Welcome back to Entrepreneurship Tuesday radio on why in the morning at Y254 channel is that you can find us across all our social media handles at Michelle Ashira is that you can find me across all my social in this particular session we dive into another interview that we look at we're looking at corporate governance in security industry and joining me is a young man who has done well for himself considering his age right so his name is Joseph Thucco is a knowledgeable legal and finance practitioner so his career journey is very inspirational having been self-employed when he founded MOBA to his current position heading SGA security so we're having that conversation and much more so you want to stick around because you don't want to miss out listening to what Joseph Thucco has to say when it comes to you know starting your own company challenges that you face how to overcome that and also juggling employment and self-employment so much more right here on entrepreneurship Tuesday and no father doing Joseph Thucco Karibusana a sentisana and glad to be here right so for someone who's meeting you for the first time how would you do like how would you describe yourself to this person who is Joseph Thucco um so Joseph Thucco is indeed a young finance and legal professional who is excited about making an impact um to the world um yeah i guess that's in brief what i'll say been Tuesday right here on why the morning it's entrepreneurship Tuesday when you're looking to cater for the young people and just inspire them to start their own businesses also if they employment on the two ways they can improve in particular areas just to improve in their income and looking at your down memory lane you have an interesting story so before MOBA was founded and before you tell us what MOBA is all about take us through where you built your desire of just starting something of your own okay so this started all out in nice in campus that is when i was thinking about how would i make an impact to the world and of course that's completely linked with me looking at how i'd be able to earn an income and realizing that the way to earn an income is by adding value to people giving a service etc so in that sense i started looking at what how could i add value to the world and that's slowly how we came up with ideas as you know in business and entrepreneurship your aim is to um meet a demand to meet a need of our customers yeah and what gap did you see in the market space that you decided that you know what i'm actually going to meet this particular demand okay so first of all we understood a shift in the way business was being done so you notice towards that is in 2015 um a lot of businesses were moving away from the brick and mortar businesses into more online and um on demand uh structures of business so um these are the times when Uber is coming in when when you want to get your pizza you order it in all this so convenience was becoming more and more essential to everyone so understanding that need then you look at the industry and see okay where can i apply this where could i learn apply this shift and add value to that industry but also add value to myself so that's how then we noticed and of course having been advised then maybe let's look into the alcohol delivery industry and use that as a starting point to build um an infrastructure which could be scalable and used across not only Kenya but hopefully Africa yeah well and i believe that's when moba was actually created exactly so tell us more about moba and uh how it operates and how we can actually get it yeah okay brilliant so moba is an on-demand drinks delivery application and um this is available on app store um and also on web and you can access it from anywhere you need and the point for it is to enable you to access lika um conveniently at your own convenience at your home or wherever you are and also sort of having also a social impact in that sense um that um you really don't have to drink and drive and such other hazards that would come with um the late night alcohol run for example so yeah that's that's what moba is about so how long did you take you to come up with this particular software and of course how can people like access their app and most definitely 18 years and above and above so how can people access this app before we actually moved to now you being into the security industry thank you so much and indeed right now focused on the security industry but what i'd say is um with regard to how the app came up it's such a journey into memory lane and what i'd say to everyone is have your dream dream big and i have to say you don't have to have finance or uh minkamal you have to have is that dream and for us um the journey to where we got moba two was basically a journey of three young men with a dream and who who against the odds were able to build a sustainable product all right and uh some of might be curious yeah did that particular business fail that's the reason why you decided to get into employment and now you're looking at corporate management in security industry so did that business actually you know fail now you're moving to employment what happened okay wow interesting so at at all the time i was always employed i have to confirm that so yes i was juggling that and for sure in my role in the organization was also around corporate governance and um financial management um so when we're building that i provided that insight and at that time was working in a one of the big for audit firms and through this um skills i was able to bring moba to wherever it was and it still is functioning and doing well in fact it did partner with one of the largest uh uh distributors in um in kenya alcohol distributors in kenya and is doing quite well and even today you can be able to have your drink delivered to you at any point in time so no the i did not move because the business failed but one of the interesting things for me and why i pursued employment in parallel is to build my capacity as an entrepreneur to be able to lead and create um structures for business so as you start out yes you you can walk with all the skills you have but for my dream and the dream of a lot of people is to build global businesses and that takes more skills than just running a kiosk you know and that's what i'm developing um as i work for global businesses um right now working for sga security which is a leading security provider in east africa and sitting um at the board and listening to all these directors run a global business helps you um get different perspectives as to how to run a business yourself so yes for me it's all about growth and which is a key aspect for me just have to say that you're very very wise to uh taking it upon yourself like it's intentional that you're building capacity and what i've really loved is the fact that you intend to transfer this particular knowledge back to your own business and in this situation mopa for the young person is uh listening to this conversation and they they in a place whereby they in in employment but they feel like i need to live so that i can focus on my own you know this particular idea that i have but they have not yet built capacity in a way they will give it the best this particular business idea they have so what will be your advice to that particular person wow i'd say um in business you don't have to be everything right and maybe one of the tools of you being able to um be successful is to have meaningful partnerships and partners right so if you are supposed to build capacity to bring a certain skillset to your business then you could focus on that and have um other people meet the other needs of the business so that's a tradeoff where you'd have with a good partnership you could be able to have a very good tradeoff and learn what am i supposed to bring it to the table and do i need more time to do it as you run with a few other things so i'd say forming meaningful partnerships could be the way the way forward to solve that issue all right and how are you managing juggling you know uh your own business and now being the security industry uh okay interesting so for me at at this moment i'm out of active management of the of the of the business and for sure then i don't have to juggle so there are people who are running MOBA and it is fully managed so i don't have to participate in day-to-day management but what i'd say is at the time when i was involved in active management and this was um say before pre-security industry and i'll explain why is it was all a play of balance so what you need to do is understand that one does not need to fall because of the other so you need to have a very good balance in your in your life because what i'd encourage people not only in your employment but also in your business to give 100 percent giving anything less will impact on one or the other yeah now let's get into the security industry so how did you get into security industry and uh what is your position what is your role when it comes to SGA farm well you found me in an interesting um transitional phase i was uh just say two and a half months ago i was the group corporate governance manager at SGA security now i'm the group financial controller of at SGA security and what this entails is leadership at a group level meaning across the all the the companies in East Africa for SGA and providing stewardship and support to enable business success in each of our countries of operation and how i got into it is also an interesting story for me in the sense that as i mentioned i was uh working in an audit firm before and i'd say more head hunted in the sense that i was busy going about being excellent in my job and one day i get a call saying that i'd been recommended to for this position and and of course i was curious about the opportunity and having spoken to the group ceo and chairman about the opportunity i was convinced that that was my next step in my in my journey and that's as i mentioned why i took then a back step um from entrepreneurship then i could build the corporate governance skillset well someone is watching this and people are running corporate businesses uh corporate uh you know enterprise out here we also have back at home and we need security guards and they're always wondering what kind of what is the procedure that you know the company goes uh to just do a background check on the security guards just for the safety of clients yeah brilliant so we have a very thorough screening process for our security guards to ensure that quality and also um to meet i expect the demands of our of our clients as you might be aware we deal with um not only local but international clients and we did we we are determined to be give the best quality so some of this checks we do is we have um uh a clear vetting process by our HR we have a clear investigations team and we keep on having impromptu checks just to ensure that nothing could be going on so we we are not only restricted to uh mind the guiding we also do protect cash yes i've seen that yes yes so you'll see our vehicles transporting um cash for uh banks and other big enterprises with a lot of cash movement and for that even needs higher security levels so similar measures to what we take when recruiting our team to secure large amounts of cash is the same processes which we use to ensure that we get the right guards for for you okay and also for the sake of my viewers who uh they have the love and desire to be part in the security team who is eligible to be part of uh you know the security department in you know they are guards and other different levels so who is eligible for these particular jobs okay i'd say um we hire across scope so we have um from a service perspective operational perspective where we have um we have guards we have drivers we have the range of services which we do cleaning and all and of course within the organization we have all sorts of roles which are more administrative and from finance technology and entrepreneurship and innovation um internally um which i'm also passionate about so qualifications indeed are um the minimum qualifications at least you have a diploma for certain roles in the operational perspective but also when it comes to the professional each role has a different requirement and you can get this through our website and always reach out through our website the information is there and you can be able to learn more about the opportunities and available from us okay so what type of training do uh do your security guard actually receive wow okay and that is very intense and i've watched this briefly in this basically they they go through um uh say three months cost where they get trained on basic drills um for some of our countries we even have fire fire amuse where that is uh legal and customer handling so yes that's basically the training program we've put in place for each guard once they join the organization and frequent refresher courses all right so and uh how do you guys come up with the you know the pricing of the services okay so that is uh bottom up for of course we we look at our cost and the value that we bring and uh when you're coming up with a with a price for anything the first step is to really understand the cost of the of delivering the service then plus a reasonable markup to enable the rest of the infrastructure to be able to deliver the kind of quality our clients expect okay so do you have insurance that will actually protect a client uh in a case of reliability brilliant indeed that's one of the key governance issues is not only to protect our clients from the downside risk but also as a entrepreneur and business person as you're addressing some of the youth is to also cover your business from the downside risk and indeed we have robust insurance policies to ensure that in case of anything which of course we put in as much controls as possible to prevent that in case of any bad scenario then we are able to be covered as a company but also our client is able to be covered um indeed yes and for a potential client and we are thinking that what do you need to provide when it comes to if I need your services in the aspect of my company or even if any just personal security what are certain of things that I need to provide and how fast can I get my services from your from your firm turn around is up to one day if we have everything and so we value tailor making tailor made solutions to each of our customers so um what depending on what you require so we might you might want a technological solution so you want your uh your place man in terms of CCTV and all then we'd require to come to your premises to be able to identify the the needs security needs and give you a tailored solution so it's not the kind of place where you just tell me I want 20 CCTV cameras no we'll come and tell you know you need maybe five or ten and this is where you should place them if it's about guarding again we look at what are your actual guarding needs of course you can always tell us we just want one but as as security experts we'd want to go above and beyond analyze your security needs and then recommend what's best for you so that's the the kind of partnership we have with our customers and our value driven approach to our customers so you sit down with the client and get to understand what exactly they need and custom make custom make exactly what defeats there exactly all right is the company licensed indeed um so with the security industry um is regulated in different aspects so the company is licensed to the extent that it should be licensed and um in different areas of operations then we some areas there's no requirement for license and that's one of the challenges in the security industry where you have um a lot of um and players who are not really say compliant compliant or qualified and that might create a discrepancy between the cost of that you ask why one company would charge x amount and another x y amount and that contributes to to that the lack of regulation but the interesting thing is recently I believe in 2018 um there was a private security regulation act which was passed and what the government is trying to do is to regulate the security industry in Kenya and that will be really good for not only the clients but also for the companies by controlling the the quality of all of what security the security companies yeah and for looking at the whole transition from mobar to now working in the security industry what are the some of the lessons that you're learning from this side remember we are building capacity the day to just go and just you know inject to back to your own businesses so what are so far what have you uh in terms of capacity built and so far that you look forward to you know transition it back to the business wow I'd say um a bigger understanding as to corporate governance and um the role it plays in managing so transparency the importance of transparency in your organization and communication with all stakeholders looking um from and owners or directors perspective um looking at your duty not only to generate profit but your duty to all other stakeholders your employees your clients your suppliers that is really coming out and these kinds of partnerships are very valuable in some instances you might think hey the only person who matters is the owner but as as you as I get into this we are we are in a service industry and we have over 20 000 employees you realize the value of your employee and the um the need to treat them with dignity and respect and realize how valuable they are so that's one of the areas I look at and two it's about prudent financial management right um as your organization gets bigger and better you can't run it um like say your um petikash your kitchen kash and all you really need to keep track of your um of your finances strictly and um as we really recently experienced have been um privileged to see and experience the corona virus in the sense of looking at how to manage it and I'd say um being aware and ready for unexpected scenarios is a key element for any business to consider so at any one point in time we should be able to weather a storm and that entails building buffers and always being keen on what's happening in the environment all right and looking at your bio your lawyer and your background in finance of course so do you practice law brilliant so I'm not in litigation practice okay but I am in corporate practice so I'm not too keen on going to court but that doesn't mean if I need to I won't I so I am an advocate of the high court and I have my practicing certificate I do all my continuous professional development and I'm ready to take on anyone in court if necessary so I do um apply it but now from a corporate perspective and that's where you see um issues around contracts and um and sorts of all sorts of agreements shareholders um agreements and negotiations just change the heart from being financial from accounts just change just yo I'm here I'm a lawyer let's do this and it's wow yeah you putting it that way I'd put I always tell people I made a recent comment which somebody remarked that yeah when you sit with me you're sitting with um two people at once and I think it's a valuable tool for me and actually one of my key success factors in my career in the sense that when I sit I look at things from multiple perspectives I um one of the challenges is and this is something I picked up when I was starting my career is that as a lawyer more often than not people look at it from the legality of issues but forget that every decision not only has a legal impact but has a financial impact every decision you make right so being able to look at a decision from all these angles really helps you have better decision and actually being informed and exposed to this particular information actually gives you an advantage and an upper hand exactly so at any one point in time as I listen to if um uh from a management perspective if I'm listening to a lawyer I'm able to understand and relate to what they're saying but also link and understand what does this mean from a financial and general business perspective and vice versa when I'm listening to a finance person and explain something to me I can quickly pick up what are the legal issues the tax issues and all other issues that relate and from even my experience in entrepreneurship and all then also um having experienced how would I put it um having experienced the operational aspects of business then you can also link a third lens to looking at situations about um how does this affect my day to day operations and success of my business so yes um I'd say all these things help me have a more holistic approach to issues and decisions yes so the country was in a recession period whereby uh you know lockdown you know we have we still have kafi but there was time like it was last year that nothing was moving back in terms of economic or economical and looking at you you enjoyed two sides of this story in terms of MOBA uh I believe like MOBA operates quite well during recession considering like you know uh people back home and they have time in their hands and probably leisure they will like they would like to drink and when you look about the other side of the security industry whereby I believe COVID-19 really affected uh all sector of industries and uh security industry being involved tell us about the both worlds the both worlds MOBA and now in security industry for sure thank you for that um I'd say for sure um I see the opportunities in both and for example for the for MOBA of course having people at home or people not allowed to live then means then they have to get things delivered and I'm sure that was for the benefit of all um how would I put it on demand um businesses so food alcohol uh I'd say even delivery of shopping and because nobody wanted to get into the public and interact with people so yes indeed that was an interesting perspective but we also have to look at it from the side that there was maybe less disposable income some people were a bit people who are a bit more um cautious about their spending and only spent on more essential rather than um how would I put it rather than uh leisure leisure because um at some point in time people held back their cash because they never knew what how it was going to be we were so uncertain we were still uncertain about the future yes but at that particular moment it was totally frightening it was frightening and we'd see people go to supermarkets and clear things and stock up and people who are really not spending discretionary uh on discretionary items but that trend definitely seems to be changing now the next thing from a security perspective it's been um it's a mix of blessings and all because as I mentioned we work in all these businesses are interrelated and so for example if you are a security company which deals majorly with clients who are in the hospitality industry in the airline business and such then maybe horticulture etc then you would be really adversely impacted because this clients are closing their businesses reducing their demand etc and for sure I know the finance people who are addressing such companies who are at hard terms to make sure that they create sustainability and resilience in those times but um on the flip side there was more demand for security in some instances where there was a rise in the insecurity maybe people are not at the offices and therefore you need security there or you're at generally those are feeling that hey there's an increased security risk because um yeah maybe unemployment and all that so from that perspective it also impacted on businesses which could take up the opportunities well on a on a different note uh would say from our business perspective right um we have a range of businesses so you say you're in cash business those less cash everybody was using impesa everybody wanted to you you don't want to tell it was called a disease vector well one time when cash was not a good thing anyway um so that tells you that was an impact um for people and um you needed to walk around that and ensure that you're able to weather the storm it's starting slowly to improve and that's something to look at think about um uh technical installation so you were talking about say you want to have a security setup in um in your large organization people are putting a lot of decision makers who are putting on hold high carpets um that's capital investment projects so you don't want to spend too much during this time because you don't know how long you'll survive so if somebody was how the markets are going to respond so exactly and people were cutting costs at that point in time so in that sense then um it it had an impact on the security industry and finally the the whole aspect about cutting cost then you some people for them security is an essential service but for some other people they consider it as a luxury and they say yeah right so all this came into play and um from a business perspective we had to look at this and we had to do a lot of agressive financial stress testing and planning to consider all these circumstances scenarios and our reaction to the materialization of any of them and so for my um what i do for the entrepreneurs here is that um yeah always be able as i talked about earlier to assess all the risks possible risk in your organization and plan accordingly okay yes so are some of the ways that you guys are planning to prepare for the future for the future which is actually uncertain in a situation whereby something like this would happen because i believe like uh being you know caught being you know getting just being gotten off guard so and i believe right now uh particular mitigation as a company you are actually putting up for the sake of the future okay interesting and i'd say common approaches to this is to uh first of all create and sure you have a buffer and that sometimes is it can be too late if you're thinking of coming up with a cash buffer um when the uncertainty has already happened so it's always something you want to do earlier um also two is to create um partnerships for financing if you feel that you will need financing um three is to cut on discretionary spending so that you can build resilience right and also four and i would say actually should have put it at number one is to assess the market and also identify the opportunities because in every bleak situation there's always some opportunities for how would i put this some great opportunities for business so for instance um what we've seen in the security industry is looking at creating screening material where everybody needs now at the moment at the entrance you need to ensure people are checked in different ways that's an opportunity for for the security industry um it's interesting just to step out you know for example people who manufacture alcohol move their production now to produce hands sanitizer you know right so it's it's about looking at the glasses half full rather than half empty so i think as much as you try and meet to get to the downside risk you want to look at the you really have to look at opportunities and be an optimist in this kinds of circumstances all right what couple of achievements that looking back when you started moba and where you are right now that you look back and you be like hmm that was an achievement wow interesting um i'd have to narrow them down to a few but i'd say um at that point in time i was pretty impressed um building a business from scratch and even being able to get meaningful partnerships with significant uh players in the industry and being able to deliver a service um yeah you know at the before that i never thought i could do that all right and two i'd say also um from my career perspective i think i've achieved decent growth and i've been able to make an impact in all the organizations i've worked with and particularly now at the SGA to be able to add value to all our stakeholders and builds to the um growth of that company is an achievement for me from a personal perspective speaking about growth you're still you're still building capacity taking it back to your business so what does the future look look like for joseph doko brilliant three years down the road how many years three three years three years three years down the road three years um i'd say three years down the road uh will still be building capacity i think there is a lot to be gained and a lot of impact to be improved and i'd like to actually um say that entrepreneurship is not something which you only do when you're outside employment when you are in employment you can choose to be an intrapreneur that's what they call it an intrapreneur and create solutions and the interesting thing about this perspective if your ideas are great they get more traction because of maybe capital backing and excellence in that sense so um i'm also not of us to the idea of intrapreneur excellence and um yeah being part of changing the landscape of the security industry at least through SGA you mentioned something very important i've had this countless number of times yes but by people who are in employment and when they retire that's like oh i need to start a business i need to be an intrapreneur but you just bring it across that it's not something that you do after yes actually very good so that is the time we had which you just said they were looking at corporate governance in security industry how can people reach out to you if they want to you know keep up having conversation with you and do you have any new projects coming up maybe business ideas or any company you're studying up you never know you never know um indeed um i'd say for sure you you never know i've definitely been scoping for market gaps and as i said i'm thinking global and global solutions and hence my approach and to it regards to my um how you can access me um you can access me on LinkedIn through uh my profile is joseph thuku and also um you could also reach me through from a security perspective um to through jay thuku at sga security dot com okay thank you very much joseph joseph for creating time uh for us to have this conversation i'm looking forward to having you over again and this time round i will maybe we'll be talking about a new company which is just started thank you so much it is a pleasure being here too and i look um i'm meant to those um wishes absolutely okay so guys back at home make sure okay sorry make sure you stay tuned for another conversation coming up uh we'll be sampling your comments here on the question of the day so make sure you stay tuned i'll be right back on more on entrepreneurship Tuesday on why in the morning at michela shirei so you can find me across all my social at y254 channel so you can find us across all our social media handle so make sure you don't don't touch that dial i'll be right back


Hello and welcome to the session. I am Shashi and I am going to help you with the following question. Question says, find the area of the shaded region in figure 12.20 if the radii of two concentric circles with center O are 7 cm and 14 cm respectively and angle AOC is equal to 40 degrees. This is the given figure 12.20. First of all let us understand that area of sector is equal to theta upon 360 multiplied by pi r square. Here theta is the angle made by the sector at the center of the circle and r is the radius of the circle. This is the key idea to solve the given question. Let us now start with the solution. Now we know these two circles are concentric circles that is they have common center O. Now we know that radius of the outer circle is equal to 14 cm, radius of inner circle is equal to 7 cm. This is given in the question. We have to find the area of this shaded region. If we subtract area of sector OVD from area of sector OAC we get area of shaded region AC dB. First of all let us find out area of sector OAC. Now area of sector OAC is equal to 40 degrees upon 360 degrees multiplied by pi multiplied by square of 14. We know area of sector is equal to theta upon 360 degrees multiplied by pi r square. Here theta is the angle made by the sector at the center of the circle and r is the radius of the circle. Now we will find area of sector OBD. This is equal to 40 degrees upon 360 degrees multiplied by pi multiplied by square of 7 cm square. Here radius is equal to 7 cm and we know central angle that is theta is equal to 40 degrees. So substituting corresponding values of theta and r in the formula of area of sector we get area of sector OBD. Now area of shaded region is equal to area of sector OAC minus area of sector OBD. Now substituting corresponding values of area of sector OAC and area of sector OBD in this expression we get area of shaded region is equal to 40 degrees upon 360 degrees multiplied by pi multiplied by square of 14 minus 40 degrees upon 360 degrees multiplied by pi multiplied by square of 7. Now clearly we can see that 40 degrees upon 360 degrees multiplied by pi is common in both the terms. So taking 40 upon 360 multiplied by pi common we get this expression.  Now substituting value of pi in this expression we get 1 upon 9 multiplied by 22 upon 7 we know pi is equal to 22 upon 7 multiplied by 7 multiplied by 21. Now simplifying further we get 1 upon 9 multiplied by 22 upon 7 multiplied by 7 multiplied by 21. Now 7 will cancel 7 and we know 3 multiplied by 3 is equal to 9 and 3 multiplied by 7 is equal to 21. Now this is equal to 154 upon 3 centimeter square. So we get area of this shaded region is equal to 154 upon 3 centimeter square. So this is our required answer this completes the session hope you understood the solution take care and have a nice day.


Live from Orlando, Florida, extracting a signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering Pentaho World 2015. Now your host, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Welcome back everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live here at Pentaho World 2015. Pentaho was one of the very first customers that we ever interviewed when this whole big data meme started out. We were at the early years in Hadoop World and Strata. Chris Jansen is here as the director of user experience at Black Arrow, a company that services telcos doing some cool stuff with data. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So first of all Pentaho World. This is my first Pentaho World, only Pentaho World second. So I guess I get a pass. But have you been here before? No. What are you making the show? This is my first so far as well. It's been great. Some of the keynotes that we had this morning were really nice. Yeah, I thought it was a good mix of, you know, so high level, you got a hardcore, you know, practitioner with FINRA. So let's tell us about the Black Arrow story. What does Black Arrow do? Director UX? I mean, I guess it's self-explanatory, but maybe talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so Black Arrow provides a platform that enables multi-screen solutions for data and for advertising. So we serve operators like Comcast, Charter, Rogers in Canada, Virgin Media in the UK. And through them, we also serve the content providers, so Disney and AMC and so forth, are all onboarded onto our platform so they can do dynamic ad insertion on the different screens that they serve. Yeah, so we, as every user knows about dynamic ad insertion, your job is to make sure that it works. It's effective. It's not just get this out of here. It's actually, oh, that's interesting. Yeah. That's a hard job. Yeah, my job ultimately is to make our platform as easy to use for the operators so that they can get in and get out and really set up our system and then ultimately set up campaigns, report on that, and really know what's happening in the system. So kind of the Google of your world, right? Is that fair? Yeah, fair enough, yeah. So talk about how you've used technology and what's changed. So, I mean, what's changed recently was we added Pentaho as part of our reporting solution and what that allowed us to do is really free up the reporting so that the user can define what they want. So before we worked with them to find reports that were very broad, had a lot of rows of data that ultimately was difficult really to deal with. They'd have to take it somewhere else like Excel and kind of distill it down from there. What we get with Pentaho is an ad hoc reporting tool that now we can set up the general model, give all the dimensions and metrics for them, and they can either use our standard reports that we've defined because we know the space, modify those and save them as new ones for themselves, or define ones that we haven't thought of. So talk more about how that works. You have this bog of data. And what do you do with that data and what comes out the other end? Yeah, so we get a lot of data, and as I said we support multiple screens, which means we support multiple platforms. And so we get data in different formats coming into our system. We end up loading those logs and that return path data. And what I mean by return path data is information about what actually happened in the session. So did the user watch this particular ad? Did they happen to fast forward and skip some of it? What was their engagement on it and so forth based off of the events that we get from the player? So pretty deep knowledge about what the user does. But then you enable your customers to build their own dashboards essentially, right? Right, so we distill that information into a format that they can actually use within our visualization tool and our ad hoc reporting tool. And so they're able to create visualizations that allow them to see trends and analytics that they wouldn't have been able to see before with our own reporting or their reporting. One of the important things that we enable for them is since we're multi-screen, we bring all that data together into one place, which is something that's kind of new to them before they've had these different systems that report in different ways and it's really hard for them to actually get that data together and be able to report on it. Okay, so part of your solution is a visualization piece and making that easy. Is that something that you guys developed your own? It's actually built on top of Pentaho's analyzer. Okay, so you use Pentaho's Viz. And then what does the user get? They kind of get this sort of drag and drop, customizable environment. So they get this easy to use drag and drop environment. They have a list of the dimensions that are available, the metrics. As they drag and drop, it builds that out either as a report or as a visualization. It's very guided as far as you put metrics in this place. You put dimensions over here. How to do a cross-tab report is all kind of explained within the UI. Kind of simple to use and that's one of the reasons why we chose it. So there have been other tools over time that simplify creation of cubes and reports. What was it that made Pentaho so much more effective in bringing together this multi-screen capability that you're talking about? So it's what we're going to be able to do going forward on top of it. So the first thing that we wanted to address is really give this ad hoc reporting. There's a lot of data in there and there's a lot of data that needs to be processed in a certain way and that's where our data hub that's using Spark comes into play. So in the future we're going to be able to actually open it up for them to do the kind of reporting where we can do some custom reports for them that's ultimately they define and then we run on top of Spark. It may be a much longer running job because we're doing things like unique counts that if you're doing a true unique count as opposed to an estimation, you have to go back to the transactional data transactions in a single campaign. Can you talk more about Spark, maybe the existing infrastructure or pre-Spark infrastructure and then how you're using Spark and what pieces Spark is complementing, supplementing, replacing, enhancing? Right, so previously we had your run-of-the-mill kind of MySQL data warehouse where we would do custom ETL work into the data warehouse and then ultimately write store procedures to be able to do the reports. What we had, what we moved to was having Hadoop ultimately as a data source. We get the raw logs in, we load those in into a, in the raw format. We then transform that and put it into a parquet format within Hadoop still and then using Spark we do transformations, aggregations, enrichment of the data based off of what's there and prepare that again, we write that in Hadoop so it's accessible there but then we push that to what we call MySQL hub which is InfoBright which is basically an enhanced kind of MySQL database that runs on top of MySQL and we push that data there which is what Pentaho ultimately talks to. So using Spark in conjunction with Hadoop will you move certain work to Spark that you normally would have done in Hadoop? So our entire ETL process has moved on to Spark so all the work's being done there and we also offer customer reports as needed to our customers that things that are farther in depth can't just do for every, you know, as a run-in-the-mill kind of report and so all those jobs will be run directly off of Spark. So you're replacing major portions of your Hadoop infrastructure with Spark completely or not? Well, so it's working in conjunction because Spark is just on top of Hadoop. It's just enhancing what we already have there. Is there work that you, you know, like say, you just mentioned ETL and other pieces that would you've been able to do that previously or is this Spark I think at the scale that we continue to road to we were doing things as far as we were enabling that reporting but as we are running into more scale it's to continue we need that solution. So, Chris I had a question regarding this pipeline looks like it has a lot of latency built in because there are a lot of discrete steps. Are you trying to shrink that? And in the future what technology might play a role where you're getting in data on one end and making it accessible to the customer to operationalize it either through human or automatically on the other end? We already kind of get the information to them relatively quickly. I think the longest run time we have is an hour for some of the ETL processes. But yeah, different platforms give us data in different ways so your older qualm environments that most of TV has run off all the video on demand has run off even the return path data takes time it usually takes less than a day but sometimes we have a window of three days that we'll have to continually try to match that information within the system. Good. I'm just curious because the latency, how fast all this information goes through the pipeline has a determination on what technology you choose so would it be you'll take the lowest or slowest common denominator and you make your decision about what to use based on that or would you say the really latency sensitive stuff will use new technology? It's a balancing act. Ultimately, I think as you said it's going to depend on the platform that we're supporting and how frequently we're getting that feed of data you know in the future we may need to enhance what Spark's doing to be able to do more frequent data ingest depending on the platform. And what help us tie that back to what's going on what ads are being bid on or presented video to on demand so might be as three days what's the one that's closer to real time? So we support different platforms we support digital platforms that information comes through vast ultimately how return path data comes for that is much different with someone hits a pixel and that says hey someone had an impression or this was a fast forward event and then we record that and log that immediately ultimately we then put that into our ETL process and then expose that into the reporting. You guys won an excellence award for this work talk about that a little bit what's that mean to you why do you think you won? It really to me validated things that I was trying to get out of Pentaho is really the seamless integration into our application and I think us winning the award really speaks to that we did the right things to really make it feel like it was a unified part of our our product and that we were able to do a couple enhancements on our own extending Pentaho based off of what it provides to give additional user experience gains within that. You know I was listening to the keynote this morning from the chief product officer and he laid out this dazzling vision that goes way beyond what we used to think of you know business intelligence. How does that roadmap fit in with your with your plans? What would you build on it that you know that you hadn't thought of before or what alternative road maps are you considering? So there's a lot of different aspects in the different parts of the roadmap that we're interested in Spark when we started was really in the labs so we're not really using that in PDI and I think ultimately as that grows up within to the PDI infrastructure on their roadmap it would be very interesting for us to start leaning on that for our ETL process and so forth is one potential option we have once Spark becomes a more integrated piece of their platform. I was excited to see a lot of the enterprise hardening that he was mentioning and the continued hardening you know we want to make Pentaho feel like it's just part of our product and it's seamless and so as they add the features there that really allows us to give a seamless experience and also allow us to make decisions for the user as they're using the application so one thing they added in one of their recent releases was the ability for us to change models for the user without the user knowing what's happening so what that allows us to do is really like to deploy a new predictive or prescriptive model so we've already the model that describes what dimensions and metrics exist what the hierarchies of those metrics the cubes yes so the feature that they gave us allowed us to programmatically switch between those cubes and so now we don't have to ask the user choose which cube you want to work with today right they can just go into the report say I want this dimension this dimension in this dimension and we're able to decide we need to use this cube and this is the most efficient cube for that and we switch to that seamlessly dynamically dynamically yes so it's a really nice thing that really gives a huge user experience gain they don't have to think about it they don't have to think about it they don't have to know what our architecture is to be able to do their reports oh you mean they just say what dimensions they want they just drag and drop that you have something that's called campaign name I just drag and drop campaign name we have some things that are high cardinality like program and if they drag in program we have to switch to a special cube that has that high cardinality item in it so it allows us to quickly do that and really they don't have to worry about what our architecture is they just have to know what their information they're trying to get to that's essentially a cube template that you can invoke on the fly they don't think about it that's critical to getting data in the hands of you I was talking about citizens analytics today several times I mean the important piece of the analytics and reporting is breaking down the walls of having to know what the data is understanding it and just you want them to be able to drill in and seamlessly go down through the data and that's what they have provided so it was a big data analytics practitioner you know we've heard a lot in the last couple years about the complexity of a dupe and the challenges of a dupe and how hard it is to get up and running and how hard it is to get ROI out of it you guys have been solving that problem you're actually running your business on it what do you want to see from the ecosystem from the community do you agree first of all that it's still too complex does it have to be simplified or is that a competitive advantage for you it's complex you know it may be so I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic a little bit yeah I mean a good thing is we understand our space and our data and we're able to kind of curate things for our customers so that I mean it does give us an advantage but I do you know as someone that's in charge of user experience want to see continually breaking down that wall of the difficulty it is to get at the data and do the visualizations ultimately we do want to enable our customers to be able to not have to call us and say how do I do this or how do I get to this data we want to make it available for them so that they can get to the data as quickly as possible and find things that they didn't know before they can find audiences that they didn't know existed that they're under utilizing and then monetize on those audiences understand what the user experience is of the ads that are going in if I do this you know this many ads do I get a better user experience am I getting more engagement from my customers or what type of customers am I getting certain audience segments that perform better for this this ad load than that ad load so there's a lot of possibilities that we can delve into that data and help guide them to see things that help them monetize and optimize their system either guided exploration or simplified exploration so they don't need the guiding right I think ultimately it's going to be a little bit of both as I said we're experts in our space so I want to present things that are guided dashboards that really allow them to go down in and not have to know that much but then you're going to have more sophisticated users that are need to come in and they want to be unguided so that they can get to other data that we may not have thought of how did you guys launch this business was it a situation Chris where you said okay now the technology is available we've got the skill sets let's somebody wrote a business plan got funded and said go or was it a legacy business that you then sort of supercharged with the analytic we we've we've always been in focused on dynamic ad insertion depending on the platform early on the company saw an opportunity within video on demand as an underutilized or underrepresented area so we kind of focused there and that's what we're known for and now that we've established that we're moving far beyond that I mean different platforms in different use cases being able again to provide audience data and decorate that and really allow them to explore their audience data as well in your primary focus is enabling the efficacy of inserting ads making it easy for your customers to do that well I guess I should say the ease with which they can insert as what about the efficacy of the ad itself I mean that's not your role but so because we're the ad router and everything comes through us through us ultimately we're getting all that return path data and that is part of so after we've enabled this ad insertion we decided who gets what ad and what ad should be served it's not the work's not done there that's where the reporting really comes into play where now we can look at what happened as a result of that and then allow them to try different things A B test what they want to do with ad loads as I said or be able to tell agencies how well this ad did versus that ad so that's all part of the solution that we provide and the time in which you could actually provision an ad has obviously been dramatically compressed how has that affected you know hit rates and conversions so again it depends on the platform and so we get a lot of information about the ads but ultimately the operator's still in charge of working with those agencies to get the ad onto the platform that they need so whether it's a CDN or onsite a pump for video on demand for example well so the reason I'm asking is as a consumer you can tell it's getting better but it's still not great right so there's a lot of upside would you agree with that as an industry do you feel like there's a ton of upside in terms of the efficacy of the ad placement yeah I mean there's a lot of things that as they're exploring into these different screens they really have to see how they can monetize and that's something that we're helping so that they can get different ads on as opposed to you know maybe you're used to seeing the same ad repeated during every single break and you kind of that doesn't end up making a good user experience so all the work that we do to better enable them to do different campaigns be able to track that kind of thing or even prevent that kind of action which our platform allows for allows them to increase your user experience and ultimately makes you want to come back and actually watch that platform so I'm like the ad serving industries like best customer potentially because I'm a sucker for an offer yeah and I buy a ton of stuff online if I see something that appeals to me I'm like oh I'll stop what I'm doing and grab it so I just feel like the industry has a huge upside yeah and should be good news for you guys yeah I mean ultimately I think the upside for consumers as well is what we enable again their monetization of this allows them to offer more content so what I like to say is don't think of it as I'm making you I'm forcing you to watch ads I'm actually getting more content on demand for you right yeah so I want to go back to sort of a meta question which is sure you know Pentaho has this sort of end-to-end approach to tools that were very different from the data warehouse world where you have kind of the exploration you know kind of exploration and then the kind of ETL over here what is the value out of having it all integrated together in one big single-vendor tool chain in the you know big data world so I think there's a lot of things that if it's a single chain that they can do and that one piece can pick up immediately from the other so you know a lot of the things that they kind of talked on the road map of being able to dynamically get doing data extract and then automatically have PDI build that model for you and that then gets published and then the user is able to go into analyzer and seamlessly use that then understanding that entire workflow and being able to provide that gives us a huge advantage because it allows us to automate more easily so that's something that we're definitely looking forward to using in the future all right Chris we have to leave it there congratulations on the excellence award thanks very much for coming to theCUBE thanks for having me all right keep right there we'll be back with our next guest this is theCUBE we're live from Pentaho World in Orlando right back Line from Orlando Florida extracting a signal from the noise it's theCUBE


I am here to discuss with you on topic raft foundation. What are the learning outcomes of this session? At the end of the session, students will be able to explain necessity of raft foundation, its types and suitability. What is raft foundation dear students? Rraft foundation also known as mat foundation is actually a thick concrete slab resting on a large area of soil reinforced with steel, supporting columns or walls and transfer loads from the structure to the soil.  Generally raft foundation is spread over the entire area of the structure it is supporting and raft foundation is generally used to support structures like residential or commercial buildings where soil condition is poor, storage tanks, silos, steel equipment etc. So raft foundation is used when bearing capacity of soil is low and also structure is heavily loaded. So here you can see a photograph of raft foundation, complete slab is provided. So beam and slab network is used to transfer load coming from the super structure through columns to the soil below. So let us see working principle of raft foundation. To get a better idea about when to use raft foundation it is important to understand how raft foundation works. So raft foundation transmits the total load from the building to the entire ground core area. Stress distribution mechanism of raft foundation is very simple, total weight of the structure and cell weight of the mat is calculated and is divided by the total area of the foundation it is covering to calculate the stress on the soil. As in the case of raft foundation the contact area of the foundation with soil is much more than any other type of foundation. So the load is distributed over the larger area and thus the stress on soil is lesser and the possibility of shear failure of soil is reduced. So what happens larger area of this particular foundation helps in distributing the load over a larger area. So intensity of pressure on soil below will be less, intensity will be less and shear failure of soil will also be reduced due to this type of foundation. Now when to choose this raft foundation? Remember dear friends raft foundation is preferred when soil has a low bearing capacity then load of the structure has to be distributed over a larger area. Again individual or any other foundation area would approximately cover 50 percent of the total ground area beneath the structure. If you are providing individual footing and total footing area of all these columns say is more than 50 percent of the total ground area beneath the structure then there is no fun in providing individual footings you can better go for mat foundation or raft foundation. The columns or walls are placed so closely individual footings would overlap in those cases. So mat foundation is the best alternative for these types of conditions. And also when stress on soil is to be reduced or needs to be reduced because soil is of low bearing capacity. There is a possibility of differential settlement in case individual footing is used. When soil state are unpredictable and contain pockets of compressible soil, when basement is to be constructed and any other type of footing cannot be used advantageously. So in all these cases you can go for raft foundation remember. Now let us see types of raft foundation. There are different types of raft foundation. Now few of them are flat plate mat foundation, plate thickened under the column, two-way beam and slab raft, plate raft with pedestals, piled raft, rigid frame mat or cellular raft foundation. So let us see one after another these in little detail. So flat plate mat is the simplest form of raft foundation. This type of mat is used when the columns and walls are uniformly spaced at small intervals and the subjected loads are also relatively small. Reinforcement is placed in both directions and more reinforcement is required at the column locations and load bearing walls. Here we can see a photograph of this particular type. So here only a slab is provided, flat plate raft foundation it is called. There are no beams provided, these slabs are not thickened anywhere. Some thickness is provided. So such type of raft foundation is called flat plate raft foundation. You can see plan and section also and these are used for low loads. What are the limitations of this? The thickness of this type of raft foundation is generally restricted within 300 mm remember within 300 mm for economic reason. A thicker slab would not be economical. So up to 300 mm thickness you can go for this type of foundation. Now next plate plate thickened under the column. So next type is the plates are or this raft slab is thickened under the columns. You can see in the photograph here. Below the column the thickness of slab is increased so that the slab can be rigidified and the load on this particular foundations can be more, this can take more load. Now next type is two-way beam and slab raft. So in this particular type of raft foundation what is done? Beams are cast monolithically with the slab connecting columns and walls. Here you can see two-way beam and slab raft. So load from column comes to the beams and beams transfer the load to the slab below. So this is two-way beam and slab raft type of foundation. Now next is plate raft with pedestals. So in this particular type of foundation what is done? The function of this mat is same as that of flat plate thickened under columns and in this mat pedestals, in this mat foundation pedestals are provided at the base of the columns. So here you can see pedestals are provided at the base of the column over slab. That means thickness of column is increased when it comes to in contact with slab. So here you will find that load from slab is distributed, load from column is distributed over a larger area when it gets transferred to slab. So that punching shear failure is prevented or intensity of pressure is minimized at the points of junction. Piled raft, this type of raft foundation is supported on piles. A piled raft is used when the soil at a shallow depth is highly compressible and the water table is high. Piles under raft help in reducing settlement and provides resistance against buoyancy. So we will see a photograph, here you can see. So piles are used and over these piles a raft is provided, remember.  So it is called piled raft foundation and when this particular type of foundation is used when the soil at a shallow depth is highly compressible and also water table is high and this type of foundation will reduce settlement and provide resistance against buoyancy because water is there in this particular area below the foundation. Resid frame mat is the next type. In this type of raft the foundation walls act as a dip beam. Resid frame mat is referred when columns carry extremely heavy loads and the connecting beams exceeds 90 centimeter depth, remember. So here you can see this is a rigid frame mat. So depth of these particular walls are increased, voids are provided and depths are increased. So two slabs are there parallel to each other at certain height. So what will happen? When you increase height moment of resistance will be increased and to observe economy or make the structure economical, voids are provided in between. So cost of material will also be less and moment of resistance will be much more because depth is more. These beams which are in between two voids those may act as dip beams also remember depending upon the span. So let us stop while here dear students. Here are two questions for you answer them neatly. The first question is the thickness of flat mat type of raft foundation is generally restricted within dash dash dash mm for economic reason and rigid frame mat is referred when columns carry extremely heavy loads and the connecting beam exceeds dash dash centimeter depth. Come on write down your answers neatly. Here are the answers first question B 300 mm and second question C 90 centimeter. So these are the correct answers hope you must have written them correctly. These are the references for today's session. Thank you.


Hi everyone, my name is Benedict from ASAPU and today I will show you the new ASAPU payload designer, which is a powerful tool that simplifies the creation and management of data payloads. For that I'm going to transaction as a dev design and that will bring me here to the first screen of the payload designer. Here I already find a variety of pre-delivered content, so I could directly start with taking one of the existing templates, let's say for gruntrack material, purchase order, reservation, doesn't matter, that is already all inside here.  So that could be, that could be multiple versions, like a small version, a medium and a large version. So let's say the small version does contain two tables and the bigger version will contain even more tables. So you could separate that like that. So in that screen you see we have a header section and that is giving me here a status. I will say that is one is here in development and I can also give it here some descriptions. And we have a table section here and below that we see the fields. That is empty now, but I will add a table with the join builder here. So I'm going to click on add table and I'm going to add the VBAC table and also the VBAP table. They are directly connected here and I want to have, that is now an inner join. I want to have it as left outer join, which I can do here directly. That was previously not possible. That was only, that could only be done with the CDS view. So the database views and SAP they always have an inner join, but now I can do that here directly with the payload designer. I'm going back and you see inside the table section we see the VBAC table and I could use a where clause here. So I can filter on the data here directly and I can rename those table names. So if I don't want to have VBAC table inside the JSON that we send to the cloud, I want to call that here header because it's more describing to me. I can do that here directly. And I see here the parent child relationship between these tables. So in case we're on an even higher level than the, with more tables than it could be like three or four. And here inside the field section we see that all the key fields have been added here directly by its own. And I will also rename that field here to client because it's also more describing to me and I will add some more fields here by double clicking on this table. Just add the fields here also from the VBAC table of a couple of more fields. And then I click save and that's basically it. Then I did create now my payload data view. So I'm going to copy that one and into my existing configuration. And here you see we have the fields for that payload view name on also for the version going to hit save. And I'm going to a sales order transaction via zero two.  And we can look on the payload if we go to the ACI monitor, I'm going to filter on the connection that I just showed you. And here we see the last entry. That's what we just triggered and under views and show trace. I can look at the JSON that was sent. And you see that's what we did in the payload designer here. So that is VBAC table that is now called header. And also that we have here the client field. That's what we also changed. And we have the items table here, which is the VBAC table. So that's basically all you have to do to create your own payloads. So yeah, thank you very much for your time and see you soon.


First of all There's the steel 2260 That's coming out. There's a chimney breast out. Right that literally took minutes. I'm not joking Done right if you're watching this Then I've got permission to film. I haven't actually asked just yet so I'll be asking in a minute We're actually on a steel job today in a bathroom separate bathroom and toilet and we're knocking the bathroom into one one room It's at the back of the bungalow And we're going to work around the side So I'll just take around show you what we're doing First of all There's the steel 2260 nice Nice hand double size and then that's for the padstones. There's one padstone. There's that's for the other padstone Brought accros Vicks brought his accros and the strong boys and Yeah, we're all geared up Alex's in currently halfway through Sweden trip So I'm missing him a bit, but then it's a bit of a rush job So Vicks agreed to come and help me with this one. So it's just me and Vic on this one the Perhaps going in Vic's plan Which is there Came in a bit late Customers start a bit later. So this is the entry toilet bathroom So that's the wall That's coming out.  We can take everything around Which is much more efficient and better for the customer. So, um Yeah, I'm hobbling along Just getting organized and we can get stuck into it. We're gonna put the accros on the inside But anyway, I'll stop walking out and take you inside and show you And as I say, if you're watching this, I've had permission Past 11 Well, like I say, it does only start at half nine. We go so far. We've come cover this Funny looking window Which has been opened up and bricked up again Here's the old lead cable To a wooden back box proper old stuff Yeah You see where the brick works dropped. That's a piece of 3b2 there. It looks like this door's been opened up So, um, that's a bit crumbly. So we're doing my favor putting a steel in there We're just gonna get the accros up As high as possible trying to get three in On there, on there, on there Maybe I'll get a tile to sink This is Vicks' side. We've got all the studs to work out With the trusty saw as well And we've been working on the tiles As you can see, it's a lot higher on this side So there's the, um, all the heights are going to my deep bathroom side Um A lot of pipes here, hoping they're dead A lot of pipes there that are still alive, so we've got to be careful dropping stuff on the floor So at the moment, we're getting the, um, getting a lot of this crap cleared out So we've got a bit of room to work and then crack on again Once I've got all this down, I can start getting the accros and strong boys set up on this side Well, I'm gonna get all this stripped off first Not much to go So we're getting there Looking for me Vicks doing all the walking up and down There's another fine example of crappy lintel Piece 3B2 on three bits of wood I don't know what's above that. I think it might be a wall With the pearling on top, so it's not like it's a It's just a Nothing wall. It's holding stuff up So yeah, we know him Oh, steel I'm gonna go into that wall Flush back to that and into that wall. That's a chimney breast So yeah That's where we're up to Have a tidy up and then crack on It's dusty now, where we're up to Bit of plastic on the third wall That can come off as a welcome zone I don't think we're gonna stitch through that I think we're just gonna chop them with our borscht as we go down because the It's very very wobbly this wall As you can see why there That's it Half a brick and a bit of tin, but it's holding this wall And even that this is all dropped See the crack up there So those are the pockets with our crows And we're gonna knock that brick out there That one there And we can get one there On there, on there After dinner when vix took all the stuff to the skip We're gonna load fresh buckets and we can drop all this And the props go in this side So the steel can go in this side We just might have to thread it behind this plastic pipe Today after lunch update That's all the crap gone Well, for now That's a band load A lot of buckets both So this is a chimney of rest, that's why it's so big You see because there So we're working up to that And then we're working up to that wall The base is from there To there, I think that's 1.8 Slightly bigger So I've got the steel 2260 Which gives us 200 plus each side Because that's going to be bang on That's a bit ropey that side So I'll add a bit extra Just brought an echo in me Strong boys have passed through the window Vix just going to get rid of all the crap That thing Absolutely brilliant as usual Brilliant piece of kit that Straight through all that student was there And then I've got the first echo around So I'm going to get that put up now Two pockets knocked out And then I get Going once that's in I'm not this last breakout which is that one in the corner That one, the full brick Then I can prop the piece and the full brick We're probably going to lose this one here Because it looks quite loose I might even put Just put an echo without the strong boys just underneath Stop it dropping And then the steel's going to fit underneath all that So the steel's going to be Two courses down It's going to be here Basically It's going to be a good 150 160 above where the old door was So it's going to be more head height And then this side It's going to look a lot lower because this ceiling's a lot higher So they can either lower the ceiling So a little three wall Leave it as it is but Two different ceiling heights in a fun room shape So let's get this propped up Get it safe and then start knocking it down That literally took minutes I'm not joking I'm just lifting off Come on So Be careful with that brick Might just pop that out Yeah Soon have this down and pass it through into the vick Get it all cleared up And then take the piece out with the steel and the padstone Happy days All the knocking down's done There's our pocket There's our other pocket We've got two bricks drop Three bricks drop And then We're going to get this crack in time Just to get it mixing Once I'm patching all this up I've got the steel in the vick It's quarter to four now So it should really be quarter past four But we did start about hour and a half late I was just arrived Get rid of this dust So I'm going to head out now Get mixing And get ready for vacuuming So we're catching a bit We're going to sink for a while I'll just run around And then I'll come back for a few minutes Two bricks down please Yeah for this Padstone there, just spin that around a bit And you're done with that That's it, you're done just there by the brush So you grab that You got that back with it Are you okay there? And now You're going to be able to relax Yeah, you're going to be able to relax Bring it through Go back to me You can go up I'll go up You know what I'm going to do Yep Do you know what I'm going to do I'm going to use your hands if it's safer Mine are a bit dodgy I don't know that one We're going to have a worry again Oh hang on If it's in the middle If it's got little clips inside You need clips You just clip on That's sad If it's in the middle Put it onto the upper Oh yeah I'm just going to chill Do you want to move that up a little bit By the next day Spin that up up that way for me All right Move that up What are you doing Just up onto the shelf Put it on the shelf Oh yeah So It needs basically Going to all that trouble to go round it Then go slightly sliding that way First of all I'll slide it in And then I'll pick it up Send it down that way You've got my end down That corner So slide it to me That needs ready All that you need then And then I'll Put it on Very tight What's that for To the strong boy From there to there It's 5 and 5x which is 142 now Very Very tight It's very tight What are you thinking There's something on top Yeah that's usually what I do A little blob here And then afterwards You go left a little bit Can you just pass me On the padstone Or I see what you mean The eye to the padstone Just stick it on Just pass it both up Put yours on there See if it's slightly beneath the eye for the strong boy If it does we can lift it onto it It's alright there Put that on the wall Everything fits It's just there taking up a lot of room Yeah they're pretty big Anyway we'll sort it So what we need to do now is Get them into it I've had to put that in the middle And with your side from one side And then the other side So it's tight I'll sit down again I'm going to lift it I'm going to have one top first Alright Come on out there Do you want me going Pass it through Thank you I'm going to pass it through I've got your towel Sixth of crap in it Sixth of crap Back to the slate All nice and opened up Obviously all the pipes are going to move now All the bathroom is getting redone New ceiling in this half So everything is level Looking good The bath is quick rinse So we're out of here So I'm going to hand you over to Alex Back at the house One of my pre recovered I appreciate the support This has been quick clean with Steve and Alex and we'll see you for the next one


This bridge affects me and my three neighbors. It's posted 10 ton and has a primary access in from the valley. The milk truck can't cross the bridge with any load at all and be legal. So for me, this means a detour of 10 miles, 20 miles round trip. At a cost of $1.10 a mile, that 20 miles really adds up and I have to pay for it. It's a cost I can't directly pass on so there goes a big chunk of my profit on each load. Ultimately that cost is passed on to the consumer somewhere along the line. How did this agri-access study begin? We started by defining a priority commercial network. Our governor, Dick Thornburg, has established economic development and community conservation as Pennsylvania's top priorities. We in the Department of Transportation responded by working with local officials to identify that network of highways that serves the greatest volumes of commercial and industrial traffic. We next identified the deficient bridges on this priority commercial network, those bridges that won't carry fully loaded trucks. In developing the priority commercial network, we discovered that the feeder roads to agricultural activity areas as well as to individual farms had been overlooked. Our initial effort did not completely address the basic transportation needs of agribusiness. We had missed a key element in the farm to market trip, namely access between agricultural activity areas and the priority commercial network. The Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture expressed an interest in developing a method to identify this missing element in the farm to market trip. We felt that the need was real not only in Pennsylvania but in other states. We're all aware of the importance of agriculture and agribusiness in our economy and our need for information from all sectors of the economy to develop and prioritize programs that will encourage economic development in rural Pennsylvania. Agriculture and agribusiness represent one of the largest single industries in the state of Pennsylvania as well as in other states across the nation. In Pennsylvania there are 61,000 family farms which harvest and market nearly $3 billion worth of crops and livestock. One out of every five jobs in Pennsylvania is involved in some segment of agribusiness. Agriculture and agribusiness are vital to the economic welfare of the state. The network of roadways and bridges that form the extensive transportation system in the state has significant impact on the growth and development of agriculture and the state's economy. Much of Pennsylvania is mountainous with many rivers and streams. There are approximately 56,000 bridges, half are owned by the state, the other half by counties, municipalities and railroads. Many rural roads and bridges were constructed at a time when the demands in terms of weight and size of vehicles were much less than they are today. Insufficient roadways and structurally deficient or weight restricted bridges divert the transportation of produce, products and services. This in turn hinders economic growth and development, adding costs that ultimately must be paid by the consumer. In December of 1982 an agriculture transportation task force was formed, composed of participants from federal, state and local governments, various farm organizations from across the state and the Pennsylvania State University Extension Service. On the state level both the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Transportation were aware of the many problems concerning rural access. Primarily I'm talking about narrow or weight restricted bridges that hindered the movement of farm to market products and services. But this is the first time such a large and diverse group was pulled together to study the problem in depth. We had 16 people on the task force representing many governmental and private agencies. There were participants from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Pennsylvania State University Extension Service, the Economic Development Committee of the Governor's Office, the Pennsylvania Farmers Union, the Pennsylvania Farmers Association, the Pennsylvania State Grange, the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors and the Pennsylvania Forest Products Industry. What was the next step? I guess what I'm asking is how did you arrive at a method for the study? We had to develop a system for the study. First we had to establish what information we needed. Second, what criteria we needed to identify that information. And third, how to get the information from the field. As a work base we had the advantage of a previous statewide study, the Priority Commercial Network or PCN. It's a detailed network identification of the highways carrying 500 or more trucks per day or serving as connectors for specific regional industries like coal. Highlighting this network of highways used frequently by commercial truck traffic helps the department to pinpoint deficiencies which deter commerce. This network is generally composed of the Federal-aid primary system. In Pennsylvania, 75% of the PCN falls into this category. The PCN helped us map the agri-access pilot study because the people responding did not have to identify an entire commercial access network. Most of the system was already identified and marked for them. Actually there were two tests to identify which roads were most important in providing access between the farm areas and the PCN and to identify the obstructions that most affect the rural economy. You referred to this as a pilot study. Why did you begin with a pilot study? Rather than attempt something statewide, the task force decided to study two counties. Both have agricultural economies. One county is populated and prosperous. The other is remote. The economy is more fragile. This approach gave us the two extremes as a test not only for the data we needed but also for the process we designed for obtaining and evaluating the data. How did you identify and locate the people you wanted to respond to the study? Well, we decided the most effective way to identify major agricultural activity and essential farm roads and obstructions was to draw upon the knowledge of the local farm and planning organizations. Pennsylvania, like most states, has cooperative extension agency offices and contacts with local people in each county. We asked them to coordinate the agricultural leadership in order to reach the local farmers and businesses directly. They are the ones who know best which roads and bridges affect the economy of their areas. This is a shortcut between Route 6 and Route 15 in this area and it's traveled an awful lot by all types of vehicles. And there's three bridges in there that just aren't up to standard to the rest of the road. And in a couple cases in here that there's farmers, I believe you'll find that lay right between these bridges.  Do you think this is an effective way for us to get the type of input from the farmer that we need on roads and bridges in the area? Well, I sure do. I would think that's the best approach because I don't think that anyone would know better what bridges are giving the farmers problem, especially the farmer problem, because we're the ones that use them and I appreciate this approach to ask our opinion on this. Roads and bridges are essential. And if you don't come out and ask the farmers and the rural businessmen which bridges need to be fixed, you'll never know where all of them are. Here are the two counties we studied, Tioga to the north and Lancaster in the south. Tioga County is beautiful country, remote and mountainous, with lots of dairy farming and some lumbering. Lancaster County in the south is flat, generously populated with rich soil and a lot of diversified agriculture. Most people know it for its picturesque Amish farms. Here is the priority commercial network in Yellow and this is what we call the Agra Access Network, highlighted in green. And here are the bridge obstructions that were identified in the study. The bridges were already identified and coded in the state's bridge inventory. There are over 100 data items for each bridge. What we gained from this study is knowledge of which bridge obstructions have the greatest effect upon the agricultural economy. Here is Tioga County. Notice the sparse roadway network. A detour can be a real problem up here. We found one detour caused by a poster bridge which took truckers off an important route for a total of 56 miles. Here is the priority commercial network, the Agra Access Network and the bridge obstructions. When you do a study like this, you learn a lot of things you don't expect to learn. I already mentioned the 56 mile detour in Tioga County, but we also learned a lot more about service and emergency traffic in rural areas. We started in here about 30 years ago and got into the farm agricultural line of stuff. Started out with the weld and shop, then we got into barn cleaners and farm supplies. Then that got us into the cement business. So it just kept increasing in size until we take more concrete and stuff. So we kept getting bigger trucks and trying to work along with it. There used to be a little farm of 20 cows starting out. Now they're talking about the average 70 to 100 cows dairy. The bridges and things back when we started was heavy enough. But now the trucks and everything is getting to where you got a haul of big loads in your bridges and things are all too small. But a lot of those bridges we can't even cross are the empty trucks, let alone loaded ones. The biggest problem we have with the posted roads and bridges and the effect that we cannot be very efficient in a way that we're handling ag products to the farm. Since that is 90% of our business we have to detour because of these bridges. We have added cost to the product that we're delivering to the farm. And in such we're raising the price of the goods to the farmer which also would be rising the price of the goods to the ultimate consumer. You get into a timely business like lime or fertilizer spreading in the spring where the ground is fit, the whole farming community is ready to plant corn. We've got to get lime and fertilizer on those fields and then we're faced with a bridge problem. We can't get to that man's farm so rather than taking one load out to that man's farm we have to go with two. So we're getting farther behind what do we do to offset this inefficiency that we're forced with is added cost. Added cost to everybody that's ultimately going to be using that milk or those grain products. That's the biggest problem we have is efficiency. We had no fire protection for the people on the lower end of the garden branch. The bridge is posted for 10 tons and their equipment weighs more than that. It's a county bridge that's between Lake Humming County and Tiled County. We've got a low drawer by the name of Sam Cousier that lives down the road here about a quarter of a mile. He's got a rotary that weighs at least 22 tons. He can't get that in and out of his shop. Most of his work is for the farmers, probably 70 to 80 percent of it. It's down to this bridge, he's got other problems with other bridges too, the weight of it. The single axle delivery truck is almost a thing of the past, although there's plenty on the road yet. But by volume most of it is delivered either on a tandem or triple axle straight truck or a semi truck hauling 22 tons, grossing 70,000, 70,000, whatever they're allowed, I'm not sure. Near the maximum limit. Yeah, maximum limit. And the roads that they have to use to get here, of course, are big consideration in their part. From the point of view of the rural resident or the farmer, how is this study different from other studies that have been done to improve bridges and roads? I believe that probably for the first time the farmer out there, the rural resident who has to live with great problems and bridges in the roads, had an opportunity to be directly involved in the process in the study. And as a task force member, I could see a positive change in attitude occurring as what was happening in the task force work was being transmitted to the farmer. We saw these people actually feeling that what they could contribute was going to have a direct positive effect. And we saw an improvement in attitude towards the state, towards the Department of Transportation, towards the Department of Agriculture, because they've been asked to point out the problems that they have to live with with a real expectation that they're going to get improvements from that. What are the most significant aspects of the study? First, of course, has to be the task force. The diversity of the participants in the spirit of cooperation throughout the study was really exceptional. In many cases, when we sent out the preliminary base maps, we got responses within days. We refined, correlated, and sent it out for a second time for verification. This whole process, from the initial task force meeting to the publication of the pilot study results, took only six months. Another important aspect is the fact that this study was done within existing resources. We received no special budget appropriation and added no people to our especially lean planning staff. By careful management, we were able to defer some lower priority work and reassign two people to this effort. Much of the work was voluntary, with numerous organizations and individuals contributing simply because they felt the work was important. I think another very important aspect of this study, and the way it was shaped and conducted, was the fact that the PennDOT and Department of Agriculture folks involved the general farm organizations directly. There are real benefits, I think, in that not only do you get the direct participation of these organizations in the project itself, but those departments in the state generally will have gained enhanced appreciation of what they do from these organizations. After all, general farm organizations like many other similar organizations, they are lobbying entities, they are politically oriented entities. They are out there in the community in those ways having an impact. I think that PennDOT and the Department of Agriculture are going to see beneficial ripple effects beyond this study as a result of having flattered, if you will, these organizations, but in the best sense, having asked them to participate in an important project, they're going to get continued support. Through this study, we were able to develop criteria for identifying major agricultural activity areas, defining the basic transportation network serving these areas, and locating critical obstructions to the efficient movement of associated agricultural supplies and products. Analysis of the required database provided the kind of information decision makers needed to make informed decisions. We were confident that the projects selected for immediate action were truly the highest priority as far as the agricultural community was concerned. Before PennDOT, it was a little maybe hard to get to consider rural areas because it seemed like they put the money where the people were and the people living in the cities are near the suburban areas. And to get some more money into the agricultural area, I think it has helped and I think PennDOT has been very realistic and has been making some effort to communicate with the agricultural segment because after all, agricultural is the number one business in Pennsylvania now. When you get down to the interconnected network in the rural areas, it's difficult for us setting at a district office level, almost impossible for those setting at our central office level, to really establish priorities based on which roads are most important to the people that they serve. And through establishment of this network, those routes that are most critical will be defined. And this will be a tremendous tool to me in prioritizing bridge improvement and replacement projects. Perhaps most important of all, we now have in Pennsylvania a responsive communication network. We can continuously monitor the condition of our highways and bridges. We can update our available database and we can evaluate our progress in carrying out Pennsylvania's Agra Access Improvement Program. I believe the establishment of a network was really just the first step, getting to know the locals and them getting to know us. And I'm very certain that it'll have long-range benefits and increased communications between the various Agra business organizations and indeed individuals. I think it has made us more comfortable knowing that there is someone up there that we can contact and we have learned to know you and several others personally and this gives us a very good feeling about what is happening in Harrisburg. We feel that the government is out there trying to do some good for the farmers. A large part of the success of this study rests with support from all levels of government. At the federal level, the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At the state level, the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Agriculture. And at the local level, county commissioners and township supervisors. Here are the highlights of the Pennsylvania Agra Access Study. A task force was formed, composed of various federal, state and local representatives of agencies concerned with transportation and agricultural issues. Their first priorities were to select an advisory steering committee and to develop a method for the study. The pilot study of two counties was a collective effort utilizing existing resources. In a product sense, the results were a more complete database for decision making, the establishment of a continuing communication network and a commitment to follow up. In the fall of 1983, the pilot study results were presented to the Pennsylvania Secretaries of Transportation and Agriculture and to the various governmental and private agencies involved. Within nine months from the initiation of the pilot study, the decision was made to implement the study on a county by county statewide basis. Within 18 months from the initiation of the pilot study, deficiencies identified by this study and the subsequent statewide study will have been addressed in the Transportation Department's annual improvement program. As a result of the pilot study, 27 deficient bridges in Tioga County and 25 deficient bridges in Lancaster County have already been identified and are being considered for improvement in the current program update. This cooperative and dedicated effort will have direct and long-lasting impact upon the economy of the state of Pennsylvania. If you'd like more information on the Pennsylvania Agra Access Network Study, please contact Harvey Hack, Deputy Secretary for Transportation Planning, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, 1200 Transportation and Safety Building, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 17120.