CEO Corner:

A Q&A on Technical Toolboxes’ recent partnership with BVP Forge

By Jim Schuchart

With Technical Toolboxes’ recent announcement on their partnership and new investment from BVP Forge, we sat down with Technical Toolboxes CEO Jim Schuchart to hear the rationale behind the partnership and what it means for Technical Toolboxes and their customers throughout the energy infrastructure industry around the world.

Why did Technical Toolboxes decide to partner with BVP Forge now?

Over the past few years, we’ve made significant improvements to better serve our customers. We launched new advanced insights like Sensitivity Analysis, redesigned the UI, invested heavily in documentation, self-help, and performance, added AI capabilities, and introduced new inspection tools. While we’re proud of these accomplishments, we recognized that we could do even more, so we sought out a partner with a similar vision.

We have big ambitions to drive innovative change within the industry.  To help us achieve our goals and bring innovation to customers faster, we’ve partnered with BVP Forge and their world-class team.

There is enormous potential to modernize energy infrastructure through software. We need to begin thinking bigger on how we can serve our customers with broader value, touching more use cases that will make even larger impacts on the world’s operators, service providers, and utility companies. Many opportunities for digital transformation remain, and we’re excited to lead the way.

What makes you most excited about this change? 

On day one of this new partnership, our new board challenged us with a simple question: “How can we drive more value to our customers, and be an even more important vendor for them in their daily operations?” It’s a simple question, but it highlights the focus that BVP Forge has on further investing in Technical Toolboxes and ensuring the innovation we drive with our software platform occurs faster and is more focused on improving our customers’ processes.

We have a unique opportunity to expand on our capabilities in critical engineering assessments, to continue on our path of innovating in the inspection space, to leverage AI, and to combine it in a way that creates a system of record for integrity management. This will help our customers with big challenges, like driving compliance with traceable, verifiable, and complete records.

What is changing? What is not changing?  

Our company values and mission remain unchanged. Our four values: being people-focused, professionals, results-oriented, and positive collaborators, are what have driven our success up until this point. Our company culture was formed on these values, and it’s the reason our team has been incredibly successful.

We will continue our commitment to our customers and quickly acting on their feedback. I personally review every NPS score and find value in personally reaching out to customers for feedback and insight.

Our mission to be the leader in integrity insights for energy infrastructure is also staying the same. What will change is how quickly we innovate for our customers, globally. BVP Forge will be central to success in this new chapter with an even bigger vision.

What about your partnership with PRCI?

We have a long-term partnership agreement, and they are a great partner. The only evolution will be the speed at which we’ll execute on enhancements to our jointly developed products, to stay at the leading edge of the market.

How specifically can we expect your software platform to be enhanced further?  

This is a question we ask our customers for input on every day. We are consistently looking for ways to make our customers’ lives easier when they need to perform engineering analysis. Whether that is making the analysis faster or providing better answers with more insightful responses.

We’ve only scratched the surface of what our platform can deliver with AI and pipeline insights. Moving forward, we will expand its capabilities so that multiple departments can benefit from it simultaneously. Our goal is to create a unified system of record, providing traceable, verifiable, and comprehensive data across the entire company.

Where do you see the integrity management space going in the next 5 years? How is Technical Toolboxes equipped to better meet these challenges with the BVP Forge partnership?

The demand for all sources of energy isn’t going away. In fact, it will grow in the next 30 years. Meanwhile, infrastructure continues to age, with fewer new pipelines being built, which means the strain on dated infrastructure will increase. Regulations are constantly evolving worldwide due to shifting environmental standards, scientific advancements, and changing political climates. Additionally, we are experiencing a “brain drain” in the oil and gas industry, where the number of engineers retiring exceeds the number of new graduates available to replace them.

There is a massive opportunity for technology to make energy infrastructure processes more efficient. I believe Technical Toolboxes has an important role to play in that effort, and our partnership with BVP Forge will only accelerate our footprint and ability to drive those efficiencies for our customers. Faster, broader innovation that connects teams and processes across engineering orgs is our north star. The goal is for Technical Toolboxes to be the central tool for all engineering teams across energy infrastructure, and our partnership with BVP Forge will help  get us there.

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