Travis Parigi of Liquid Frameworks On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level
Transform the traditionally paper-based forms to an electronic process for things like operational data forms or safety forms. The process to collect this “form data” should be woven into the fabric of the field ticket process since they are often done contemporaneously and can also leverage and/or share data from one another. Leverage the data collected from the electronic forms into business intelligence reports that can be used across various aspects of the business.
As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Founder and CEO of LiquidFrameworks, Travis Parigi.
Travis Parigi is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at LiquidFrameworks. Travis focuses on growing the company’s software platform and evangelizing its benefits to customers. He plays an active role in LiquidFrameworks’ technology, architecture and overall product vision. Prior to LiquidFrameworks, Travis was a founding member and served as a Senior Engagement Manager for Emerging, Inc., an e-Business professional services firm funded by Austin Ventures and Benchmark Capital with offices across the US.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Coding became a very strong interest for me at a very early age. In 1983 I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas, and it came with a book titled Programmer’s Reference Guide. There were a number of chapters on BASIC programming, and I read those chapters word-for-word and did all of the examples. Having the computer do what I wanted it to do through code, that I wrote from scratch, was fascinating to me and produced a very satisfying feeling of accomplishment. After a few years of using that computer, I upgraded to a machine running MS-DOS and started learning Pascal with a Btrieve database for storage. I kept learning as much I could and started to find business problems around my family and community that could use a computer program to perform tasks more efficiently and reliability. This was the mid to late 80s so there were all sorts of problems that could be solved for people and small businesses, such as simple mailing list programs to business systems for order tracking. In the late 80s, I wrote an order entry and invoicing system for my dad’s business. My dad has since sold that business many years ago, but the software I wrote is still in use today. Those experiences showed me a clear path to a career in software development, so I continued to pursue it in high school and at Texas A&M. I completed my degree in Computer Science and Engineering, intent on building software with a goal of ultimately starting a software company. However, I didn’t at that time know what the software would be. Interestingly it ended up being something extremely close to what I originally built for my dad’s business in the late 1980s.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Undoubtedly this would have to be my mom and dad at the top of the list. My mom knew I wanted a computer and gave me one for Christmas in 1983 way before they were commonplace. I’m not sure how she knew which one to buy other than there were only about 3 choices at the time. I’m not really sure I would have picked up programming without that gift, and even if I had developed the skillset later in life, there’s no telling whether or not things would have progressed like they did. I’m grateful for both the gift itself but also the freedom they afforded me to pursue something like technology when most all of the other kids in school were pursuing sports.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
For many years I’ve really enjoyed Naval Ravikant’s content and more recently his podcast. He is an inspiring person with well-grounded, reasonable views along with a philosophy on life and success. I’m also an avid listener to Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast titled Invest Like the Best. He conducts in-depth interviews with very successful people from a wide variety of industries including technology, finance and many more.
As far as fiction goes Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged has likely been one of the most compelling books I’ve read. Although her atheistic viewpoint does not align with me, the novel’s perspective on self-reliance, the free market and building a business focused on reliability and high quality resonates loudly with me.
Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?
From the very early days of LiquidFrameworks the company’s goal has been, “To become the undisputed standard for field operations management software in the energy industry.” We have worked for many years at this goal, and I believe we have achieved it for the most part in the upstream oilfield service provider market.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
We have just completed a transaction with ServiceMax, the leader in the broader field service management industry. ServiceMax completed an acquisition of LiquidFrameworks at the start of November 2021. Both companies are now working more tightly to integrate our people and processes. All of the LiquidFrameworks team members across all departments have job opportunities at the new combined company which is a great outcome for everyone. We are now working to complete the combined company’s public listing process on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol SMAX. The new company will benefit our customers with a larger product offering and more resources to dedicate across all departments, but especially our product R&D department which will result in an even bigger and better FieldFX product for our customers.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?
Digital Transformation takes place at a company when existing processes that use legacy, often times manual, methods to achieve specific objectives are replaced with new ways of accomplishing the objectives using technology. The results are a fast, more efficient, and more reliable way of completing the respective process. On a practical level it could be as simple as changing out Excel-based or paper-based forms with an electronic forms system that runs on a phone of tablet/iPad. In other cases, a company may decide to transform the way they determine pricing for its products and services from a process that is very manual and subjective, performed by one or two people, to a digital process where data from thousands or even millions of historical transactions is analyzed with linear regression algorithms to determine the best pricing strategy to optimize both margins and transaction volume.
Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?
Numerous examples and cases studies can be found that demonstrate the benefits to support digital transformation in companies across almost all industries that range from SMB to large enterprise class globally dispersed companies.
We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
Every business across practically every industry can benefit from moving from paper-based, manual processes to more streamlined and efficient processes where accurate information is more readily accessible by not only employees of the company but also customers, vendors and partners. At LiquidFrameworks, we have chosen to focus on processes related to field operations such as: quoting jobs, scheduling people and equipment to jobs, writing service tickets for jobs, managing asset maintenance, and invoicing.
The legacy process associated with scheduling resources, for example, is often seen where a company will use a large whiteboard on a wall that has magnets to represent people and equipment. The whiteboard may be divided into swim lanes with each lane representing a job or a very large calendar might be drawn on the whiteboard. The magnets are placed across to whiteboard representing where that set of people and equipment are going for the day or week or sometimes longer. To prevent losing this information, someone might occasionally remember to take a photo of the wall with their phone. Sharing the information with someone in another location is done by sharing a photo. There are clearly numerous issues with this type of process including: single point of failure, time consuming, lack of information sharing and availability, lack of reporting, inability to do any longer-range planning, and an inability to scale. When we implemented the Schedule & Dispatch module in the FieldFX product suite from LiquidFrameworks, these disadvantages are eliminated and several new benefits are realized by our customers including: information access, alters, standardized workflow, faster ramp up time for new employees, historical data reporting and many more.
Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?
The biggest challenge I’ve seen in almost all cases is starting with a reasonable number of processes to transform and focusing on the majority set of use cases. Often times after a customer is introduced to the digital possibilities, it becomes challenging for them to avoid trending toward a boil-the-ocean goal where they take on too much, too quickly. LiquidFrameworks primarily engages large, enterprise customers with widespread organizations, and the ROI for these types of companies is enormous across many areas. When keeping the scope narrow to start, reaping returns early can be difficult. We help them resolve this difficulty through a modularized approach, whereby they start with something like Scheduling and Field Service Ticketing. From there, they can rollout other FieldFX modules from LiquidFrameworks, taking things a few steps at a time to ensure good adoption and ROI.
Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation to Take It to The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
Start with a very small team of longer-term employees that will head the Digital Transformation team. These initial team members are critical and should be people that embrace change with great communication skills and also have a deep understanding of the business. At least one or two of them should have come from operations and have an intricate knowledge of how the business does what it does. In the case of an oilfield service provider, like those that LiquidFrameworks serves, it should be someone from the field that has worked jobs at a well site or offshore rig. This team should be charged with determining the high-level scope of the project by creating an inventory of their processes and calculating the respective ROI and cost for each process. The team should then determine the highest value and begin planning the transformation project for each in-scope process. It is critical to not attempt to boil-the-ocean in this type of project.
In our earlier example of an upstream oilfield service provider that would be typically served by LiquidFrameworks, the five ways they would use Digital Transformation to take the business to the next level would include:
Moving from paper-based or Excel-based field tickets (service reports) to electronic field tickets that use customer-specific pricing stored on the field engineer’s device and eliminate inaccurate documents. This radically speeds the payment process and provides a tremendous amount of data for historical reporting that can be used for improved decision making by the business.
Automate invoice generation based on the incoming field ticket. Instead of manually transcribed data from a field ticket (be it paper or even electronic), automatically create the invoice in order to ensure 100% accuracy across the field ticket and the invoice in order to eliminate any delays getting paid from your customer.
Transform the traditionally paper-based forms to an electronic process for things like operational data forms or safety forms. The process to collect this “form data” should be woven into the fabric of the field ticket process since they are often done contemporaneously and can also leverage and/or share data from one another. Leverage the data collected from the electronic forms into business intelligence reports that can be used across various aspects of the business.
Establish digital processes to track and manage the asset maintenance program in order to minimize asset downtime and ensure equipment is operating at ideal safety standards. Keeping electronic records of all maintenance events for assets such as trucks and other vehicles also helps in performing well during regulatory audits.
Leverage the data collected by electronic process to make the appropriate information available to customers giving them timely updates and reports to help them run their business more efficiently and make better purchasing decision for the future. In most cases, provides this type of information flow to customers serves as a differentiator from competition and can help to win new, future business.
In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?
First and foremost, people need to be given the time and option to pursue areas that most interest them, that are aligned with what might benefit the customers of the company. If people are micromanaged and not given the latitude to try new things and make mistakes along the way, it is highly unlikely that new and innovative product will emerge. In terms of innovation within a software company, individuals need the freedom to create and test ideas. Leverage the existing customer base to source and socialize ideas being tested to confirm the end result will be profitable for the business.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
The renowned 20th century American novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in [the] mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Starting and running a company requires many skillsets, not the least of which is hearing several different perspectives on an issue and taking the time to truly understand the situation from both sides being presented without injecting bias, but ultimately making the best decision for the business. Fitzgerald’s quote on this topic has always summarized this skillset in my mind.
How can our readers further follow your work?
This was really meaningful! Thank you so much for your time.
