EECO Asks Why Podcast

089. Hero - K Sorsenginh, Solution Architect at EECO

March 18, 2021 Electrical Equipment Company Season 3
EECO Asks Why Podcast
089. Hero - K Sorsenginh, Solution Architect at EECO
Show Notes Transcript

K Sorsenginh has a powerful story and shares his journey as one of our heroes. K has supported industry in many ways and has worked in the pharmaceutical industry and is skilled in many areas such as welding, HVAC and mechanical services.  As a solution architect he is on the front lines and living out Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing every day for the clients he supports. He's constantly building new  solutions that help industrial end users grow.

He has great advice for young engineers and encourages listening with intent to grow.  If you focus on learning what people are actually saying you'll be in a better position to help them achieve their overall goal.  He gets great joy by solving problems for others and helping them realize the power of technology in real world applications.

K is a busy guy away from work and has many hobbies that keep him busy.  He loves working on import race cars, snowboarding, camping and fishing just to name a few.  But not just regular fishing - K really enjoys ice fishing and loves to experience that whenever he can. 

This is a powerful conversation from a leader in industry and we are proud to have him as part of the EECO Team.  K is a visionary leader and you'll quickly hear why he is one of our heroes!

Guest: K Sorsenginh Solution Architect at EECO
Host: Chris Grainger
Executive Producer: Adam Sheets

Chris: 00:00

Welcome to EECO Ask Why. A podcast that dives into industrial manufacturing topics and spotlights the heroes to keep America running. I'm your host, Chris Grainger, and on this podcast, we do not cover the latest features, benefits on products that come to market. Instead, we focused on advice and insight from a top minds of industry because people and ideas will be how America remains number one in manufacturing in the world. 

All right. So welcome to this episode ofEECO Asks Why. So these were, are the episodes that we enjoy the most, where we sit down with our heroes and we get to know a little bit more about them. With us today we have our Solution Architect who is Kansas source, and then we.

Typically go by K. And we're love to sit down and just talk and learn a little bit more about K and his role, the things that he's challenged with, here at EECO and things that he's seen in his past. So K, just to kick us off, tell us a little bit about your journey to the role that you're in right now.

K: 01:05

Hi, Chris, and thank you. So as you mentioned, I am the Solution Architect here at Electrical Equipment Company. Also known as EECO. I've been here with the company for almost three years, almost my anniversary. So I'll be expecting some prizes and gifts and stuff like that. 

Chris: 01:24

Its in the mail. 

K: 01:24

Okay. Okay. But yeah, prior to that, I was working as a Controls Engineer. As also EECOs customer. This, this role was presented to me by our Product Manager, and, and of course he was telling me about the project that our COO had. The idea of helping people and it just struck an interest right away. Right. 

Prior to that, I was doing maintenance engineering at a pharmaceutical company. Just about  everywhere. My past life, I was, a welder and the life before that I did HVHC and then my life before that, I was working on cars. I still do that's my hobby, but a lot of different background in terms of what I do and how I got here.

Chris: 02:22

That's pretty cool. K. So you spent a lot of time out in the industry, working directly with engineers and users helping them. What do you see as some of the greatest challenges that industry has over the next five years? 

K: 02:37

A lot of it is getting their plants modernize for what's coming. Know, it could be anything from a product to their network infrastructure. It could be as simple as planning, right? Assessing their current systems. Plants aren't equipped with staff engineers and. A large group, like they are back in the days. So having the bandwidth and resource to go do these types of studies or cataloguing, or just other resources has been the biggest challenge I've seen out in the field.

Chris: 03:23

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm sure you've had a lot of mentors that you've worked with over the years. What's a piece of advice you or someone would have told you when you entered this industry, years ago? 

K: 03:40

Don't go into this industry and go be a doctor or something, or follow your dream, go be a pilot. But no, I've had some real good mentors from my past experience. Anything from teaching you, right? The scoring you it's the school of hard knocks. Learning by doing. I was taught to never quit learning. That's the biggest thing that I've taken. Never stopped learning, never you know, more than the rest.

But one of the things that I wish they would have told me was, the, and they may not have know the vast and diverse world that's out there to prepare for that. And again, a lot of my mentors were a little bit more old fashioned, so I don't think they had the insight into what the future was bringing. But had, being capable of going back to mentor my own self was just prepared to expand more than just focusing on a single item. To, to, to really fully understand that everything is connected. 

Chris: 05:03

Right, you know, part of the reason we do EECO Asks Why is, is to just build community and to bring hope to a lot of our listeners. A lot of our listeners are working in the industrial plants that we serve when they hear the, you have an interesting title, your title is Solution Architect.

Sounds really cool. So if, if you were to give that young engineer, he, or she may be out there listening to this podcast right now and they want to pursue a career like yours. They want to be, the next Solution  Architect out there in industry. What advice would you give them? 

K: 05:44

I would say listen. Because when you're listening, instead of talking, you get more out of everything. We can process things a little bit better and have a better understanding. A lot of times we're quick to jump. As soon as we hear something we jumped and not fully understanding what the application is or what the overall goal is, right.

Or what that person is trying to convey to us. So if you're out there listening, I would definitely say, work on that inter personal communication skill. Make sure you fully understand what your peer, your coworker or your boss is asking you before being impulsive and moving in a direction that's not really what they really wanted. 

Chris: 06:37

Right. That's very good. So from a training standpoint too, to be a Solution Architect now, what does that training look like? Take to get you to the point that you are today? 

K: 06:49

You know, when you're looking Solution Architect up online, it deals a lot with network. That's really where the term came from, where you're building out designing network infrastructure. My role is a little bit different in terms of not only is it network related where we're building actual solutions for everyday customers. And what that entails is keeping up with technology, just like our current customer base now, unless they're actually going out, looking for a specific device, they may not know newer technology have emerged. 

So part of my job is to take that initiative to actually go digging in search and web searching white paper on understanding what the next big trend is coming out. Looking at the overall market. We'll determine which path is going to be the next biggest hit.

Chris: 07:58

You're a pretty passionate guy. So in your day to day, when do you feel the most fulfilled or the happiest? 

K: 08:06

Chris, this,  this is, one of the  biggest thing that keeps me drive is when I'm able to accomplish a task that's been set and helping a customer. It's really the most satisfying thing that I could go home and be proud.

You know, it may kick my ass for two weeks, but if I could accomplish a certain task that me, myself, or a customer has set out, it's one of the best feeling in the world. 

Chris: 08:39

Makes you feel good. 

K: 08:40

Oh yeah. 

Chris: 08:41

Do you have any stories? 

K: 08:43

Yeah. You know, there's a lot of things out there the field that I go through day to day basis. I lacked a lot of knowledge in different aspects of different components, right?

And this is one of the challenges where I'm saying you gotta keep up with technology, me and a customer we've installed a couple of power monitoring equipment. And we're having connection loss. So what we did was we pulled out all the tools and went through every single component that we could. In the process that we should.

And we was able to find the bug that caused the communication loss. Had we not had the proper tools the insight, it had been a very difficult process to fund. So basically web connections to devices and components were dropping left and right. We utilize a, CA cable certification tool, DSX 8,000 made sure the cable end was good.

We did some scannings. We did some additional tests and work with their it folks. And everything's solved. The customer's happy. They're grateful that they utilize this new component. They're able to use the information to help their business process. 

Chris: 10:05

Wow. That's a great story, man. I bet that really made you just connected all the dots for you right there. Yeah. So what about projects for the future? What's what are you, what excites K? When he's looking to the future and the way things are changing. 

K: 10:23

So as we move forward with projects and stuff, you know, us here at EECO have defined specific projects that we're working on, focus on mainly helping customers. Right? One of the biggest thing is integration to different components. We liked build an up solutioning guides to help customer achieve that task without really putting a burden on them. 

For instance, we have a couple of solutions out now where we've got guides integrating Yaskawa VFDs in a Rockwell platform. Eaton power distribution components into your Rockwell platform.

We're working on some power monitoring. This is full large enterprise level items. Anything that can help a customer achieve their goal, their business objective. We look at the patterns and we'll determine what we can do internally to help them out. 

Chris: 11:29

That sounds like you got some neat things going you've, you know, I've been in some meetings with you lately where we've talked about augmented reality. Where do you see that fit net for industrials in the future?

K: 11:43

Augmented Reality for the industrial sector right now is somewhat at an infancy state. Now that being said, the technology has existed and are heavily invested in developing. If you're aware of, simple things such as the Pokemon game. That is a augmented reality type of application. So you're seeing things that are not really there.

In the industrial sector, I see it really moving forward because it allows technicians engineers just to walk out there with either a phone or a tablet, or even a halo glass, augmented reality glass, and look at a machine or an asset. Scan it and bring up virtually all the information that they ever needed.

How does this  help out? it frees up your hand, right? So you may look at a tablet. You don't have to have a clipboard and a pencil, just click away. You know, it improves the process times, but it also gives you real time data and to determine if that equipment is actually functioning up to specification or not.

Additionally, what we have seen is augmented reality in the industrial sector is reporting. We're able to get information to and from a whole lot quicker. Instead of a long paper trail. Okay. Because if we walk up and scan, say a QR code, everything is there. We can access everything. Documentations and all that information are sent directly to the server. Where everything gets processed. Yeah. Augmented reality in the industrial sector, you can almost, it's a best bet to believe it's coming. 

Chris: 13:49

Yeah. We've even seen applications where users were using it for maintenance, right? 

K: 13:56

Correct. Yeah. 

Chris: 13:57

That looks pretty neat. So you walk up to this piece of equipment and kind of gives you the breakdown of this is the tools you need. This is this bolt here, this bolt there, right from that standpoint. 

K: 14:09

Yeah. So different application we'll have different types of functionality, obviously. If you're looking at military grade stuff, you have exploded views of all parts break down, and that will trickle down into the industrial sector.

But main thing, is, you know, all the information is there, right there visually. On the spot without having to go and search for these types of information from six different systems. It makes the maintenance process. So if it's a daily checklist and instead of having 99 items to check off, walk up, scan it, everything looks good.

Go to the next. So for instance, a typical eight hour days of, of a manual route. May end up being two hours. So they got freed up six hours ago, do whatever they need to do. 

Chris: 15:05

Yeah. Okay. let's talk about you a little bit. So give us some hobbies. What do you enjoy to do outside of, being a genius Solution Architect?

K: 15:18

I like fishing. I like working on cars. Okay. Two weeks ago, I'm an outdoors guy. I was just got back from a snowboard. 

Chris: 15:28

And so is there anything you don't do? K 

K: 15:32

There's, there's quite a bit of stuff, but, I, I tend to be pretty active out there. and then 

Chris: 15:38

What kind of cars you work in?

K: 15:39

All? I do a lot of import racing. 

Chris: 15:42

Okay. 

K: 15:43

So a modified imports for a higher horsepower and embarrass those, us muscle cars, those that are listening, drag race, and then track and track. 

Chris: 15:56

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Like a road course?

K: 16:00

Road course. Yeah. 

That's pretty cool, man. 

Yeah. Fishing is my other thing, so 

Chris: 16:06

That you do ice fishing too, right?

K: 16:08

Do you guys fish and Lake. Yeah. Try to experience it all. 

Chris: 16:12

Experience at all. That is awesome, man. 

K: 16:14

Life is short, right? They experienced it all. 

Chris: 16:18

Anything outside. It sounds like you're pretty happy. Yeah. 

K: 16:21

Like I said, the role that I'm in allows me to be happy at work. And when I get home, I'm able to be happy and do what I like doing 

Chris: 16:31

Well that's great, man. That's great. So if you could take a step into my shoes, what would you have asked yourself that I haven't? 

K: 16:41

It's kind late. Are you hungry because I'm buying lunch or how does that sound? No, I think you covered everything. One of the things I'd probably asked if I was you as a it being a part of, Electrical Equipment Company, how is that affecting the job process what we're  doing well, and I could go ahead and say that it's a close knit, tight family, feeling. So it makes coming to work fun. 

Chris: 17:10

That's great, man. That's great. Do you listen to any podcasts?

K: 17:15

I have not because I'm  overworked. 

Chris: 17:21

And, I'm going back to your previous statement about the good work family. So we're not going to worry about it. 

K: 17:26

Okay. 

Chris: 17:28

How about books? Reading good books lately. 

K: 17:31

No. The only books that I'm able to read is the, eight, 900 page instruction manuals that, that I didn't translate down to the 20.

Chris: 17:42

The people can actually use it. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. it's been a pleasure. Other than who do you think we should interview? Who else would you like to see us interview here on EECO Asks Why? 

K: 17:56

You know, EECO Ask Why, because the program that I'm in now was derived from this mastermind, I'd say mr. Jeff Knight would be a good candidate. 

Chris: 18:07

All right. Yeah, we do have w we're trying to get on his schedule. Okay. And we'll make that happen. 

Great. So that will probably the first Pat prod wasn't podcast and I would listen to because it's very, a very interesting subject. 

Very good. Okay. Thank you so much for your time for all your insight. This has been a pleasure. Thank you, sir. 

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