Engineering Unplugged with John-Paul Schmidt of Dow Chemical

Table of Content

• What’s your job? – 2:03
• What are ASME and other engineering codes? – 3:03
• Academic knowledge vs. pragmatic knowledge – 4:55
• The importance of hands on experience/knowledge – 8:41
• What’s missing from engineering education today? – 10:37
• How can graduates get dirt under the fingernails experience? – 13:15
• What should industry partnerships look like? – 17:17
• How has technology changed the business? – 18:38
• Walkthrough the lifecycle of a project and the tools used at each stage. – 20:45
• Technology has compressed schedules by 40% – 24:27
• What are the downsides to all this technology? – 28:35
• Is our piping industry too slow to change? – 31:38
• Piping Technology partnership with its customers – 33:36

Transcript:

John-Paul:
We can do more with modern technology and less humans than what anyone could have imagined in the 80s. We can communicate quicker and more effectively. We can bring the right information to the right people at the right time. In the early days of the boilers, every piece of pipe or tubing or every connection was somebodies interpretation of physics.

John-Paul:
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers built this code, and what it does is it creates predictability in a highly unpredictable area, which is human beings. The databases and the interfaces between the databases are excellent. The tool to communicate these things is limited. There are times when the tail wag the dog, and we make decisions that cost us money to make sure that our computer tools are working properly.

Rakesh:
I am Rakesh Agrawal the CEO of Piping Technology and Products, and as we approach our 50 year anniversary at the company, we’re starting a series where we interview some of our favorite customers. And, today I have with me John Schmidt, who is the Global Expertise Area leader for Dow Corporation. So John, thank you for joining me.

John-Paul:
Thank you for the invitation. This is an honor. Yeah.

Rakesh:
It’s great to have you here. So you’ve been, a friend of piping technology for many years as I canvased the team and asked, hey, who should I interview? In this first interview for, piping technology, your name came up, I think three out of three, for the people that I talk to.

John-Paul:
So, Well.

Rakesh:
Thank you. Yeah. So I’m honored that you’re you’re here to join me. And as we’ve gotten to know each other, you have a really cool and diverse background. So I’m excited about not just talking about your, you know, strictly professional interests, but your broader, broader hobbies as well. Why don’t we start with your your telling me a little bit more about, what you do it now, you’re, you’re the global expertise area leader for, for piping and, and so, you know, we work together a lot piping technology and, and you on projects.

Rakesh:
But just more broadly, what is your job entail at Dow?

John-Paul:
In general, I interpret, code whether it’s as may be 31 3 or 31, 1 or 31 for, into policy decisions and actual designs. So a lot of my days, I’m giving advice to young engineers or designers who are trying to, create a design for a chemical plant or, pipeline, that will keep them safe and keep our community safe and interpret the code in a way that will lead to a predictable and reliable operation.

John-Paul:
So, while I’m definitely interested in keeping costs low, a lot of those costs that people overlook are long term costs. So, I write, write procedures, I read codes, and I advise the next generation.

Rakesh:
So for, for people who might be listening, and not familiar with the codes, could you describe briefly what what these codes are what are these ask me codes.

John-Paul:
Well, a lot of the power of our modern piping system comes in our standardization. And in the early days of the boilers and some of the early boilers you can see in museums are completely nonstandard. Every piece of pipe or tubing or every connection was, somebodies, interpretation of physics. And so the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the idea of keeping safer and more reliable operations, built this code.

John-Paul:
So 31 three is process piping. So it’s, pipes and pipes. Pipe components are really it’s just pipes, not components, inside the battery limits of a plant. And then there’s, several other codes that describe. Oh, well, a flange needs to be standardized in this shape or in this material or this testing. And and what it does is it creates predictability in a highly unpredictable area, which is human beings.

John-Paul:
Right? So, so turning math into human activity and industry is, it’s a difficult thing, right? We have our we have our language and our codes and, and now, whether you’re in China or in, Turkey, you can take an as me 16 five flange and know predictably what it will do. So on the, on the sharp end of the engineering stick for, for our chemical process industry, we have people that are have a lot of competing, requirements.

John-Paul:
Right. And we we need to keep it cheap. We need to keep the supplier happy. We need to keep this, you know, vendor, on our side. We need to keep this client. It’s too much to think about. So the more we can compartmentalize that, the the less decision making that we have, the decisions become better. So the codes help reduce those things at at the design level.

Rakesh:
One thing that we talked about was this idea of, you know, academic knowledge versus pragmatic knowledge there. The, knowledge that is informed by hands on experience versus versus not, so talk a little bit about that. You know.

John-Paul:
Well.

Rakesh:
Feel free to use the word knuckleheads also. And, you know.

John-Paul:
I had an experience at the shipyard where I was asked to heat treat, a bunch of steel coming out of China. So some some fabricated, legs for a, platform rig. Oil rig. Yeah. And, my response was to go online and find somebody that would sell us a big, expensive furnace. And, the engineering manager got a construction, got a cargo box and put barbecue burners in it and temperature sensors and built a heat treatment center for less than 100th of what it would have cost to purchase a heat treating, furnace.

John-Paul:
That’s something they don’t really teach, right? That’s sort of the initiative. And and and he did successfully he treat the entire the entire set of steel saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right. And not only not only in capital cost, but also in schedule. That sort of thinking is not going. I don’t I don’t know if that’s coming out of our universities.

John-Paul:
Right. Yeah. I had, more than one student, here in America and one student here in America, American two in Europe, who, was not comfortable with the precision of the code. And they said, well, I mean, they didn’t want to take the edge cases. They were afraid with the risk from, inspection that didn’t inspect every single point, because they were afraid of unknowns.

John-Paul:
And we can’t operate in a world without unknowns. I like to reference, even though I don’t totally understand Gödel’s proof. I believe and correct me if I’m wrong, if the gist is that any sufficiently useful mathematical system will have unknowns or contradictions. And there’s something true about that in our engineering, right, that we have to take some risks.

John-Paul:
I think a lot of people choose engineering because it is it is less risky, right? I chose engineering because there’s less risky than being a lawyer. I was considering being a lawyer when I was younger.

Rakesh:
And people like, you know, problems that have a closed form solution. Absolutely right. Or a bounded set of solutions.

John-Paul:
Pure mathematics, even with units, can have perfect answers that are not, you know, left to interpretation, that’s not the same thing in engineering. So that pragmatic understanding of risk, precision, those are really important topics.

Rakesh:
Yeah I mean just just the inclusion of risk as a factor, you know, changes the way you look at, look at an engineering problem. Right? You know, that comes from comes from more from experience than from, book learning.

John-Paul:
Right. Well, and we understand as engineers even fresh out of school, and a lot of people understand this before they go into school, that we have a duty to the people around us to keep them safe to our communities. Right. That’s it’s not our transactions with the world are not just a paycheck and a set of designs, but as a professional engineer in the state of Texas, I have a I have a obligation, not just a moral, but I believe, a spiritual obligation to protect the people around me.

John-Paul:
Right. And so doing that while at the same time understanding that there are things out of my control, there are things in this design that are not 100% perfectly, you know, analyzed after the mill, the steel isn’t analyzed every single piece after the mill. Not every stick of not every stick welded connection is, is, radiographs. And we have a lot of ways to protect against those things.

John-Paul:
But there is some imagined things. Right. That’s then that’s hard to teach.

Rakesh:
One thing that we talked about was, how this aspect of hands on experience is generationally different, that, that, you know, if you go back, 50 years ago, the, you know, engineers that were that were coming out of, training grew up in rural settings, perhaps where, you know, the life required, hands on taught.

Rakesh:
Tell us more. Tell me more about that. And even you also shared how that, you know, is reflected in the academic textbooks of that time versus today.

John-Paul:
So, I believe that, engineering used to be more of a hands on educational experience. People would, you know, shade tree mechanic was a thing in the 40s and 50s. The idea that that, people would go fix their own cars because they were simple enough to understand the levers and pumps involved in their own cars. And so having your hands on a piece of equipment and understanding how it moves or tearing it apart, breaking it apart, putting it back together, I think having some of that experience in your life before you go into, academic environment can lead to a great appreciation for it.

John-Paul:
So, at Lamar University, I had the pleasure of a very well-developed laboratory. We ran, water treatment plant for six weeks. We ran a distillation column for a few weeks. We ran, but we were in actual process chemistry where it was there in front of you could put your hands on it. And that led to an appreciation for what the numbers really meant.

John-Paul:
And, I don’t know how that is in, in every environment, but I think that that’s something every engineer should do. So what what one of the things that I’ve decided to do with in my free time is to have, a lot of crafting hobbies and hobbies that give me a better feel for how to work with my hands a little bit more.

John-Paul:
And and that has had, I think, a spinoff effects on my professional life.

Rakesh:
I want to go back to, go back to, engineering education. This is something that that we talked about this, and you mentioned right at Lamar, you, you had this experience of, of running. Did you say, water treatment plant?

John-Paul:
Very small, like laboratory scale plant. Yeah. Or pilot, I would call it pilot scale. Yeah.

Rakesh:
Great. Great practical experience. Absolutely. What’s your view of, And be opinionated, please. But what’s your view of, engineering education today? And you know what? What’s missing?

John-Paul:
Well, to cushion this, I haven’t been in a classroom for for, engineering in quite a while. Yeah. From my perspective, as somebody in industry who prepares, fresh graduates, I would say I want their hands on things. I want their I want I really need a more pragmatic approach, people more interested in and actually doing things right, because I feel like I feel and it’s a, it’s a it’s a difficult needle to thread.

John-Paul:
Right. Because we, we sometimes we don’t get to do anything. We make a design in the building never gets built, or we build a chemical plant in three dimensions and and bytes and bits and we never see it. But I would like to see more pragmatic hands on experience. So chemical engineers that have seen a pump and can see, you know, what it means to have, you know, head rise and and mechanical engineers that understand what turbulence sounds like.

John-Paul:
You know, in a or cavitation sounds like an a pump like these are it’s the education that you can get in, laboratory scale can save us on the industrial scale. And that goes a long way.

Rakesh:
Yeah. In your professional life, is there through partnerships? Are there ways in which you’re, you know, creating this, this reality with, you know, with graduates or, you know, students that are with students?

John-Paul:
I’ve had a few interns. And, the thing is, in my area in Central engineering, interns aren’t getting the best experience that they could. Yeah. Now, my company does hire interns and sends them out to the field and gives them dirt under the fingernails, as I like to call it.

Rakesh:
Yeah.

John-Paul:
And, I cannot I cannot stress enough to to the young engineers in the world that this is, this is the pathway to being an engineer, whether it’s and these are, I mean, co-ops are paid, so they’re treated well, and they definitely have to work. They need to understand professional etiquette before they get to the field. Or or that could be a problem.

John-Paul:
But, that’s that’s really where you find, you know, a 25, 26, 30 year old mentor and you start to really learn how to do things.

Rakesh:
There’s, you know, fresh graduate or soon to be graduate that’s listening to this. What’s a path for them to get that dirt under the fingernails experience? You know, you mentioned working in a shipyard, and, you know, you you, actually put your, studies on hold to go in and take that job and, and, you’ve gained a lot of practical experience from that.

Rakesh:
It sounds like, you know, you connected with people who then led you to your to your next job. What what’s a place where, you know, there might be an alignment of of, that practical experience and also a need, a need for for young graduates.

John-Paul:
First and foremost, there are programs at most major universities that, help interns find placement. That would be the most conventional route. And I would recommend that, and some unconventional routes are to get, jobs adjacent to the job that you want and to learn from those. And that’s, so when I, when I went in as a piping designer at, Beacon Maritime, I was not an engineer and it was not getting paid as an engineer.

John-Paul:
And I chose to do engineering at night and on the weekends in non-conventional ways and, not being afraid to do things outside of your pay. Right. And I know nobody wants to do work for free, and there’s a lot of people, okay, I don’t need to do that. But that was a great, great bit of training. I think there was some things, what was it called?

John-Paul:
Over employed? No, over employed is where you have too many jobs. There’s something quite. Oh, quite quitting. There’s an opposite of quite quitting. Quiet hiring. Somebody was making up some words about it. Yeah.

Rakesh:
You do something for free.

John-Paul:
Right? Right. So I’ve never been afraid to do that. So I want to learn the way to do it. And usually when you’re learning something in an adjacent field, it helps you do your own job. Right? Where at? At Dow Chemical, we do something called a temporary assignment, and it’s a temporary developmental assignment. And it’s specifically there where, one, where a person will work in or oh, excuse me, in an adjacent role.

John-Paul:
And they’ll learn some of the edge cases, like, why is it important to have this quality number go in it. Right. That’s useful.

Rakesh:
Yeah. Look for opportunities to cross train.

John-Paul:
It’s Yeah, quite hiring cross training opportunities. Internships. Those are, you know, sometimes that’s what you have to do. I’m not I’m not suggesting anybody go work for exposure only. But yeah, unfortunately, sometimes that’s the way it works out.

Rakesh:
Yeah, yeah. And I like the suggestion about, you know, looking for opportunities in an adjacent field like that’s, that’s, I think, a great idea. Like, for example, you know, your goal might be to work at, at, a large chemicals company. But then, you know, you can work at a manufacturer. I think, for example, our environment at Piping Technology offers a lot of really pragmatic, hands on, experience.

Rakesh:
And, you know, a lot of opportunity for that kind of learning.

John-Paul:
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And my, my, sister, worked very hard to get into the medical field, and she couldn’t find a way into it. She hated college. But she got a job. She joined the military at 17, as soon as she could, and got a job as a, she tried to go in to flight medic, and they had her be a secretary, and she.

John-Paul:
She worked. And she specifically made friends that were in the field and, and, quietly hired herself and some of their less pleasant tasks and then got hired at, doctor here in Galveston, as a, as a secretary and did extra work on the weekends and, eventually was able to get transferred through the military into the flight medic program.

John-Paul:
And now she’s a senior chief in the Houston Fire Department doing medical work. So.

Rakesh:
Wow.

John-Paul:
So she was a good example of that. And I learned from her.

Rakesh:
Yeah. Was just kind of, you know, kept being useful and use that to, you know, shape her career.

John-Paul:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Rakesh:
So going back to, engineering education, do you guys have partnerships you mentioned in industry partnerships that that that could be something that fills this experience gap for, you know, academic engineering programs. What does that look like at Dow and and other places? Aspirationally. What does it look like?

John-Paul:
Aspirationally. What I would like to see, yes, I would like to see more collaboration with research projects, with, teachers, with educators. I right now I’m working on clarifying the buried pipe guidance. And as May 31st three, there’s a lot of contentious, debate about how we should design underground pipes. Yet we’ve been doing we’ve been our our society has been building underground pipes since, you know, Mesopotamia.

John-Paul:
Right. So it’s you can figure there wouldn’t be a lot of argument about how that’s done. But there is a lot of argument. It’s a multimillion dollar question today. I would love to partner with a mechanical engineering professor and set up experiments and and reconsider some of the equations that we use today, some that are maybe applied poorly or changed the wording in some of them, but it would be nice to have a partner in that research.

John-Paul:
Yeah, we do take on, our interns, but it’s not the same thing. Sure.

Rakesh:
Let’s talk about technology a little bit. You know that I have a background in technology as well, in addition to piping technology, you know, information technology software. And, and so you’ve been in the industry for a long time. What’s the role that technology plays today? And how is that how has that changed the way the business works?

John-Paul:
We can do more with modern technology, and less humans. Than what anyone could have imagined in the 80s. Right. It takes less people to do an equation, to do a design. We can communicate. Excuse me? We can communicate quicker, more effectively. We can bring, the right information to the right people at the right time, so we can automate a lot of the things that are boring.

John-Paul:
When I first started this business, I had to draw pieces of pipe each line manually in AutoCAD. And now we have tools like, as 3D or Caesar that can automate the process of doing the drawing or doing the calculations. Right. So in the days of my grandfather, static, analysis for structures or pipes was done by manually performing, matrix.

John-Paul:
And now, Caesar does that for us with a great graphical interface. So while we’re talking, while right now I’m talking about advances of a generation or two generations ago, we see more interesting developments come up. So, our front end loading analysis can turn a block diagram. So a non geometric idea of a process into a geometric idea of a process that can be more quickly communicated to the engineers who can validate the technology of a pipe has been around for 2000 years.

John-Paul:
More probably. But the way we interact with those that’s rapidly changing. Technology has changed in the code in the last five years dramatically with, like I said, the 31 J advancement, the computers are changing the way we communicate that internally. There’s a lot we can do.

Rakesh:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So part of what I heard you say is that the the tools we, we went from, you know, having, primitive CAD tools, you know, where you could draw things, instead of on paper electronically to these, vertical sized tools that were specific for, for plants and for and for piping and, and then, you know, engineering tools that further layered on top of that, like Caesar, that will do the stress analysis just just so that, you know, people who may not be familiar with the tools, understand them.

Rakesh:
Could you walk through what these what the you mentioned s 3D Caesar or what these tool, what purpose they serve in the lifecycle of, the design of a plant.

John-Paul:
So, a chemical plant will start off as, of what’s called a block diagram, which will be, on a piece of paper or on a, on a, on a screen. It’ll be a square with and it’ll say, distillation column or or reactor and, and in the pipes and processes won’t be shown geometrically. It’ll just be shown as a single line.

John-Paul:
Now that’s the early stages. And, chemical engineer.

Rakesh:
Right. I was going to say that comes from the chemical engineer.

John-Paul:
That’ll come from a very senior chemical engineer and a business guy. Okay. So and then and, project manager, some money guy, and then, the chemical engineering team will then put together a ND so a P and ID is still, relativistic, a non geometric diagram of how the, chemicals will flow. Right. So the fluids will flow whether they’re, solids or liquids.

John-Paul:
And some companies include the control logic in that. And I think we don’t, we don’t at all. But and then from the NID that’ll go to a front end loading team and front end loading team will be, designers, a mix of designers and engineers who will they’ll create, like a, geometric model, and that will be.

John-Paul:
And, Oh, I think there’s another interesting piece of software that actually will turn, will turn the PID into the early geometric model, and then that can get exported to, as 3D as 3D is a is a, it’s, it’s a database that includes elements about geometric shape. So it doesn’t do any engineering, but it becomes, a way for a designer to put things in space, and things will take up space and they’ll have mass and they’ll have other properties.

John-Paul:
Right. So those properties, we take these bits and, and boops of information and then and once it turns into a geometry that can be represented on a picture that starts bringing things, you know, more realistically to the, to the human eye. Right? So then at that point we’ll bring in people with experience running a chemical plant. They’ll say, okay, well, this needs to move over here or over there.

John-Paul:
That information can get downloaded directly into the engineering tools, which, the translation each step along the way of the translation is a is a challenge, right? So, and actually, I could go on volumes about that challenge, but, but yeah, the, the easier to have the different databases, that hold the information, the easier it is to transfer them between the different analysis tools.

John-Paul:
We need less and less people. We need smarter people. We can do more with less. We’re more efficient or more responsive.

Rakesh:
Yeah. So timelines get compressed.

John-Paul:
Timelines get compressed. And a lot of in my early days of the career, I didn’t understand why that timeline was so important. And during a project, the money is sitting somewhere, not being used. Right? The promises aren’t. Aren’t the promises of that dollar bill and the bank account aren’t being met. We want to put that money to work.

John-Paul:
We need to make jobs. We need to make products.

Rakesh:
Could you give an example of the timelines getting compressed? Like how long would, certain things take from that block diagram to the need to the, to, you know, a physical representation of the plant and the engineering calculations, you know, before versus now with this, you know, integrated workflow, that’s data based and, you know, tied together.

John-Paul:
There’s a lot of variables in that. No two chemical plants are the.

Rakesh:
Exactly. It all depends.

John-Paul:
No two teams are the same. Because of course, in my scope, I have both the Dow Chemical Company and some of our business partners like Flora, WorleyParsons. I’ve got it formally Mustang. I would say, just in my life, which a little less than 25 years, a little less than a generation, I would say we’ve shaved 40% off of the cycle time.

Rakesh:
It takes nearly half the time to do something versus before.

John-Paul:
Yes, yes, with the same technical expertise and organization, because the technical expertise is still incredibly important. So as the tools get more.

Rakesh:
Complex, the judgment that.

John-Paul:
The judgment gets more. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, communication training experience. Right. These these get really important.

Rakesh:
Yeah. Yeah. Well garbage in, garbage out.

John-Paul:
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and not just that. Well the so the the software tools and the, the database, the databases and the interfaces between the databases are excellent. But, the humans, the humans might be used with one or have an experience with one system that may treat one bit of information differently than another. Right. So what might be a boolean or a simple number and one system might be a number with precision and another system or arrange.

John-Paul:
And that may sound that may sound unnecessarily technical, but it’s important. Yeah.

Rakesh:
Yeah definitely. Because because you’re feeding the data between the systems. And that’s probably where the problems occur.

John-Paul:
I have an example that’s kind of funny. All right. But I’m doing work with a design group and there’s a piping lead and the meeting of the project and totally gone off the rails was over millions of dollars over over budget. And, this particular group was doing the detailed design. So the geometric side, they were taking the, the ID and making a geometric model.

John-Paul:
Yep. A different group with a different organization. Different company entirely had done the engineering. And at one point in the engineering, one of the things they have to do is I have to tell me the temperature that’s going to be in the pipe, the temperature of the fluid in the pipe, the, detailed design lead. We’re saying, well, the I’d question the design temperature of the pipe.

John-Paul:
He said, well, the design temperature is the design temperature, and that sounds great. If you’re a programmer and you have a variable called design temperature. But in the pragmatic real world, the design temperature is not the design temperature. And this was a hard lesson for me to learn, because the design temperature from a chemical engineering perspective is it can be, well, what if three things go bad all at the same time, and something terrible once every 2000 years we could reach 400°F.

John-Paul:
But in reality, from the mechanical engineer, from the piping side, I’m my design temperature is something that’s going to happen every day and not happen every day, for 20 years. And that’s a different story, right? Fatigue. Life is something different. So the design temperature is not always the design temperature. And in fact, the the process engineer clearly had no pragmatic idea of how to build a chemical plant.

John-Paul:
I was so afraid of some strange thing happening, a meteorite hitting that, he told us to design a chemical plant that would have to survive. It was literally more energy than a nuclear blast. I said, okay, we we have to reconsider 100 degrees or.

Rakesh:
Right.

John-Paul:
And, and and if you’re if you’re thinking zero risk, if you’re thinking in a, in a programmer database, that’s not the same thing because in their, in their database, in their, in their network design temperatures, design temperature and in reality the mechanical side, I want something that can survive 7000 cycles.

Rakesh:
Yeah. What are the downsides to technology being such a, such a central part of the of the process. Time schedules are compressed. You can you can, be more responsive to to customers, be more efficient, get more done with less.

John-Paul:
And one aspect of my role I am creating pipe specifications for every chemical plant at the Dow Company, for everything, for FRP, for for for steel pipe, and for whether it’s an electronics plant in Korea or whether it’s a well known refinery in Texas. The tool to communicate these things is limited, right? We have computer, we have technical limitations.

John-Paul:
On the mechanical engineering side. We have technical limitations on the technical tool, on the on the on the software side, there are times when the tail wagging the dog and we make decisions that cost us money to make sure that our computer tools are matching the, you know, that our computer tools are working properly. Even though we don’t need this expense and our mechanical engineering lives, and there are some risks that how we communicate those things and within the limitations of the tool will be misunderstood.

John-Paul:
Maybe not by our culture, but by different cultures.

Rakesh:
Yeah. By the way, I, I’ve been using the self-driving, feature on the Tesla only for the last 2 or 3 years. They made it a subscription. I was unwilling to pay, whatever, $10,000 to, to get it, you know, forever. But, when they started charging $100 a month, I was like, yeah, I’ll do that.

Rakesh:
And I’ve realized it’s not. It’s not that you. It’s a new kind of driving.

John-Paul:
It is.

Rakesh:
Right. It’s, there’s sort of, a lower awareness and, and focus that you can, you can have on driving, but but it’s not no focus.

John-Paul:
There’s a, there’s an interesting book and I can’t remember the name of it. Sitting on my bookshelf is talking about engineering through the ages and it used to be that cloth was woven by hand, and, when the spinning wheel, I think it was a spinning wheel, came around. It was it was a lot more mechanically assisted.

John-Paul:
There was a huge, there’s actually written stories about people said it was terrible because this new, you know, equipment assisted cloth was too coarse and unpleasant and not helpful. And I wouldn’t possibly think of, going home and weaving some fibers together for the next shirt I’m going to make. So, yeah, things are changing.

Rakesh:
It’s inevitable that they’re the advance of the technology is certainly inevitable.

John-Paul:
Well, it’s a truism that we’re afraid of change, and there’s reason to be afraid of change. The existing system is known. There’s so many unintended consequences of changing things, right, that we in any change, especially when we’re talking about, you know, our, our companies and our families and our safety, any change should be carefully scrutinized and should there should be a reason for change.

John-Paul:
And so people are naturally afraid of change because of the unknown. But there’s a place for it. And I think, I think you’ve nailed a lot of great topics on it.

Rakesh:
I just became CEO of Piping Technology ten months ago.

John-Paul:
Congratulations. Yeah.

Rakesh:
Thank you. It’s a.

John-Paul:
Great group.

Rakesh:
Yeah. No, I love working. Working in the in the company. It’s, it’s a really wonderful culture, and I’ve been a part of it since I was a kid. I grew up in the business, and, so it’s been a lot of fun for me to come back to the company. Now, I come from the, you know, having spent also a lot of time in the software industry.

Rakesh:
And, here’s a question I want to ask you, do you on the topic of change, do you think that in, let’s just broadly call it the industrial space that we are, more change averse than I’d say other other industries are, and that we could be more, you know, embracing of change.

John-Paul:
I think.

Rakesh:
Are we slow? Are we slower to change?

John-Paul:
There are systemic reasons why we’re slower to change. We’re still on the, the imperial system of measurement because we’re tools. So we have tools. We have existing infrastructure that, like I said, it’s not sexy to to go change out all your wrenches. Right? So, we have infrastructure already, and, we have risk. We have greater risk.

John-Paul:
We have lower tolerance of risk. There’s, like I said, I’m okay with risk in social environment, but when we’re talking about, you know, gallons of of carcinogenic fluids, I’m not going to take a risk easily. Yeah. So I think it’s good. We need to be that the HBO did a great series on, Chernobyl. And they did a great job describing how, the, the thinking, like, party thinking without pragmatic feedback could lead to, to terrible stuff.

John-Paul:
So I think it’s related to that.

Rakesh:
Yeah. So it’s, it’s matched to the, you know, the, you know, what’s at risk.

John-Paul:
Yes, absolutely.

Rakesh:
Yeah. So piping technology, you, you’ve, you’ve been a partner of ours on, you know, over many years. I would love to hear, you know, if you have any stories of where, you know, piping technology has been a good partner to you.

John-Paul:
Well, I mean, I definitely have several. I have some really boring ones. I can say that, you know, in the entire time that I have been a door, I have predictable, reliable, good cost piping supports, piping shoes. Understandable, understandable technical guidance. So piping technology is a name I could trust, right. Well, while, while any individual component of a chemical plant is cheap, of an industrial facility might be tiny, the impact of losing it can be significant.

John-Paul:
Everything has to work, and everything works. From from piping technology. I get chemical plants to get built when we expect them to get built. And that work. I gotta say, I have really loved working with your U.S bellows subsidiary, which is I’ve. I’ve loved watching them develop their ability and their responsiveness has been great. At one point I had, a facility in Texas City fail.

John-Paul:
And part of the reason it failed is, somebody had designed a strange piece of pipe that really, didn’t really didn’t fit, but we could fix it with, with a custom, support I needed. You know, part of it had to slide. Part of it had to be fairly precision. And, I had called, Mr. David Baker, and I said, listen, I’ve got a weird one for you, and it’s Friday at 6 p.m..

John-Paul:
And he said, well, you know, send me a drawing week. And I said, no, no, no, no, I need this plant up right now. It’s, you know, quite a bit of money. And, he, he your team did it right. I was able to show up on site with a drawing. Got to watch them make it, and we got to really custom part quick, so.

Rakesh:
Yeah, I think I think we’re actually, more piping technology than any other moment in moments like that where somebody has, like what you said, which is like, we have this weird problem, that’s that’s when the organization sits up and says, all right, this, you know, this is our moment, right?

John-Paul:
Right. But and, and and somehow you’re able to do both. And I can appreciate that because there are times where I need I want it off the shelf. I need some predictable thing that you built three months ago that you’ve been building for, for generation, and that I was able to plan last year to have this here at this time.

John-Paul:
Right. And predictable. Right, that there’s, there’s, I don’t like surprises. And I definitely don’t like surprises when somebody else’s. I’m spending somebody else’s money, and I. Yeah, I consistently get a reliable partner with Pdmp.

Rakesh:
Yeah. I’m really glad you mentioned, us bellows. Us bellows. Is this, rocket ship within the, within the company that’s been growing year after year? I was involved myself in a lot of the acquisitions that led to, you know, all the different, you know, several. We acquired several expansion joint manufacturers that, you know, have made us bellows what it is today.

Rakesh:
But, but, yeah, it’s a it’s a growing piece of our, of our business. So it’s great that you’ve, you’ve worked with them. Thank you so much. This has been, a lot of fun. And you’re here. You’re a fascinating person. And, I think our audience is going to love hearing, hearing, from all of your experience.

John-Paul:
Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Yeah.

Rakesh:
Awesome.