Meet Ryan Chan of UpKeep

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Chan.

Hi Ryan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I went to college at Cal Berkeley as a chemical engineer. My first job was actually working in a manufacturing plant called TriSep Manufacturing. We manufactured reverse osmosis membranes used for brackish water desalination and wastewater treatment. And every single day I was constantly thinking, “How do we make our manufacturing process go better, faster, smoother, and run more effectively and productively?” But I noticed the big problem within our manufacturing plant was that we’d have broken pieces of equipment, and our entire process was either paper-based or desktop-based. We turn to technology to help make the days, lives, and jobs easier for us but in practice, technology was letting us down.

I was in the center of innovation and technology up in the bay area, Silicon Valley, and I kept asking myself, “Where is all of this innovation in manufacturing?” Working in a manufacturing plant, I was seeing something completely different. I was really passionate about making a change within our industry, but every single time I tried to do that, I was told time and time again that things in our industry were the way that they were, and if I wanted to change anything, it would take decades for that to happen. And ultimately, five years ago, this is why I started UpKeep. I believed that technology should make the days, lives, and jobs easier for technicians, and I didn’t believe that it would take decades for this to happen. Over the past five years, with a little bit of hard work and a ton of luck, UpKeep was born!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There have definitely been struggles, the naysayers for one. People saying, “How are you going to achieve something when you’re a solo founder?” or, “How are you different from all of the rest?” And also the competition—bigger companies out there, companies with bigger budgets and more expertise. But these challenges never stopped me. Instead, these obstacles were often met with an ever bigger drive to prove others wrong and prove that seemingly impossible things were in fact possible.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
UpKeep is an Asset Operations Management platform purpose-built to bring together maintenance, operations, and reliability data to help teams make important business decisions, with full visibility across the entire life cycle of maintenance, asset management, and operations. It’s the best of a CMMS, EAM, and APM solution all-in-one.

Our mobile-first solution centralizes data from across teams and devices into one, configurable and easy-to-implement solution that provides real-time data into the day-to-day maintenance life cycle, asset utilization and performance measurement to help optimize maintenance strategies, improve asset performance, and increase availability and reliability.

UpKeep is the leader in developing meaningful mobile solutions that help maintenance, operations, and reliability professionals increase productivity to deliver better business outcomes. Our asset operations solution is part of a holistic approach combining mobility, data acquisition, workforce efficiency, and asset intelligence.

What we’re most proud of is what we’ve done for the maintenance community. Not just providing software and technology but spotlighting maintenance technicians as well. Also, we’re proud of our core values: customers over revenue, grit over prestige, progress over perfection.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up I was always challenging the status quo and pushing what other people thought was impossible. I was also a little rebellious and didn’t like when I was told I couldn’t do something. I was interested in building stuff from scratch like Legos, learning, and I was hyper-competitive in sports (especially tennis).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.upkeep.com/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Onupkeep