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?

In the past few years, we have accomplished much to drive value for our customers. We launched a new suite of advanced calculations (Sensitivity and Simulation Analysis), redesigned the UI, invested heavily in documentation, self-help, and performance, added AI capabilities, and introduced new inspection tools. We’re proud of those accomplishments, however, we saw an opportunity to accomplish even more, so we sought out a partner with a similar vision.

We have big ambitions to drive innovative change within the industry. We made the decision to partner with BVP Forge and their world class team to help us bring those innovations to our customers faster.  

The opportunities to modernize energy infrastructure with software are huge and 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 with so many opportunities remaining for digital transformation.

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 are not changing. 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 our focus on rapidly adopting customer 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 isn’t changing either. 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, in order 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 everyday. 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 on what our platform can deliver with AI and pipeline insights. We will broaden the capabilities and ensure multiple departments across the pipeline lifecycle are getting even more shared value from it all at once, building toward a shared system of record with traceable, verifiable, and complete data across the 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 on 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 changing around the world due to changing environmental standards, scientific breakthroughs, and political climates. Additionally, we are in the process of a “brain drain” in the oil & gas industry, where there are more engineers retiring than the number of new graduates available to replace them.  

The opportunity for technology to make energy infrastructure processes more efficient is massive. I believe Technical Toolboxes has a major 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. We want Technical Toolboxes to be the central tool for all engineering teams in the midstream space, and our partnership with BVP Forge will help us get there.  

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