This week’s spotlight explores SkySpecs’ solution to the wind industry’s repair vendor management crisis with executives Dan Partin and Noah Fabes. The discussion covers how SkySpecs helps wind farm operators handle vendor shortages and quality control through their comprehensive vendor management services, which includes vetting contractors, overseeing repairs, and streamlining project management.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on FacebookYouTubeTwitterLinkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com
Skyspecs – https://skyspecs.com

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. We’re shining a spotlight on a critical issue that’s causing headaches for wind farm operators across the globe, repair vendor management. So you imagine this scenario, your wind farm is running smoothly when suddenly a turbine goes offline.

You need repairs fast, but your usual vendor is book solid, and we’ve heard this all year. Days turn into weeks and you’re losing money with every passing hour. Unfortunately, this isn’t a hypothetical or a recent industry survey revealed a starling statistic. 40% of operators frequently face delays or increased costs due to repair vendor storage.

During peak periods, like the summertime of the United States. In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into this repair vendor crisis, walks for why there aren’t enough technicians to meet the man, how this shortage is impacting wind farm operations, and most importantly. What can be done about it? To help us unpack this complex issue, we’re joined by two experts from SkySpecs.

Our first guest is Dan Parton, VP of Strategic Account Management at SkySpecs. Dan brings extensive experience in the wind industry, Dan Parton Dan Parton focusing on developing and maintaining clean air. Key client relationships, his role is crucial in understanding and addressing the complex challenges faced by wind farm operators, particularly in the area of repair vendor management.

And our second guest is Noah Faves, senior product Manager at SkySpecs. Noah’s focused on workflow optimization and team leadership plays a key role in developing solutions that streamline and repair vendor management processes. His experience in creating robust solutions for previously unmet customer needs is particularly relevant to our discussion today.

Guys, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having us.

Noah Faves: Thank you.

Allen Hall: This is probably problem number one in the United States at the minute. I’m glad you guys are tackling it. Oh my gosh. What a disaster. There’s not enough technicians that are all tied up. If there are technicians. Somebody’s already locked him up months before, so you don’t even have access, forget about calling him because they’re not going to even pick up the phone.

This has led to a crisis, such that, I think Joel and I have seen this a couple of times this summer, where people, operations are starting to get a little bit desperate. And are bringing in crews that probably aren’t qualified to do the work that they’re supposed to do. Not to say they’re not technically capable.

They probably are technically capable. It’s all the periphery. Yeah. The PPE, showing up on time. All those things, booking their hours properly. That little stuff.

Joel Saxum: Would you run into, when you have that issue, you run into one of my biggest pet peeves in operations in general? And it’s the cost of poor quality.

Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Cost of poor quality can be put together as did they do a bad repair or something like that? Yeah. You got to go back and fix it. That’s a cost, but that’s easy to quantify. But cost of poor quality can also be like, they showed up with garbage trucks or something, and they were getting flat tires all the time because they had six ply tires or some really silly things, but it can, all of those issues can compound an already demanding problem.

Or, the biggest one we ran into this summer was people not using PPE. That’s just. Quite silly. So what that does is it gets you removed from site. That’s what’s gonna happen and even more of a reason to call you guys. So this is a new thing. This is something like as it sits usually you have wind turbine operator or ISP or someone looking into whatever their procurement department tells them and they may turn to procurement and say, procurement, any blades And procurement has found whoever’s going to be the cheapest or whoever has gone through their hurdles to get through their procurement system and say, Oh here’s four guys from these people.

They show up on site. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know, you don’t know what their background is, these kinds of things. There, there’s issues all the time with this. So there will, Is space, was space, you guys are starting to fill it right now, of someone to come in and be that middleman, be that not necessarily procurement, but someone that will vet people, someone that will find these, and you’re, what you’re doing is you’re just expanding on SkySpecs opportunities to partner and to be that close partner with your clients.

So how did the, this is a question I have, like, how does this conversation happen within SkySpecs of you know what we should do? We should do contractor management,

Dan Parton: how does that work? It’s a really interesting story, so I think it comes back to how we try to position ourselves in the industry and how we try to provide a platform that allows customers to have greater transparency and visibility into what’s going on at their wind farms.

And I love the idea of, loss of quality and tracking quality, because that’s what we’re trying to do. But what we discovered was you can build a platform, but you still need somebody to use it. And we found for a lot of our customers, they’re really lacking a lot of the time, effort, resources, really, to go in and Keep an eye on the vendors and really understand what’s happening out in the field.

And they were coming to us not asking not only can we help with their decision making and their prioritization, but can we also help with their management of some of these vendors and essentially, yeah, exactly. Can we outsource some of this to you because we really don’t have time to do it ourselves.

And it presented an interesting dilemma and opportunity for us. And we thought, that’s really interesting. Let’s give it a shot and I’ll see how we can do and let’s leverage some of our own tools, our expertise. And see if we can find areas where we can deliver value for those customers.

I think so far it’s been successful and we’ve been able to do that. We’ve grown and we’ve developed and we’ve identified ways where we can scale that effectively. It’s been a tremendous journey so far.

Allen Hall: What kind of pain have you seen for some of the people that call you up? What desperate situations have you been in?

Noah Faves: They’re usually mostly desperate situations, I would say. And in many cases oftentimes Maybe they are under an O& M service contract or something like that and have been struggling to get the level of transparency into how repair projects are going or repair’s not getting done at all.

And they come to us and ask for help.

Allen Hall: Is it just because they know something should be happening on these turbines, but it’s like day 30 out of the five day project? And they’re like, what’s going on?

Dan Parton: I think it’s it’s an interesting array of pain that you see. So I think a common one is just surprise damage on their blades.

They’re not really anticipating or budgeted for, and they’re scrambling at the mid season or end of year to find crews availability, as you mentioned earlier at the onset, that’s a big one. The, their usual crew is unavailable or the teams that they usually work with are unavailable.

Budgeting pain is a major one, obviously.

Noah Faves: Yeah, I’m looking for out of the box solutions on, potentially recurring defects and things like that.

Joel Saxum: Complex damages. Alan and I, we run into that quite often. We’re in the lightning world, right? That’s our main job. So when we talk to people, lightning is one of those things where That looked like a pinhole in the damage.

And then we started opening the blade up and all of a sudden we’re a hundred, 120, 000 in. That, that crew that’s there doing that repair, they may have actually been contracted to come and do six other cat three repairs. And now they’ve spent their whole budget on doing one, or a cat three, cat four, something of that sort.

Either way, those other repairs still need to get done, but now we need manpower. We need resources to get out there. The solution then can be, call you guys.

Allen Hall: What does that look like? I want to understand, when do I pick up the phone and call SkySpecs? Is it sort of Joel’s scenario of they just identified a Cat 5 when they thought there was a Cat 2 or 3?

Or is it, they have so much work and they just can’t find anybody competent to do it? Or is it both? I’m going to call them right now and say, Hey,

Joel Saxum: next spring we need this all done, figure it out for us. And

Dan Parton: What does that look like? When,

Allen Hall: what are people

Dan Parton: calling you for

Allen Hall: today?

Dan Parton: Ideally the earlier, the better, right?

That’s the project planning number one, right? The sooner you can get to her, the better that isn’t always feasible, obviously. And that’s part of the problem. I think. A common place where we interject is around the time the customer’s getting inspection results because often they’re finding that they’re struggling to prioritize with what to repair.

And if you come back and you get 100 Cat5s in your fleet and you have budget for 50, you have to start making hard decisions. And so one of the areas where we can interject is when that decision making process, we can help our customers. Prioritize within those 50 Cat5s that you have budget for what really needs to get done.

Maybe you can squeak in a few temporary repairs and a few other issues, but what, what can potentially wait and how long can it wait? So we can help in that decision making process early

Joel Saxum: on. Because at Skyspecs, as you guys grow the company, as you add more services, as you acquire companies, as you integrate solutions, you not only can be out there, Hey, we did your inspections.

This is what we found. Now you’ve got this much budget. These are the ones that we should look at. But then you talk to Cheryl and the rest of your blade team and say, Hey, take a look at these because we’ve got to optimize this. And the same time, Noah and I are looking for blade contractors to make sure we get these repairs done.

So you are starting to become a one stop shop for people to come and get things done.

Noah Faves: Yeah. I was just going to say, and it’s interesting to think about, the evolution of this, because you talked about the challenge with scarcity of techs and availability and how it’s all, it’s all tied together, right?

And. With our inspections business, and in many ways you can think about it we know, you can correct me if I’m wrong, perhaps 90 percent in North America of the repairs that need to be done or should be done. But then there’s a gap in for, owner operators to, secure enough budget early enough.

But in many ways when you look into the future like we could provide a level of transparency to service providers as well with the repairs that need to be done, which can then facilitate better planning and staffing on their end. Oh, hopefully. Alleviate some of that availability. Say

Joel Saxum: transparency and collaboration out loud to operators and they’re happy right now.

Dan Parton: I think that’s a really good point about that. It’s not just the owner operators that benefit from this, but I think that the service providers themselves. Yeah. They want to know how their crews are doing out in the field. And they appreciate it and benefit from getting the feedback. What technician is showing up without his PPE?

What technician is doing a poor job? So obviously they don’t necessarily want those folks in their crews. That reflects poorly on them in the end. So

Joel Saxum: are you guys getting that deep into it now? Or like surface level, it’s Hey, we can find you some people to do your work.

But are you getting that deep into where you’re doing the QA, QC, all field audits and all that kind of stuff of the repair?

Dan Parton: Yeah.

Joel Saxum: We have a pretty robust QC process. Oh, that’s fantastic.

Dan Parton: Yep.

Joel Saxum: So let me ask you another question about that then. Before you get to the idea where we’re doing field audits, QA, QC, these kind of things, you have to vet these contractors.

What does that process look like?

Noah Faves: Yeah, we have a pretty standard qualification process, so it was just a bit natural of an evolution for us to end up in repairmender management. Prior to that, we had a lot of established relationships with many customers who, And part of our service offering to them, we were doing some of this QA and QC work.

So we had a, a level of understanding around quality of workmanship from a lot of the service providers out there already. So that was one method in which we evaluated and vetted the service providers that, that we work with. But in addition to that, the rest of it is, it’s pretty standard, right?

We rely on feedback from customers that we have relationships with. We have a safety. Process that they have to adhere to. I’m not missing.

Dan Parton: I think you covered it. We’re able to take, because we talk to so many different customers, we can take a bit of a bird’s eye view of the industry and see what we’re hearing from various people where as, you know, within your four walls of any particular company, limited who you’re talking to your day to day.

So you guys end up

Joel Saxum: being basically the owner’s representative. Yeah, in a lot of those systems. In the oil and gas world we call it being the bird dog. You’re the one out there making sure, sniffing here and sniffing there, making sure everything is going well. Exactly. And I think there’s certain advantages to that for the speed of procurement as well.

You guys have been, to be a customer of that customer, you’ve been through their procurement process. So you know all the things, you know the insurance requirements, you know this, that, they must have.

Yeah.

Joel Saxum: So that leads me to another question, since you guys are, and maybe this is more of a contractual thing, but you’re not actually taking on any of the risk of the repair, correct?

In terms of the warranty or the, yeah. So if that contractor goes on site and like screws it up, that’s on the contractor, right? Or is that on, or you guys taking on that contractual risk?

Dan Parton: That would be on the contractor, but we’d be the ones responsible for managing that contract to get back out and get it addressed.

So we still are the bird dog or bird dog in that scenario. Yeah, the, we were in the process of standardizing the warranty negotiation process with our vendors as well. So we want to put in some more rigorous standards there and that’s going to be a negotiation that’s going to take some time.

Yeah. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that we’re We talked about earlier, the QC process goes to fruition. Hopefully you don’t end up in this situation, but obviously they do happen. But if there is an error and a mistake is made or workmanship has stopped itself, then we would be the ones to go back to the vendor and get them back out and have that taken care of.

Allen Hall: Okay. So is there a. Accumulation of data over time, for example, you’ve seen certain ISPs do repairs and you’re out inspecting it year one, year two after the repair, and you say, that company isn’t doing a really decent job, and we’re starting to see that blade damage issue reappear again because it wasn’t properly repaired, so we’re going to red flag that ISP.

To all of this, I think a lot of people are installing their repair documentation into Horizon. So now, if an ISP has come on site and said it’s going to take seven days, and they did it in seven days, and then you come back two years later, and yeah, that repair is still holding up, have you gathered that much information from all of the data that’s sitting in Horizon to then put an assessment on the ISPs?

These are A’s, these are B’s, these are C’s.

Noah Faves: Yeah, we have a, quite a large accumulation of data where you can start doing a bit of benchmarking and you’ve got a vendor scorecard that we use to evaluate. And I don’t, necessarily want to paint the picture like it’s, this one’s good, this one’s bad, but we can also look across their specialty and things like that to understand.

What I’m getting at

Allen Hall: is,

Noah Faves: yeah,

Allen Hall: there’s some companies that are good at blade repair, some are great at other things. Getting the right one on site is always critical. . Absolutely very c fixing blades, and

Dan Parton: we try to have those conversations with the ISPs themselves. We want to let them know how they’re doing, like where we’re seeing issues and stuff like that.

That’s great. Communication, transportation, like transparency. Yeah. Because they want to improve too, right? They want. Exactly. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Who’s the blade repair? ISP of the year. I don’t know if we can play a favorite song. Yeah, exactly. You won’t get that on LS.

Allen Hall: But as the ISPs get bigger, that becomes even more important because I think at times they have so many crews out on site, they can’t manage everybody everywhere. They need a little bit of feedback. It’s almost like the AAA guidebook or the Yelp of ISPs in a sense that I’m getting an independent assessment of what, My crew has done.

Yeah. It may be a great review. Maybe five stars. Maybe it’s a two star, but at least I know that I have a little bit of control back in it. And we’ve talked to a number of ISPs. They are super sensitive to what. The client thinks of them and whether they, if their technicians have done a good job or not, that is a huge criteria on the success of those companies.

So much

Dan Parton: is reputation based for sure.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that concept of a bird dog, that’s very common in most industrial places, right? Like you’re in aerospace or you’ve worked in aerospace your whole career. There’s usually If some big company is buying a hundred planes from Boeing, they’re going to send a rep to that factory.

100%. To QC the whole thing, because they’re like, we’re paying for these, we want to make sure it’s done well. You guys, that’s not done in wind.

Allen Hall: In some aspects.

Joel Saxum: In some aspects. But it is, it’s also intrinsically difficult as well, right? Like it’s hard to have a bird dog up hanging on ropes with the team that’s doing repairs.

Out in the field, yeah.

Dan Parton: But because you guys You’re looking at a report. Yeah, but

Joel Saxum: because you guys are SkySpecs, not only do you have the ability of cataloging everything properly so you can review it, but you’re also doing inspection. You’re like, it’s the full you’re completing the full circle, with the only thing you’re not doing is mixing resin and glass.

And

Allen Hall: that’s what it comes down to right now. And I, one of the pieces that I wanted to get at is the scheduling part. I think, how much scheduling help do operators need right now? How much of the phone calls is, hey, you may need somebody out here in October, That started in March, I assume.

Dan Parton: Yeah it varies a lot.

I think, size of the owner makes a big difference in how complicated their procurement process is. Yes. Some of them could turn around and hire a new crew they’ve never worked with before in a week’s notice and some of them you need six months to a year of lead time to get through a procurement and.

And the latter, I think we can help there, because obviously we, we are an approved vendor if we’re, if there already are. Yeah. So we’re guiding you. Yeah. So we, yeah, we can be the sub, right? So we’re like the general contractor to subcontractor. So because we’re approved.

Yeah.

Dan Parton: We can work with what vendors we’ve approved within reason, depends on how it all works contractually.

Joel Saxum: So this is an industry, general industry, no, you’re, okay, you’re working with XYZ wind operator. And they’re a customer of you for inspections and maybe CMS, who we talked with Alan Larson earlier. And now they’re a customer of Noah and Dan’s professional services or whatever, so they’re working there. And so you’re making this, and this is a, maybe we don’t put this in an ad, but you’re making revenue off of them through your professional services. Are you also making revenue off of the ISPs? As far as helping them get through procurement and all of that kind of stuff.

Because you’re doing a service for them as well. No, we’re not charging the ISPCA.

Allen Hall: Okay. So you’re basically navigating through the procurement systems at the operators. And man, some of those procurement systems are, in my opinion, difficult.

Dan Parton: Not necessarily. It depends on the arrangement. I know I can speak to this a little bit more.

So some customers don’t require the if we’re a subcontractor, we’ll have a, I don’t want to get too much into the contractual T’s and C’s and stuff like here, but, if we have a MSA in place to the customer that allows us to subcontract in certain instances, then we Those vendors may not need to go through the procurement process with the end customer at all because we are, they’re, we are hiring them directly.

So that gives us the benefits. So that’s, we’ve become like the top of the funnel. Where we have 10, 15 vendors that we can work with. The customer might only have us and maybe one or two others, but we have access to a wider library of vendors we can use because we’re allowed to subcontract with them.

Joel Saxum: And are you doing, of course you’re doing blade repair services, but are you doing torque and tensioning

Dan Parton: service,

Joel Saxum: everything?

Dan Parton: Right now, just blades. Okay. Because that’s where a lot of our expertise and our data and background is in. Yeah, it gets back to the inspections and the platform and everything like that.

Yeah, that’s where we have our. A cool competency is really that’s not to say we want to explore these things in the future. If customers come asking, we’re always curious, we’ll try. How does this

Allen Hall: work if I’m a customer of yours today and I want to look at vendor management? Am I doing that through Horizon?

Is does that start when I just get that’s pretty inspection sequence of images and the categorizations and this is what you’re looking up, looking forward to in terms of a repair campaign? Is that when I trigger this button that says, I’m calling Noah? Yeah.

Dan Parton: Do you want to

Allen Hall: go? And I’m setting up a video call and figuring out like what are next steps?

Is that how it works?

Noah Faves: Yeah. And that’s basically the process. Okay. You hit on something good, right? Like one thing that I think is important to call out is that since we mean for all intents and purposes, we lack like the boots on the ground management when these projects are going on.

For us, like we’re managing basically the entire process of the repair execution. In the Horizon platform, right? And so we pay, super close attention to the day-to-day operations, work logs and things like that, all, all through the platform. And it’s really great because then we can give an increased level of transparency and visibility into how projects are tracking close to real time for the customers that we work with.

But to answer your question, like more directly, that’s typically how they engage with us. Engage with us. Get the inspection results and many of the many of our customers who transitioned into these under management services have usually been a service customer in another capacity.

So maybe they’re already getting support with. From, the shareholds who are doing, looking at their inspection results, providing some recommendations, maybe doing some budgeting and things like that. And usually that is the evolution then into asking me or Dan about,

Dan Parton: that’s a good point.

So a lot of what we, a lot of the services we provide as part of managing repairs, we also provide without actually hiring the vendors. So we can do, 80 percent for some customers and then they still go out and hire the vendor themselves. Yeah. That’s it’s just the added step for some that they just want really a white glove treatment or don’t have the resources to hire a vendor or whatever those kind of cases may be.

Allen Hall: So you have a sense because you’re taking all the inspection photos who’s likely to call. Do you anticipate that a little bit? Like you, you just did a drone inspection on a full site and

Joel Saxum: boy, you just got hammered. And you send them the email, your inspections are done, and by the way, you should call us.

Dan Parton: They get a critical notification email, just a standard process. Now, if there’s something that’s, this turbine needs to go offline immediately, that way it’s going to go. But no we’re not to the point where we’re so predictive that we’re anticipating that, that, just, yeah, hopefully someday we can be there soon, but,

Joel Saxum: And I’d like to dial it back a second to something you said. Where, are we now referring to all the Blades experts as the Sheryls? We do it within our four walls.

Allen Hall: Yeah, exactly. So how does an existing customer integrate the vendor management aspect? What does that look like? What do they do? If they’re not using you already to do that, how do they trigger it?

How do they turn that on? Phone call. Basically con, a conversation did happen in a CP or something. They’re

Dan Parton: usually already a customer in some capacity, so often it is like each other Hey, we need help. Yes, like help, but we weren’t anticipating XYI guess the problems are like, yes, like we’re the major problems.

We ran into this major problem and we don’t know how to handle it. We heard you guys might

Joel Saxum: be able to help

Dan Parton: us out. And that’s, it’s often the conversation ready like that. What

Allen Hall: percentage of customers have asked for vendor management? I wouldn’t, I’m thinking big numbers here because it’s knowing some of them that are customers of yours.

I can see them activating

Joel Saxum: this. Even if I was an engineering team that felt decently staffed, it would be such a nice thing to outsource.

Dan Parton: That’s, yeah, that’s actually an interesting point too, because I think there’s a question like, do you have the resources to do it? And there’s another question of, is it a good use of your resources to have them spending time looking through repair reports or whatever?

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That’s another common topic too. Far as like percentages, I don’t know that venture, but I,

Noah Faves: And have a better guess.

Dan Parton: Yeah, maybe 15 to 20 percent of our customers do something like this.

Allen Hall: That seems low to me because I would always want to have that emergency button there.

And I will always want to have you queue it up.

Dan Parton: Yeah. It’s relatively new for us. So we started it like, we started this about two years ago. Yeah. With the, that kind of scenario where the customers came to us and asked us this wasn’t something we really set out to do initially and it came up.

And then since then, we’ve decided it is something we want to lean into. We have made a focus in this past year, really scaled it tremendously into

Joel Saxum: its own

Dan Parton: product line. Yeah. So it’s been about, 18 months of really doing it. So it’s early.

Joel Saxum: This is one thing I’ve noticed about SkySpecs.

So like you guys know the conversation about SkySpecs and generally industry is they’ve got a lot of investment, acquired some companies. They’ve got all kinds of different things, but you guys are constantly listening to the market, right? Like you said, you didn’t go out to do primary market research on this new solution.

It was just like someone came with an idea and you guys developed the whole product line out of it to help the industry. Because at the end of the day, there’s only so many turbines installed in the field. And to optimize what we can do with them to optimize this process in the field, you guys are coming up with solutions back here as well.

Dan Parton: Yep, absolutely. Part of the reason I love working in the industry, honestly it’s the Wild West and there’s just so many unique and interesting problems that are out there to be solved. And there’s a million more that we could do if we’d love to be able to try if we had resources.

It’s gonna grow.

Allen Hall: So what are the outcomes with some of your existing clients? What have they seen over the last year or so as you’ve been doing vendor management? What are some of the success stories

Dan Parton: there? Do you want to speak to the statistics you’re wearing a little bit?

Noah Faves: Yeah, I’ll throw some so one of the things that we really pride ourselves in, which I was talking about just a bit earlier, is just that proactive project management through the Horizon platform. And so we’ve been able to save some of our customers. Costs through providing a level of like accountability to service providers.

So like advocating for credits and things like that. So we’ve been able to save them money there. Other other ways that we’ve helped our customers we’ve worked to develop temporary repair plan strategies to get turbines back on, online faster, which has resulted in cost savings.

Same with even going so far as, in some cases doing actual repair designs to try and, mitigate against some issues returning. So

Joel Saxum: you guys are doing engineering repair

Noah Faves: design

Joel Saxum: as well? Yes. In some instances, yeah. Yeah,

Noah Faves: in some instances. Yeah. So I think all of those are related to cost savings.

In addition, I think another area of value that we provide, and we talked a little bit about this earlier, but oftentimes there’s this theme that the the the lowest bidder wins the work, right? And I think it’s a common pitfall to, that many owner operators fall into. So like one thing that we really pride ourselves in is providing owner operators with realistic.

Estimates on the cost of repairs that helps with better cost management throughout the project. We

Joel Saxum: hear that doesn’t matter if it’s happening offshore. UK, Canada, South Africa, people will low bid things, and there will be bids that come in that are pretty dang accurate, but they won’t get to work.

Because they’re like, hey, this isn’t a realistic thing, but other companies just come in and they’re like, oh, yeah, we’ll do that in three days. Knowing come on, that’s not gonna happen. Yeah, but that’s where you bring in vendor

Allen Hall: management. If you do have a Cut through the BS. ISP on there that’s doing that nonsense, then Send them home, get somebody in there who can actually do the work.

Joel Saxum: This is, this is a, I can tell you procurement horror stories from my past, but not In some organizations, the procurement people know operations very well. They know what it takes. They know the they know what they should be looking at for weather risk. They know all these things. They know what blade repair stuff is or whatever the industry you’re in.

But sometimes procurement people have no idea and they’re just going, this is what the look like. Okay. And this is, and their documentation looks good to me. Okay. You get it. And that’s not always realistic. That’s not always the best way to do things. Yep.

Allen Hall: Definitely not. And I want to just highlight this one more time.

There’s so much work out there. There’s so many problems out in the field right now, and a lot of operators are struggling. You need some sort of inter management. You need that help. And it’s October right now, as we’re speaking. The season’s coming, right? The wind season’s coming. Everyone’s going to make their money.

But yeah, they’re firming up budgets. They’re trying to plan for next spring. Now’s the time to call SkySpecs and get the vendor management system turned on. Noah, how do they reach you? What’s the best way to contact you? Email. What is that?

Noah Faves: Yeah noah. fabes, F A B E S, at SkySpecs.

Dan Parton: And Dan, how do they get a hold of you?

Dan. partson. com. P A R T I N at skyspecs. com.

Allen Hall: And we’ll include that in the show notes and on the YouTube so you can get ahold of everybody or you can just visit skyspecs. com and you just enter your information in there. If you’re an existing client, if you’re on Horizon, is there anything you push in Horizon that would activate that to start a call?

Dan Parton: No. If you’re an existing client, you can reach out to your account rep and ask them, tell them you’re interested and want to learn more. We’ll be happy to set up a call.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s pretty easy. Dan and Noah, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Joel and I have learned a tremendous amount and we’ll be recommending you as we travel across the United States.

I appreciate it, guys.

Dan Parton: Always a pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro och inte av, eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.