We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jesus Manuel Laboy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jesus Manuel below.

Jesus Manuel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you ever experienced an industry-wide U-Turn? Tell us about it?

Industries related to the production of goods, especially ones with asset intensive manufacturing processes, have been for decades looking for ways to scale their productivity while increasing their asset’s performance and reliability. Predictive Maintenance has been one of the approaches many companies have implemented with a variable degree of success. During the decade from 2010-2020 new technological advances such as the Internet of Things, Bid Data and Machine Learning proposed a new dawn for this market where the digitalization of these tools and strategies promised a new era where the industry adoption of maintenance philosophies based on data and information will revolutionize the market. While these emerging technologies provided ways of scale data acquisition, there was a tried-and-true lesson that the industry couldn’t escape. Automation technologies will help scale value delivery processes, but a process that was not well defined with the right design and governance elements in place would not provide a more reliable operation. While we have been gifted with new capabilities thanks to what is called as the 4th industrial revolution, the calling for the industry is to approach these innovations from a human standpoint. These information sources, while they provide us with massive amounts of information, have to be used on the context of evolving human behavior to problem solving.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

VIBRA is a company founded in 1993 by Eng. Felix Laboy Vazquez with the mission of introducing the concept of Predictive Maintenance to the Caribbean industry. New sensor technology and computer processing power habilitated new ways of collecting data in the field and processing it to provide insights into machinery health. By helping customers understand the health of their machines, how they express risk of failure and assessing the operational consequences of this information provided a new way of managing industrial assets maintenance programs. A good analogy would be comparing the way we approach our own health strategy, to machines. We became machine physicians!

The company’s vision was to provide this value on a Service model context while also banking on new internet technologies to be able to share this value on an innovative scalable model. Early in this process, the company also learned that achieving a change on human behavior, basically on the way our customers used this information to attain their production goals was key to successfully implement this new way of taking care of our machines. We were able to detect symptoms of “sickness” in our machines, but how do we effectively cure them? How do we make sure these events do not happen again? For thirty years we have been dedicated our talents to answer these questions and thus, supporting a more intelligent, reliable and sustainable production industry.

I’m part of the second generation of the company leadership. Been the son of the Founder, I grew up watching both my parents build a business out of nothing. No funding, infrastructure, or network, just sheer hard work, a defiant way to approach challenges and the application of family values to everyone that joined the dream.

For 13 years, I watched how the company evolved and grew. While the value that was been provided was a technological service, my parents always focused their lessons on what was really important for them “business wise”. Their focus on taking care of our members, focusing on exceeding our customer’s expectations, and always keep evolving in an honest while defiant way were the values that I took to my college years as an Engineering student. I spent these years working as a technician’s helper in the field, not necessarily understanding that I was learning firsthand from the craftsmen that made the world turn.

When I finished my college studies, I took a position in the company as a Sales and Applications Engineer, again not necessarily clear where this path would lead me. The moment I was faced with a challenge where technology alone would not achieve the customer’s goal, I felt a calling to help this company apply technology in a way that will really provide value to our society. Viewing the company as a vehicle to grow a company where so many talented individuals join together to build towards a more reliable and sustainable industry really sealed the deal for me.

By applying a proactive approach to a company’s machine health, we can increase their productivity, mitigate the risk of unplanned downtime and extend their asset’s lifecycle so the cost of production is optimized. This would eliminate waste in their processes while providing a robust structure to face any challenge that may come.

This vision has been put to test in recent years. Puerto Rico (based for our Caribbean office) faced environmental challenges such as Cat 4 hurricanes, earthquakes and a pandemic in a very short time space. While these events proposed a not very inspiring results, VIBRA was able to support many companies while growing our footprint in the Caribbean and Latin America market. Our formula came together to provide an answer to the challenges we were facing in the third decade of the 21st century. The question been the same: how can technology help us to build a better industry? While the answer seems also to be the same from our humble beginnings, use these tools to increase human capabilities and value. We help the industry understand what their machines are expressing, and what to do about it.

To keep scaling our value delivery capabilities we have heavily investing in the digitalization of our processes embedding our three-decade business intelligence while evolving the way we develop our members to be ready to next challenge to come. We already have a successful sister company in Mexico living by the same values and standards. We’re excited of which new frontier destiny will take us to.

Our motto still been the same: Que Nada Le Detenga (Let nothing Stop You / It).

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Whenever I hear the word “resilience”, it inevitably triggers memories of the events we experienced during Hurricane Maria, the Puerto Rico Earthquakes, and the COVID pandemic in a string of 3 years. Puerto Rico has always been in a hurricane prone zone, so it was part of our lives to be prepared for what was locally known as “el temporal”. Nonetheless, Hurricane Maria was one of the natural events that no one could have been adequately prepared. Internally we executed our preparations protocols and send everyone home with the message of surpassing this impending challenge taking care of each other.

As many already know, the impact of the Hurricane took out power and all communication lines in the island. It was not possible to call up everyone in the company and see how they were doing and what kind of support they could need. This was a very stressful moment for me since I was just recently started to answer for the Caribbean operation while our Founder lead the development of the Mexico team. There was no playbook available for the scenario we were experiencing.

The first thing I was trying to do is to in some way contact everyone I thought that could need help. A very frustrating process since we had no coms available. During one of these moments of feeling constrained on what we could do next, I was surprised by a very special group of people. Part of our team had left their homes and families and went to our headquarters to check on our second home (VIBRA). By their own accord they tried to clean up whatever they could. A very symbolic memory was seeing a note from one their family members telling us that our main gate (which portrays our logo) had fallen, but she had lift it up with the help of her family. After this I was surprised that the group decided to go up to my parent’s house to see how together we could help each other out and define our next move. Within all this very nightmarish scene, my heart couldn’t be more inspired. Definitely NOTHING COULD STOP US. Not because of our technology savviness, but four our family and human values.

In the process of normalizing our operations after this event, we started to build heavily on our digital infrastructure (internet, servers, software platforms, etc) with the purpose of scaling our operations and increasing our business resiliency.

As a result, when the COVID pandemic hit, we were faced with the challenge of supporting our customers while not been together in our home base. It took VIBRA 24 hours to get together and say goodbye to our mutual physical presence and still keep supporting our customers. The challenges we faced some years back, had built us into a company that not even a world-class event could stop. VIBRA has enjoyed continuous sustainable growth from Hurricane Maria to this day.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

One of the main growth drivers of VIBRA has been the very same customers that gave us our first opportunities. Been focused on the industrial market, many of our customers challenged to us to grow our footprint to a corporate level with the purpose of been able to support them in geographical areas where had never been before.

One event that really changed our perspective came disguised as such a boundary. One of our customers in Mexico approached us with a new challenge. They had just acquired a business in Peru and wanted to implement a Reliability and Predictive Maintenance culture and process within these plants. Initially, we had our reserves since we didn’t really know much about the Peruvian market, much less of the way machines were serviced in the region. Nonetheless our customer challenge us to discover how can we really innovate within an already established and mature market.

The bidding process was an open one, where local and international companies (way bigger than VIBRA) participated proposing their own approach to solve the challenges our customer was facing. Trusting into our business intelligence, members quality, and values we were able been selected for the last round against a company with worldwide presence. The result of the bid process really surprised us. The customer decided that although VIBRA didn’t have a physical presence in Peru, (while the competitor did) they would like for both companies work in synergy: they would provide the local personnel while using our approach, standards and digital solutions. Without knowing, we had become a digital solutions platform company. This opened our eyes to a new frontier, where physical presence was not a deterrent. We were going to keep scaling our value, while honing our digital tools to match our human advantages.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.vibra-inc.com
• Instagram: @vibrainc
• Facebook: @vibrareliability
• Linkedin: vibra-inc
• Youtube: @vibra-inc

Image Credits
The majority of the pictures were from Gio Camacho. One is a licensed stock picture.