SteveGreaseBoss

Check out greaseboss.com.au, its an RFID tracking technology for zerks in industrial operations. It tracks zerk by zerk how much grease, the timing and grease type.

Crushing rock is very energy intensive, transporting rock to farms is energy intensive. Placing rock in the soil is energy intensive. Its hard to see how this passes the B/S test.

hey lostgame, reach out. I'm mech eng, YC founder, and have experience in IoT.

Thanks for the kind words

The cofounders are spread across Gold Coast, Brisbane and Sunshine Coast in Queensland

I think this is a very good idea and point. I raised the idea of GreaseBoss on the reddit aviation forum a few weeks ago and got shot down by all the questions about regulartory issues and approvals.

The tag in cap idea is solid

Yeah we saw this after we had our prototype and customer orders. We have never seen any in the field.

we have LoRa network in Australia, we have not yet tested on it. We have the capability but it keeps getting pushed down the product roadmap

We are QLD based as well. Tim is Sunny Coast, Pete is Brisbane and I'm GC. DM us on linkedin.

thanks for the encouragement. Its good to find another aussie in these parts...

We have not had a problem getting customers to sign up, aside from the normal nobody wanting to be first customer - the outback handshake came in handy here.

The outlay required is the labour to fit the tags to each zerk - some plants have 1000's of them, so a fitter @$120/hr has to visit all of them pull the zerk off and fit the tag. When tey are fitted we need to record to ID and put it into the database, then the system is good to go.

After that, we can remotely program the intervals and grease volumes - using the know how of the people on site, or the OEM manuals. One customer did't have the data, he sent his fitter into the plant to complete a round with GreaseBoss and we used the recordings as the baseline data.

Australia has excellent prototyping and product development facilities, I would expect to see many more products in the future

Others have tried, 20 years ago before the tech was mature, think windows 98, serial cables, beige industrial tech - we discovered them after we had started.

There probably will be followers, especially now we are public.

The number 1 risk is user adoption - ie the guys who have to do the greasing hate it. We have the opportunity to implement it and learn all of the lessons before the followers catch up

great to hear from a tribologist. We have the military on our plan - we just don't have an entry point yet. Do any companies for a partnership come to mind? We want to make a camo head unit

Great feedback, cast iron foundaries are terrible places. I used to work at a foundary, the sand and the dust was terrible.

We get feedback from customers all the time that they use auto-greasers, or their new equipment comes with auto greaser fitted standard. One issue we see is when they blend the new equipment with old equipment, they inevitably have a bunch of manual grease nipples that don't get managed and are forgotton about. There is also a class of nipples that are uneconomic or physically unable to have auto lubers.

We are initially the neglected cohort of nipples as our target market, because they are the ones that fail the regularly. Our intention is to eventually get our system to cover integrate the Autolubers as well - we think it would be very valuable to have a single source of truth for greasing.

You are right in saying that our customers prefer to buy on capex, we are still figuring out ways to satisfy this. The problem of missed greasing occurs every day, so it should be paid for everyday, however our customers don't quite see it this way..

Thanks Ryan, I'll reach out, I had you on my radar for post-YC.

Our metric for our investor deck is NUM: Nipples under Management

Zerks are called Grease Nipples in Australia ;)

Our main compeittors are to do nothing and hire a specialist.

It turns out there is a whole dicipline of lubrication specialists called Tribologists - they have an association and chapters in many industrial cities.

Many operations have a target to reduce head count - aside from the salary cost, the logic is that people cannot get hurt if they are not on site. We have seen many cases hiring a specialist cannot be justified on both cost and safety.

As the maitenance workforce is reduced, the same level of performance is required. GreaseBoss is positioning so that anyone on site can pick up the tool, know what to do and then do the greasing. This way site can maintain the same maintenance performance, without increasing head count or putting additional people in the plant.

Thanks for taking to time to raise your concerns, these are all legitimate questions that have been raised by our customers during our sales process

Our your second point - the problem we are solving is human error and principal/agent problem, which can be addressed by management controls. We have seen the management controls fail when there varying skill and experience levels in the maitenance crew, when the operation has a transient workforce (say contractors at a harvest) or when the records are falsified. Falsification of records is principal agent - the person responsible for greasing doesn't wear the cost of downtime, labour and spares to fix it.

GreaseBoss can be used to eliminate all of these factors - customers who buy it may be a gold mine in PNG, or a potato farm in Victoria, a smelter in India. These types of operations have minmimal management controls compared to a modern developed world operation. As with everything, GreaseBoss has a sweet spot in the ecomony and it may not be where you have previously worked.

On your second point - we added a computer to a grease gun... that runs the risk of over complicating a simple tool, let alone an RFID on a zerk. We have worked really hard to make our system simple - we know our users are not going to tolerate a screen freeze, syncing errors etc - its not perfect now, but its on the trajectory. We have built our system with minmial impact to completing the current task, the only change is that you have to charge the unit at night. The only input interface is the RFID (no buttons) and the output on the screen. We want our users to pick it up and it just works.

With regards to the final comments, we have a version of the system that can be deployed locally - therefore no risk of losing data, bricking the device. The system works entirely offline, it only needs to sync once - provided the schedule never changes. And the third party can guide you around the plant, tell you how much grease and when its required, if you have a day off it can ensure the greasing is completed to the same standard as you would.

I hope this answwers your quesitons - thanks for making me work hard :)

The system has APIs, anticipating integration into maitenance platforms like SAP, Pronto etc. We haven't needed to do it yet, but our customers ask us every time.

Great comments - people that manage people that don't give a shit are our target market. But point taken.

I used to sell and commission equipment in the field, this meant visiting lots of sites and working in the service crews as a junior (getting tools, pumping grease, sweeping floors) to install and commission what was sold. I had a mix of field and office duties.

You are right in saying our RFID tags are not as rugged as they could be, we are currently making them by hand, while we wait for our injection moulding tooling to be delivered

Great feedback.

We are exploring the franchise model, one of our customers has a contract to manage the greasing for 18k zerks at a number of different sites. They want GreaseBoss to drive their manaul greasing business, they can reduce head count and reduce admin overhead.

I used to go to Papua New Guinean gold mines and the use case of not being able to get a spare part for months is very real. These are the early adoptor operations we are targeting

We have a self hosted version of the system available, we have found that attitudes to data security and location are changing. Customers want to have it in house to the extent possible.

this is a good point, I mentioned that we are exploring the business model now.

One benefit of the current model is that we expect lots of improvements in the hardware over coming months. We are rolling these out to our early adopter customers as they become available at no cost.

There is room for more creativity when it comes to the model

We have patents on the head unit and the whole system

great idea, we are experiencing the same type of friction from our customers. We think we need to get it to something similar to cell phone contract from the 90's - $0 upfront, $X per month for 2 years

I like your comment about this being easier to justify on a PPT than in the dirt - we are on the road every day experiencing this reality. We are making progress, customers are buying it for more than just the greasing - they have transient workforces who take care of the equipment differently and want consistantly . Some of them use greasing as an indicator "if they can't do the greasing, what else arn't they doing?" another guy got rid of 4 guys over 12 months for not completing the greasing, so he is saving on recruitment costs, there are many others..

great question and good logic.

Many sites are reducing headcount in maintenance due to high labour costs, greasing is one of those things that can be neglected. Our pitch is to do more maintenance with less head count, with GreaseBoss anyone can pick up the grease gun and be directed what to do, with no prior trianing.

Further down the track, we want GreaseBoss to power robotic greasing. But to get to this nirvana, you need to start with manual

Thanks, at this stage we have no other hardware. We are piggy backing off plant wifi or 4G. We have explored getting our own network gateway so we can bypass corporate networks.

The system can work offline, record the data in the unit and then sync when it comes back into range. Our use case is working all day in the plant, then coming back to the workshop for charging and syncing data at night

The head unit records all greasing, even without a tag, but its up the user to log in and map them to the correct nipple

CUrrent state is $2500 - we have not started manufacturing on volume, we are currently hand assembled

We can get this much lower.

Great questions

For roll out, we try to upload the data into the GreaseCloud before going to site, then we have someone manually fit each tag to each zerk, they then use the head unit to read the code and map it into the GreaseCloud. Once it is in the grease cloud we can set the grease volume, grease interval, etc

For the timing, we have a function to set the operating timetable of each machine - most plants this is 24/7, however some are M-F 9-5. The intervals are calculated relative to the operating timetable of the machine. Machines can be "paused" if they are tagged out of production.

I will check out Borgs, honestly they were not on my radar.

The autoluber question comes up all the time, initially we are targeting the zerks/grease nipples that are too low value or physically cannot be fitted with an autoluber. We are also targeting autoluber refills.

We have some specific autoluber products on our roadmap so we can have all greasing in our GreaseCloud