NOW AVAILABLE: Bullhorn® FieldPro App | Virtual Brew

Join Erick Flores as he walks through a preview of Bullhorn® FieldPro—a new mobile app designed to work alongside Field Data Collector (FDC) and extend the Bullhorn Tools you already use.

Key Session Highlights:

• Bullhorn® FieldPro is now available for iOS and Android, giving teams a more streamlined way to work with and manage RM5 units directly from the field
• Simplified workflows make it easier to collect data, interact with equipment, and keep work moving without added steps
• Support for RM4 legacy units is in development, helping ensure teams can plan ahead and avoid disruption as updates are rolled out
• Works alongside Bullhorn Tools and Bullhorn Web, so teams can adopt new capabilities without changing existing workflows all at once
• Ongoing updates and clear communication will help teams prepare for future changes with confidence

Speakers

Ed Kruft, CEO and host

Ben Johnson, Product Manager, Bullhorn

Erick Flores, Product Owner, Bullhorn

Transcript

Opening Remarks

Ed Kruft
Let’s jump in. Welcome, everybody, and good morning. I’m Ed Kruft — thank you for being here. I’ve got two other folks with me from American Innovations. One is Ben Johnson — he’s the one with all the AI meatball logos behind him, and he joined us about a month ago. He’s our new senior product manager for all things Bullhorn.

And then Erick Flores has been with us for — what, eight years? Something like that? Eight years, Erick?

Erick Flores
About eight and a half, yeah.

Ed Kruft
Eight and a half, yeah. So he works in our R&D group — again with Bullhorn, a little more focus on the software side of things, and some other software as well. So those two guys are going to be the ones really walking us through the new Field Pro application and what’s going on. I’m just going to do a brief intro — we have some people monitoring the chat, and I’ll keep that up as well, so please, it’ll be awesome if you ask questions as we go.

So, I’m ready to jump in — oh, I guess I can actually move to the next slide.

Really quick — just like we said last month and the month before that, this is the season of events. We love going to these events and getting to see people face to face. We’ll be at the Southeastern Corrosion Short Course in Peachtree — I was there last year, it was a great event. AGA, Piney Woods, Western State, Appalachian is always a great event. And then Esri has the Energy Resources Conference in Houston. We’re sending teams of people to all of these events, and if they’re local to you, or you happen to be going, we’d sure appreciate it if you stop by and say hi — and any feedback, we’d love to get it, to figure out how we can keep getting better as a company.

So that’s what’s coming up in the next, about a month — we’re going to have people all over the place.

With that, I think the next slide — we’re going to jump right in. Is that right, Ben? Yeah. So, Ben and Erick, I’m going to leave it to you guys right now.

Ben Johnson: Introduction

Ben Johnson
Yeah, thanks for joining us, everyone. As Ed said, I’m the new product manager for all things Bullhorn — both hardware and software.

I’m new to American Innovations, but I’ve been in the industry since the start of my career. I supported applications and technical support early on, for people in the field all up and down the oil and gas industry. So I’m very familiar with being a tech out there needing to get the job done. I’m happy to come on board at American Innovations and help you all do your work more efficiently.

For this presentation, we have — I believe — the Bullhorn FieldPro live demo that Erick’s going to do. Erick’s our senior product owner internally — he works very closely with the R&D teams, making sure issues are being addressed and new features are rolling out. He’s been intimately involved in the FieldPro development, and he’s going to walk through the demo today.

With that, I’ll toss it over to Erick — I’ll also be monitoring chat, so I’ll be able to interrupt him if you all have questions. Feel free to throw those in chat. Erick, take it away.

Erick Flores: Bullhorn FieldPro Overview

Erick Flores
Good morning, everyone — hope everyone’s having a great Thursday morning.

Before I dive into this presentation, I’m kind of curious — in the chat, if you can drop in how familiar you are, or what kind of user you are, on Bullhorn Web. Are you one that regularly uses Bullhorn Web? Are you a new user, or have you never used it? You can drop that in the chat — or, that’s at the poll. Yeah, the poll is like how often — okay, cool. Just give your answer of how often you’re using it.

So — Bullhorn FieldPro: managing your RMUs, simplified. What I’ll be walking through is what managing your RMUs will look like through Bullhorn FieldPro when it’s available, and how it’s simplifying a lot of the workflows you may be doing today as a daily, weekly, or even monthly user.

Let’s get into what I’ll be talking about today: a high-level look at what Bullhorn FieldPro is, what it will be doing in the future, and all the latest updates coming to it. I’ll go through a demo of what we have today in development — so what I’ll be showing is our application that’s currently in development, and where we are and what we’ve got left to do. Then I’ll break down what it will do — the features it has on-site versus remote — summing up some of what you’ll see in the live demo. And for those of you who are long-time Bullhorn users, you’re probably familiar with Bullhorn Tools — I’ll briefly talk about what’s going on with that application. And lastly, I’ll go through the timelines.

So, what is Bullhorn FieldPro? Some of you in the chat may have attended AI World and sat in on this session — I gave a session on this last year at AI World, a sneak peek of what we were working on and the vision for the application. So if you’re here from AI World, you’ll see where our progress is. If you’re not, welcome — you’ll get to catch up with what everyone else already saw.

What I want to talk through here is what Bullhorn FieldPro is — what were some of the core values, what’s the intent of the product, and why we wanted to develop it and what we wanted to deliver. One of the big core values is that we wanted to build this for the people managing their RMUs day-to-day — or even if you’re only using it weekly, but might start using it day-to-day.

Streamlining a lot of those workflows for you, keeping it simple, leaving a lot of the administrative items outside of the FieldPro app, and letting you get down to it — if you’re out in the field and need to check your reads, you can do that quickly. If you need to send commands, you can do that quickly. If you’re installing an RMU, you can validate the connection right after, all in the same place. That’s really what FieldPro will deliver — combining on-site and remote functionality, letting you remotely log in, access your RMUs, and send commands, as well as be on-site using the same application to install or troubleshoot a unit’s configuration.

All right — I’ve got another question here. Throughout this I’ll ask a few questions, because I want to get as much feedback as possible from you all — your feedback is important to us and helps us prioritize the right things as we’re developing this. I’m curious what kind of device you’re using today when you’re logging into Bullhorn Web — a mix, a desktop, a tablet? There’s a poll up — I think Ben put up a poll — feel free to answer that.

All right, okay — now let’s get started with the demo. I have a lot to go through, so I’ll be moving a little fast.

Ben Johnson
So, while Erick pulls that up — what we’re going to be doing today is, Erick has his phone connected to his computer, and he’s going to actually be demoing some of the workflows in the new FieldPro app. It’s up now — go ahead, Erick, take it away.

Live Demo

Erick Flores
Sure. So, I open up the app, and I’m immediately greeted with two options: Sign In, and Continue to BLE Tools. What that means is continuing to the Bluetooth portion of the app — maybe you don’t have a connection where you are, but you’re on-site. For the purpose of this, I’m starting off as — so, I just installed an RM5. I have it right over here, actually.

I’m going to walk through what an install looks like, and then the next steps after that install that I’m able to do — that you weren’t able to do today with Bullhorn Tools.

Let me go ahead and swipe this on. I’m going to tap Continue to Bluetooth, allow all these permissions — okay, I see my RM5 is advertising. I’m going to connect here. Very quickly I can see some of the info that’s going to be relevant to me when I switch over to my dashboard in a minute.

First thing I’m looking at is the dome serial — 5-1, lots of zeros, 1-2. I don’t have a great signal quality here, but I think that’s okay for the purpose of this — hopefully this will work as I expect.

But, I’m done installing — I’ve installed all the hardware, I’ve connected a battery to my unit, and I want to validate that all my connections are good. Next, I’m going to make sure my channel settings are good here. For those familiar with Tools, you’re going to see a bit of a UI difference on FieldPro compared to Tools.

On the left-hand side, I see the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 — those are my hardware channels. I can quickly validate — in this case I have some generic names, but I can quickly see which hardware channel I’m looking at. The other one — there’s a little circle, and right now it’s got a half-moon filled in. At the top there’s a legend that lets you quickly see what you’re measuring.

So for my channels 1 through 4, I’m currently just measuring the DC side of things. If I wanted AC only, I’d see the left half of the circle filled — but if I’m measuring AC and DC, I should see a full, solid-filled circle. I can go through that quickly — here, we can see this one is now full, solid circle — I’m measuring AC and DC.

I notice I don’t have a shunt set on this. I’m going to switch this to a shunt, and enable it. I was testing this earlier — I don’t actually have a shunt installed in this battery, so it was showing some crazy numbers. In order for it to show a normal amp reading, this is what I had set my scaling to — 1,000 to 1. I know that’s probably not your typical setup on a rectifier, but I want the values to come across sensibly on this screen.

I set this here — now I can see this one has a shunt enabled, and I can see I’m measuring my DC amps, and what my scaling is set to for this channel. There are lots of small quality-of-life improvements you may not be seeing on Tools today, but a lot of this will be on FieldPro.

I’ve configured my channels — next, let’s check out the readings. Okay, I’m seeing zero volts here — I think I might have something wrong, but I’ll continue forward with this — I do see my amps coming through, so I’ll call this okay since I need to walk through the rest.

And lastly, since this is a good setup, I want to do the last step we always recommend, which is sending a test message. I’ll assume this goes through — I did have a poor signal here, but I don’t want that to impact the purpose of this. And like I mentioned before diving into this next portion — this application is still in development, so I’ll run into a bit of bugs that you may or may not notice, but I’m very aware of a lot of these things — I’ve been working with this very closely. Just a heads-up on that.

So — okay, I see what’s going on — now I’ve validated that the test message is good. Next, I’m going to tap — this is where your workflow changes — I’m going to tap on the dashboard, and I’m presented with a login screen. I’ll log in with my account.

So I log in, and I see a dashboard of many units inside my account — these are all the units I have, but for this, I’m looking for the 5-1-zeros unit. Actually, I called it EF-Dome. Okay — I see it hasn’t called in since — I can quickly see the packet hasn’t come through to Bullhorn yet, so maybe my connection’s not solid, I need to adjust my antenna. Right now I can validate that my connection’s not solid here, so I’ll troubleshoot this a little later, but we’ll continue on.

Next — since I’m out in the field right now, I want to see what’s going on near me. As I switch over to the Maps tab, I’m presented with a lot of units I don’t really need to look at — I just want the ones near me today. Okay, I can see — I have one unit over here, then two out here. I’ve got one in alarm, so I’ll see what’s going on with that and tap it — the main reason I’m assuming this one’s in alarm is because I’m getting zero volts or zero amps on channel two.

So I can see what’s going on there. Next — I just got a call from, let’s say, a foreign operator who wants me to interrupt this rectifier right over here by Angel Pass. I’m going to tap on that, hit Add to Interruption, and walk through the mode I want to select — in this case, a start-stop. They want me to interrupt through the end of the week — I’ll go from Thursday to Friday, set that date, and do 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. There are a few time zones here — if you’re Pacific or Mountain, you can select those, but I’m here at Central, so I’ll go with Central.

This operator asked me to interrupt at 4-on-1 — I’ll tap that real quick and hit Send. I’m expecting this to fail at the moment — we’re working through this issue. After that, I can monitor what settings I just sent to those devices — in this case, I sent one to the site unit, and I can see all the historical settings I’ve sent over to that device. There’s been a lot of activity going on with this — earlier I was getting a lot of failures, and then it looks like we got it back in order after that.

Ben Johnson
So, Erick — maybe to recap and highlight some of what you’ve walked us through: you quickly connected to the 510, you were able to see right away that the signal quality was a little low, but then you were able to inspect and make sure all the other settings were set up appropriately. You then jumped into the groups dashboard to show the fleet management workflows we’ve added in the FieldPro app, where you could quickly group units, see which units are in your region, and then you got the call where you needed to set up an interrupt schedule really quickly. And you were able to — what was that, four or five clicks? — set up an interrupt schedule with an array of settings for different time zones and interruption schedules, and deploy it rather quickly.

Erick Flores
Right — yeah, exactly. I didn’t have to bounce between multiple apps to do that, or navigate hard-to-navigate UI. So that really simplified a lot of it.

Ed Kruft
Can you select multiple RMUs to have the same interruption?

Erick Flores
Yes, there is a batch mode here. Am I still sharing my screen? I think — okay. Let’s say I have this group here, and all of them need to be interrupted. I already know which group I have selected — I’ll just tap Select All and Interrupt, and send it to all of them. I’ll throw them in continuous — do 4-1 — select all three — you can see at the bottom it says your selected units, three, will interrupt 24/7. So, yeah, you’re able to do a batch interruption with this.

Ben Johnson
And not just continuous, but also the scheduled interruptions as well.

Erick Flores
Right, right — with any of the modes available there. I’m going to switch back to the slides — I have a few more to go through quickly.

Okay, I have another question here — take a second to think about this: what’s the one thing that’s most important to you for RMU management, and would you want to do that thing through your phone? Let me rephrase — what’s the one thing from your phone you’d want to be able to do for RMU management? Maybe you want to configure your units remotely, or set your alerts remotely — drop that in the chat if you have any important features you’d like to see. We don’t have a poll for this one, so —

Ben Johnson
Yeah, utilizing chat just to answer Erick’s question — if you could do one thing from your phone for RMU management, what would it be? And if you’re shy about it, you can message me directly.

Erick Flores
Okay — so, on-site versus remote. In the demo, I walked through both what on-site would look like as well as remote. There are two ways to think about it: on-site, you’re using the Bluetooth portion of the app — connecting to the device like I just did, configuring it, maybe installing it or troubleshooting your RMU. If you have a satellite unit, you’re probably going to need to push firmware on-site — you’ll be close to the unit. That’s generally what on-site activities would be.

For remote, you can do your read-on-demands anywhere you have cell signal, and you can send your interruption —
[Interruption / audio check — attribution unclear]
Are you all able to hear me? I’m seeing a — okay.

Erick Flores
Yeah, you can do your interruption — and monitor compliance reads from anywhere. I have a funny story — one of our customers I was chatting with told me they were approached by an auditor while out in the field, and the auditor was questioning their compliance reads, and asked, “So how are you monitoring your rectifiers? What kind of devices are you using?” The customer answered, “Well, I’m using Bullhorn.” And the auditor said, “Okay, can you log into Bullhorn right now and show me what that looks like?” Luckily, this customer was using a tablet and was able to log in — they were logging in regularly with the tablet using Bullhorn Web. I imagine some of you may not have that — that’s really what FieldPro will optimize, so if you’re ever caught off guard, you’ll have the app and be able to log in very quickly in that kind of scenario.

And for remote, you obviously don’t need to travel on-site to use FieldPro.

Ben Johnson
Hey, Erick — good question in chat: what’s the customizable sampling rate, and how fast can it be set?

Erick Flores
So, sampling rate — that’s not a feature we’re supporting at this moment on our RMUs. Unless we’re talking about reporting intervals — if you have an RM510, you’re able to configure that to gather measurements up to once an hour. Maybe if you have an AC monitor it’s a little different — I think we’d need a bit more detail on that one, but we can follow up after to get it squared away.

[Chat question]
How fast is the on-off sampling rate?

Erick Flores
Let’s take that one offline.

[Chat question]
Is the current Bullhorn website being discontinued?

Erick Flores
No — Bullhorn Web will be ongoing, we’re still pushing out updates to it. FieldPro will just be living alongside it — anything you’re doing in FieldPro, you’ll see on the web, because you’ll still need access to your reports, still need to do administrative things, or manage large amounts of data or a large number of RMUs — that’s challenging to do on an app. So Bullhorn Web is necessary to keep that functionality available.

On this slide, let’s talk quickly about Bullhorn Tools — some of you may have Bullhorn Tools today. I wanted to update you all that Bullhorn Tools is going to be sticking around through around the end of the year. FieldPro right now does not support legacy unit support — that’s being folded in as we speak, being worked on right now. We’re going to include the RM4-style units, like the AC monitors — they’re getting integrated into FieldPro.

But I really encourage you all to go download FieldPro today so you can get all the latest updates. If you only have RM5s, go download FieldPro and let’s just use that — I think all of our latest updates and new capabilities will be going through that.
And lastly, I’ll speed through this — the Bullhorn FieldPro mobile app is available, and it allows for on-site capabilities, so you can use it with your RM5s. The online features — those will be available — we’re forecasting the end of Q2 of this year.
I think I’m basically out of time — had to rush at the end. If you have any questions, you can email myself, email Ben, or drop questions here in the chat, and we’ll follow up with you all. I think we have a lot of your emails, so I’ll stick around for the next few minutes in case you have other questions.

Closing

Ben Johnson
Yeah, we’ll continue monitoring chat. I’m going to drop Erick’s and my email into the chat, just so people have it and can follow up with us. I’ve already messaged some people privately letting them know we’re going to follow up with them. But thank you, everyone, for joining. Again, want to be respectful of everyone’s time — I think we’ll jump off for right now. Again, please reference chat for Erick’s and my email with any questions, comments, or feedback you have. Thanks, everyone — appreciate the time.