Emerson Automation Experts

Emerson Automation Experts


5 Questions for Operational Certainty Consultant Dave Buttner

February 26, 2019

Dave Buttner
Emerson's Dave Buttner joins our continuing podcast series, 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert. Dave works with manufacturers and producers as part of the Operational Certainty Consulting team to identify opportunities for performance improvements in safety, reliability, production, and energy & emissions.
We'll have a more in-depth podcast in the coming weeks with Dave describing the process of how the Operational Certainty consultants work with clients and some results they've seen.
We hope you’ll enjoy this episode and will consider subscribing to the whole FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod series on your iOS or Android mobile device.
https://www.emersonautomationexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Dave-Buttner-5-Questions-Podcast.mp3
Transcript
Jim: Hi. This is Jim Cahill, and welcome to another edition of "Five Questions for an Emerson Expert." Today I'm joined by Dave Buttner who's a Business Development Director for Emerson's Operational Certainty Consulting Practice. And Dave has a project management professional and certified maintenance and reliability professional certifications. Welcome, Dave.
Dave: Good Morning, Jim.
Jim: Okay, let's start off. Given your background, what made you decide to pursue a STEM-based career?
Dave: I actually migrated to this type of career. My background is in finance and economics. I spent some time in banking as well at Deloitte Consulting and, you know, kind of migrated towards the maintenance and reliability engineering space, consulting space about 20 years ago. Eventually became part of a legacy MRG organization that Emerson acquired back in 2014. I'm not gonna say I stumbled upon it, but it wasn't necessarily the vision from the start, you know when I was in college or in high school.
Jim: Okay. And I guess going back a little further, what did you pursue in the university timeframe?
Dave: I have my master's in economics and my undergraduate degree in finance and economics. And I think that one of the things that I've learned as it relates to the consulting realm in which I work is that it provides you with a clear vision of business cases and opportunity costs, and I think that helps you from a business development standpoint to help articulate that to our customers. I like to think that it is actually a very helpful skill, you know, beyond engineering skills.
Jim: Well I think you're right. I think people talk about how difficult it is to justify the projects and be able to make sure their project gets done and being able to talk in an economic sense to get the capital approved to be able to do it is incredibly important. I guess in that role with that kind of background, that really helps the people you work with get their projects scoped and done.
Dave: I would say to our team that whether we are drafting or writing a business case for a client or not, there is gonna be a business case whether we see it or are involved in it and if we have a chance to help frame the business case, I think that that provides a lot of value to our customers, whether we, you know, we get the business or not.
Jim: Okay. Tell us about a recent challenge that you've been working on to solve.
Dave: One of the areas where we help our clients is we help them migrate to a new enterprise asset management platform or sometimes referred to as Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) or EAM [enterprise asset management] platforms. And we're wrapping up a project for a power generation company, an international power generation company where they had a business unit where they wanted to migrate them to an SAP PM platform from a legacy platform and they needed to do it rather rapidly.
And we have had some rather unique skills in terms of master data migration and enhancement and we beat out one of the big four consulting firms and you know, they've been very happy with our work.