Are you going to be out there and trust me, all this stuff is bleeding edge. If you are going to be out there on the edge implementing new technologies along with everything that you can and so that your customers come to trust you, you are going to make mistakes. I mean we did but you know what, at least the customers were able to recognize us and that’s one of the things I am going to talk about. So, make that decision first. Do I want to be an enabler, a shaper or do I want to be a follower? And so in our case, we chose to be an enabler because our board and the senior team, we said, “you know what? This is exciting.” This is the internet back in Web One, this is the technology back in the telephone when we went to wireless. Let’s get in it. Let’s learn about this stuff. So, that was our first priority. We wanted to be an enabler. Okay. But, in order to be an enabler, you got to have that three letters that all boards of directors and finance people don’t like, research and development, right? So, it’s really easy to put research and development in there with small organization. We do not have millions and millions of dollars to put in a research and development and as most of you may realize, when there is pressure on the bottom line, it's the R&D dollars that are usually the first thing to take the hit, right? Long before anything else. So, we said, okay. Well, that’s not going to work”. So we want to be able to have research and development. How are we going to stay in front. And then my boss and I have a very good relationship with the university. So what we said, “We want to have university. If I want to know how to create a university in my own organization, the best place to look is at the university and the other technical schools”. And I use the university here but we have relationships with our colleges and other technical facilities as well. So we said, “This is what we want to do”.

There are two reasons for this. First, our learning occurs for our techs is very steep. Every time we turn around, this new technology to questions of how to integrate this and what to do. So what to say is how can I bend that curve? Is it possible to bend the curve to make it more reasonable that I can at least meet my customer’s expectations? The university is feeling tremendous pressure. I don’t know if you have affiliations with universities but now, with the research and development that they are doing the incubation period that they have to commercialization has just been squeezed the same way that the learning curve has been squeezed on the other side. So, they are looking for commercialization opportunities to be able to say, okay, from the university if you may not know, they take us through incubation period and do trials, then they go to commercialization. If they are lucky enough to partner with industry, then they can do the incubation period with a company and our life situation and commercialization goes twice as fast. So, for us it was a natural partnership and we said, “okay, let’s see where that goes”.

So, there were four… I am going to leave you with a slide at the end of the…but there was four basic ideas that we came up with. The first one is this, if you are going to do it… if you are going to work with the university then they are by fact, you are a virtual organization. So, if you think of it in that regard, you are virtual organization. You have just expanded now into all the research and development activities that they can provide you but it’s going to cost you a little bit but not as much as you think. Fund some research, grant proposals successfully, leverage, substantial funds from various federal and prevention funding agencies in addition to showing collaboration with other companies or regulatory bodies. What do I mean by that? If you gave $100,000 to a university, they can go out and they can show collaboration with you as a company and they can turn that $100,000 into $400,000 or $500,000 because the Federal Government would say, “Industry likes what you are doing. I am going to give you some money to develop this”. So, that’s the first thing plus if you give them the money, you get to choose what kind of topics that they are working on. So, let’s say I heard the last speaker talk about integrating of technology and that. Well, in the university, there are all kinds of departments that you could draw on, right. The professor has all kinds of interest. You can find a professor that will want to work on this thing or community college that may want to build apps for instance and that’s also applicable, say for instance if you are using maybe some economic econometric studies or things like that, you can do that.

Second thing is, provide coop opportunities from the graduate studies. They bring in the latest in technology, right? I don’t have to send my guys back to school; they bring it in, right? And they know about it and they know and plus what is that for me for an employer? If you are like our organization in Ontario, we are facing a demographic cliff and the demographic cliff is that over the next… by 2015, we will have lost 30% of our work force and because of age, they will move out and it’s systematic across North America. Have your staffs supervise some students in their final year. You want to see technical staff step up to the plate, go back to the books, try to prove themselves. You take a guy out of school, that’s 10 years out of school, 15 years out of school teaching someone that’s in their last year, they are not going to be want to showing up but truest me, I know I have guys come to me like they said, “Can I borrow your book? I can’t find mine. I need to be able to answer these questions. I don’t know what these guys are asking me anymore.” I said, “Don’t ask me, I have been out for 30 years”.

And arrange for your staff to deliver guest lecture to students on current industry topics. Take your staff, key staff, have them go to the college and university and present something. I guarantee you, they’ll know the topic inside out and they’ll make good presentations and then you know what, when they do that, have them make that same presentation in the organization. It puts the fear gone on them. I am telling you. Because it’s only second to death, people hate public speaking. That’s a known fact. So, what did we do? We establish or commitment for research project. We have a 10 year commitment and the 10 years is probably $800,000 to a million dollars that we are going to guarantee. They have turned that into $5 to $6 million worth of research grant. We have a commitment to provide coop terms. These guys come in and we are lucky that there now more women entering the work force, so we’ll get to evaluate all kinds of different skill sets that come to us and we can pick and choose and we have actually over the past 3 or 4 years picked one or two of those students to come back with us. Very very good way to do it.

Provision of final year project for undergraduates. I got… my engineers got 100 questions. So, we picked three or four of them and gave them to the university. Why? Students are working on them, our guys supervise them. Professors, the experts, the research and development will address those issues and I am talking… so for instance, one of the major… I don’t want to talk about that right now but there are lots of projects. We have post grads and research fellows, a little bit more difficult projects but stuff that is really bothering us and these would be like an app development for HAN, the home area networks. Customers want that, they want to be able to control things. They want to understand.

We send our engineers up to the universities and colleges, you go up and teach for that, right. That’ll smarten them up. So, what happens in reciprocal is that the university has said, “we understand this as a need for your technical staff to be more empowered.” So what they did was and we have … there is a similar thing with our community college as well. They will offer… they have offered our engineers Masters of Science degrees for free. Working on thesis projects related to their work. They get the benefit of having the… because they get funded depending on how many students they’ve got. We get the benefit of it and I get to keep the staff working on projects that are of meaningful value. And I’ll just tell you what one of those projects were. For instance, you may not have realized it but if you have a solar panel, how many of those can you… this is like how many engineers does it takes to change the light bulb? How many solar panels can you connect to a theater? Seems easy but very complex, very complex. We thought it was based upon the output of the solar cell and it's not. The research show that it was based upon on something called Harmonics, which is totally all together different than what we had thought about it, so we set a different limitation. So, we were able to take that research, apply standard to it and now we know when our technical field staff gout there, they can say, “No, I am sorry. We can’t connect that in. You are over the limits.” So, we worked in establishing it. Remember what I said before about enabling and about knowledge doubling and knowledge transfer, this allows the way to do it.

All right. If you want to collaborate on research projects, it strengthens the fundamentals of the people that you work with. At this point, you would say, “Wow! That’s a lot of time away from work from my people.” And you know, if you think about it, if you talk about delivery of training, this is just another method of delivery of training. It doesn’t take as much time as you think. We are still delivering the services. In fact, our service enhancement, we are actually delivering more of and our customers… we do customer service ratings and surveys and we are not seeing any degradation in those surveys and plus our staff are being trained. So, it will stimulate innovation, encourages team work, sparks healthy, fosters pride, and it creates the sense of satisfaction. Because if you are spend all the time training those people, you want them to feel that they want to work here, because it has also been shown that job satisfaction is one of the primary motivators for young people entering the work force today and they will change. If they don’t like what they are doing, they will move. And we thought I had this conversation with some of the younger engineers. These are research papers. These are peer reviewed research … I am not going to read them out but I just want to put them up as an example, these are peer reviewed research industry papers. IEEE presented that various industry forms all over the world and we sent the university goals, and we send the person who had collaborated on that as well. So, they get that sense of pride in it. This is idea that I came up with.

The friend of mine, a really good friend of mine working at a university. He said to me … he said you know, his name is Rajiv. I said, “Rajiv, you are going on sabbatical.” I said, “Where are you going? What exotic place in the world?” Bali, or someplace like that. He said, “No, I don’t have anything. He said, “my wife wants me to stay home.” I said, “Well, that sucks for you, but what are you going to do?” And he said, “Well, I don’t have anything to do.” And then I thought, “Why don’t you come work with us? Take your sabbatical.” He said, “No, no. You don’t take your sabbatical in industry.” He said, “You go off and go to the mountains and you do something else.” I didn’t understand what he said. But I said, “No, no. Why don’t you come work for us? We’ll support you and we’ll fund you, but there is only one condition. You have to tailor your research on what we want.” He said, “Yeah, sure. Okay. Not a problem.” He said, “I’ll come.” I will just get to the next slide. So, I call it the sabbatical 101 because he developed this for me. He produced him. We had a lot of papers that we produced and he developed launch and learn lectures. So we brought the university to us. The professor would – these were mandated. You have to go. There was like eight lectures, and there was in something called static Var Compensation. If that means anything to anybody, then I’ll see you afterwards. But basically, it was from zero to the end. It was eight full lectures of it. So that by the end of it the technical staff were able to evaluate … I mean this was targeted right, the technical staff were able to evaluate request from customers. So, they could do that intelligently and be able to have the knowledge behind them to be able to do that. And he was available for con … staff consultation. I mean he was in the café. The guys have talked to him. He brought along his all his staff. Some of the students came along, and there was Dr. Verma, what are we going to do? And then talked to guy. Actually, for us it resulted in a patent that we are now looking at this integration of wind mills using solar cells and during for night time. And we are just working through some commercialization to that patent. I never realized that that would happen, but that’s what happened.

We brought the … bring the research in-house because your staff needs to be able to see that you are supporting and continuing education. Make it visible and friendly. Don’t tuck it away in the back of the shop or up on the second floor. Put it right in the main office so that people can say, “Hey! Look, there is the professor,” or “there is the research people, what are they working on?” Encourage your staff to visit them. What are you working on? Hey! I have got a problem. Did you ever think it is? How is that work with what I do? And then so you can talk to them. And so what is it that does lifts the level of … or it elevates the whole level of consciousness, academic consciousness and that means training, so your staff are thinking more as they are moving along, right?

We brought the research in lab. We created the state. Now, Watts Lab, believe or not, it was my ex-boss, Bernie Watts. So, I said I will call it Watts, but it is electric lab, Watts, that was a pun. But it's for smart, good, and innovative DT control studies and it attracted the attention of the Ontario government. The Minister of Energy actually came down which is like the state minister came down and opened up the lab forces, and million dollar state of the art lab, that’s what we put into it. And our technical staff field and otherwise go there and then said, “What’s happened here?” So really what it does and I am going to skip a few slides because I am moving along here, anything that you can think of from a simulation perspective can be simulated there. Load, solar cells, reverse power flows, wind mills, electric cars, right, it's got all of the other elements right there. Actually, the simulator itself, there is one in California … in southern Cal and they brought the other one to Western which they now put in this lab.

And again, I have talked about collaboration, so you have the Ontario Center of Excellence, other hydros, the development and corporation; the cities are using this, right? Now, they’ve caught on to it. German Solar, task force and KACO. KACO is a huge manufactures of inverters, right for the solar cells, so now we’ve got that as well.

So, I want to talk about the drivers, the impact of regulation when you are forced to do it, the paradigm shifts that you are faced when there is no standard, how you can come about it, but there has to be some payback. And in our business, because we don’t go out and grow business to attract new customers although we’d like to, we are more regulated than anything else. For us, it's brand recognition … trusted brand recognition. So I have listed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in there.

Shaping is a really big word when it comes to the regulator. What I mean by that is you can see, you are getting respect from the regulator. When they are looking at new policy, sometimes they will call us and say, “We are doing this, what do you think? You know, we want to implement this form of green energy, what do you think?” And so we are asked our opinion and we’ve published many papers. So, when we go to conferences and that, not me so much but my technical staffs themselves, they feel proud of it. And also the technical staff in the field, they are also … we train them as well to be fully aware of what the situations are or what we are working on.

Innovation, scored a patent, for for utility. Not pretty good. The Board doesn’t understand it, but that’s okay.

Enabling, our research demonstration provide real time data on emerging technologies. When our customers have a question, they come to us. We have a couple of solar cells, trackers, fix, wind mill, electric cars, and chargers. We have a simulator system. So, our customer says, “I don’t understand this. What about the solar cell?” Well, come on in. Let’s show you, right. We put it up on the local market place and we have you know, we are downtown and we have all these things and people can ask these questions and they phone us and they said, “Hey, come down and take your test… if you want to test drive electric car, yeah come test drive ours.” I mean these are reputable customers and we only put a certain amount of gas and that’s all. They don’t drive out of the city but these are reputable customers and they said, “I like this” and we have arranged it. Enhanced customer focus, let me tell you. Home automated networks is the hot topic and it’s going to get bigger because as the world heats up and green energy becomes more of an issue, customer focus on green initiatives, it’s going to take more prevalence, and you can see… look at the hills around here through the wind mills, right and these all have to be integrated and now it’s going to move to your home as well.

The last one surprised us. Was attraction and retention, right? We, like I said we are small… we are not small, we are a fairly large utility on Ontario but we don’t pay you know, enough to be on the Fortune 500. We don’t have anybody at least… hope not. We don’t have anybody on that, not in our business but the young technical staff for some reason are attracted to us because of all the tools and the gadgets. The other thing we have which I didn’t mention is full SAP system, its full Intergraph suite of outage management tools. We have got the software to be able to do it, we have made that investment and so they come and they stay because we allow them to work on the projects and if an engineer or a technical staff or field service say, “Hey, I got an idea”. We say, “Okay. We don’t have a lot of money but we got a little bit of money. Why don’t just develop that, right. Come by and show us if it works or not. Give us a business case for it”. And we invite them to the executive and they come. So you know, I think at the end of it, talked about all of that but I want to leave you with a final slide and this is basically a wrap up slide.

If you got a college or university close by in your town, city, community, talk to them. Try to get one of their professors to come and do a sabbatical with you. Maybe you have got some burning questions that you are dealing with, right? Then you have got them in house and it’s easier to train in house than it is to send everybody out. Collaborate and research projects, takes some of that money that you are thinking of doing something with and say, hey, I am going…maybe I can in send some to government and maybe I can give it to the university and get them to be the researcher.

Encourage academic to take it if you can and then bring in research in house if you had any opportunities. I think overall, we have been really successful in it. It’s not been perfect, I won’t stand here and tell you but what is allowed, it actually in some cases uncovered more questions than it has resolved more issues but these are questions that would have evolved anyway and it really means that when we send the people to conferences, they understand more and they can challenge more and when they challenge more, then the whole knowledge goes up, right? Because that’s what it’s all about, it’s about challenging the existing body of knowledge so we can get there. The 11 hours floored me but it’s one of the reasons why we are here. So, with that I don’t have any other thing that I want to present to you. I hope I was able today to keep your attention but also maybe just give you one or two ideas based upon what we did and maybe you can take advantage of that and then we’ll help you promote your field, staff promote your service in the field and just move your head. Give it a little bit of edge if you want to. Thank you very much.