Augmented Ops

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers.  In episode #4 of the podcast, the topic is: A Renaissance of Manufacturing. Our guest is Enno De Boer, Partner, Digital Manufacturing Lead, McKinsey.

Augmented is a podcast for leaders, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG.works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at the World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9 am US Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented--the industry 4.0 podcast.

In this conversation, we talk about What is digital manufacturing? How to transform operations strategy, best practices, specifically the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Factories. We also tackle future developments: How to stay up to date in this fast moving field? What’s next?

Trond's takeaway: is that manufacturing is indeed undergoing a renaissance. There should be a tremendous amount of excitement among policy makers, industry professionals, and frontline workers about the changes in play. Technologies are maturing. The digital factory is becoming a reality. For those who already took on board the lessons of lean manufacturing and are exploring the latest opportunities, automation has become augmentation. Yet, there's still a lot to learn. The World Economic Forum's Lighthouse factories is one place to seek inspiration.

After listening to this episode, check out the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network, McKinsey's Operations practice,  well as Enno De Boer's social profile. 

• World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network: https://www.weforum.org/projects/global_lighthouse_network 
• Enno De Boer (bio): https://www.mckinsey.com/our-people/enno-de-boer 
• McKinsey Manufacturing & Supply Chain practice area (@mckinsey_mfg): https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-we-help-clients

Augmented is a podcast for leaders in the manufacturing industry hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG.works, the open learning community launched at the World Economic Forum. Our intro and outro music is The Arrival by Evgeny Bardyuzha (@evgenybardyuzha), licensed by @Art_list_io. The show can be found at http://www.augmentedpodcast.co/

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode #1 on From Automation to Augmentation or Episode #2 on How to Train Augmented Workers. Augmented--the industry 4.0 podcast.

Transcript:

TROND: Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Augmented is a podcast for leaders, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG.works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at the World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented — the industry 4.0 podcast.

In Episode 4 of the podcast, the topic is A Renaissance of Manufacturing. Our guest is Enno De Boer, Partner and Digital Manufacturing Lead at McKinsey & Company. In this conversation, we talk about what is digital manufacturing? How to transform operations strategy, best practices, specifically the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Factories. We also tackle future developments: How to stay up to date in this fast-moving field, and what’s next?

TROND: Enno, how are you doing today?

ENNO: Very good.

TROND: I'm excited to have our conversation. First off, Enno, you're an interesting guy. You obviously have a tremendous amount of experience working with a lot of manufacturing factories through your work at McKinsey and also now directly at the World Economic Forum. But what got you into manufacturing? What sparked this interest?

ENNO: I had always kind of a passion for real things, for products and everything. And my dad was an engineer. He was a researcher in the steel industry, and he wanted to get me into steel, but I thought I wanted to have something a little bit more sophisticated. So I got initially into automotive, got really excited about it. And then when you're in automotive, you need to go to the shop floor; that's where the real music is. So that's how I got into it. And then, from there, it took its toll, and I went into any industry, and I'm always passionate about manufacturing.

TROND: Wow, that's where the real music is. Well, you ended up getting your master's and your doctorate in mechanical engineering. I think they're all from Dresden and from Aachen. So you've been around the academic side and now very much on the combination, I guess, of consulting and advising, but you enjoy getting into these factories and hearing the music, basically.

ENNO: Yes, totally. I started my career at BMW, and it was amazing to see what product they are building, et cetera. And then, I moved to McKinsey, and it was always about the products and how can we make the products better? How can we get them better to the consumer, and also, how can we make literally the shop floor a better environment? And I think that's so exciting about what we're seeing at the moment with this digital revolution, and we're getting to that in a moment.

But it's all about augmenting the operator and figuring out how do we take the dull, dirty, and dangerous work out of manufacturing and make it very exciting? I think it's one of the most exciting spots to be. For all the young people, I just say go into manufacturing. That's where all the fun technologies come to bear. Is it augmented reality, virtual reality? Is it digital twins? Is it AI? Is it digitization? Is it 3D printing? All of that is coming there. Tell me any other industry where that's happening.

TROND: You know, I echo what you're saying. And it's almost incredible how long it has...well, how long it has taken, but how long it's taking for the wider world to realize how many things are actually coming to the fore in manufacturing right now. Give us a sense of what this environment looks like. Well, there are many buzzwords, but what is digital manufacturing? Let's start sort of simple here.

ENNO: Yeah, digital manufacturing, actually, it's interesting. It's an interesting term. So when we worked with the World Economic Forum, we defined digital manufacturing as 110 use cases that are spread across...roughly half of them within the factory walls. And then something like predictive maintenance, very apparent, but then half of them also outside of the four walls. So how do you connect to product development, get your products faster developed? Most likely with virtual reality, with digital twins.

How do you connect to the customer? How do you get customer orders in and immediately propagate them down to the shop floor and all the way back to the customer where the product lands? And you want to have this in one digital thread, how we call that. So that's very exciting. So that's digital manufacturing. It's very much about augmenting the operator.

As I said before, it's not so much about this idea that was out there in the '80s and '90s about the lighthouse factory and full automation. Nobody is talking about this. This is really a concert of how we are bringing technologies to allow the operator to bring out better products in higher quality, in higher agility, and more sustainable.

TROND: I know industry 4.0 is a big term. But at the forum, there's also this notion of this fourth industrial revolution, so very specifically calling it a revolution. How do you feel about those things? Are they even sort of perhaps wider terms than just focusing on the worker?

ENNO: I think it's interesting. I think it's partly we have an evolution because the manufacturing sector you cannot change overnight. It's very complex to manufacture products, and you need many technologies. So it feels not like this is happening overnight. Though I would say now, with what we have gone through with this terrible pandemic over the last year, it has almost switched, and it totally accelerated the digital transformation. So I feel now it's becoming much more of a revolution because I'm seeing examples where innovation is not stopping anywhere.

Like we have one lighthouse that we got new on the lighthouse platform from Alibaba. They took an entirely new stand on how do you do apparel manufacture? How do you produce jeans? Now, that sounds very simple and sounds very labor intense. They took a stand at this and fully connected it to the customer to get their ideas on how that would work, but then fully digitized it.

And that allows them to create products, new apparel in only 30% of the time and also bringing it to the customer 70% faster than anything we have seen before. So there's a real revolution going on and a renaissance, I would say, of manufacturing and the art of the possible. I would say the limit is the sky.

TROND: But you said lighthouse. When you say lighthouse, to me, I'm thinking of a navigational tower created out there in the ocean with lights and signals to navigate against. Give me a sense of what this metaphor means and what you have used when you built out this Lighthouse Network at the forum. What does it mean, and what's the purpose? And why this metaphor?

ENNO: Yeah, and I think it's great that you're asking because I got a lot of questions at the beginning. "Is lighthouse the right word, Enno? Lighthouse is where we are driving on rocks. Is that not negative?" And I said, "No." It's like the light. We need always role models. We need examples that we can latch on. We need things that we can learn from, that are lighthouses. Lighthouses are a towering example. They are high. They are shining out, and they're shining the way.

And I'm a sailor, so I love lighthouses. So when I'm coming to the coast and the first thing I see is this light. And it's going up, and it's leading me the way, and then I'm coming nearer. I get the contours. And that's a lighthouse. So what is the lighthouse? The lighthouse is, we said it's not a shiny object. Stop with these shiny objects. It's not about technology forward; that's wrong. It's not about building an ivory tower, and everyone is looking in very different.

Three things we're looking for with WEF Lighthouse; first of all, we want to see impact at scale. Secondly, we want to see that unleashed by several use cases, several technologies that enable that, like really innovation there. And then, we want to see that this is sustainable, that there are the measures and the enablers below that is not only sustainable but also scalable.

That is, for us, a lighthouse, and that's something that is exciting people. And they say, "Well, I want to..." I get every week a call "I want to have a lighthouse in my organization. How do I do this?" And that's exactly what we wanted to create. We wanted to create that everyone gets a feeling of what really is industry 4.0.

TROND: Well, so then here's my question. How did this project get started, and how do you select lighthouses? And what exactly do you collect once you have selected lighthouses, and how is it that then it becomes helpful? Is it kind of a collection of videos from the sites? Is it interviews with the people who have designed the work processes there? What is it exactly?

ENNO: Yeah, it started...as always, the first try is not working. [laughs] So when we started it, the first idea I had I said look, we need these lighthouses. We need examples. It's like in the old lean terms where we had Japan; we had Toyota, we had Honda, as ways to go for the manufacturing community to learn. I said, "We need to create the Japan of digital manufacturing."

And the first answer that I got from a couple of executives where I was on an executive committee, they said, "Hell no. We'll not share our secret sauce. We're ahead, and we don't want that others learn from it." And I said, "I think that's wrong. You need open innovation. You need to share," Because this is such a dynamic environment where you can only stay ahead if you fully open collaborate, and learn from the best, and then stay ahead." And it turned out to be true.

And then I found the World Economic Forum. They loved the idea. We started to build this app jointly. And it's now something that everyone in the manufacturing industry aspires. So that's how it started. It was a lot of work. So we started almost three years ago to build this with the World Economic Forum. And we still feel we're only at the very beginning. We have now 54 lighthouses and more than a dozen, actually, to be announced soon that are coming out. But if you put this into perspective, this is 50 out of 10 million factories, so a lot of work to be done.

TROND: How many lighthouses should there be?

ENNO: I think there should be many, many more. And I think every organization should have at least a handful or a dozen lighthouses. Because what we find is you need different lighthouses in an organization. You need maybe a lighthouse that shows you how you connect your product development to manufacturing. You maybe need a lighthouse on how do you connect to the customer? You need a really sustainable lighthouse. So there are already three.

And then you need to start to use this lighthouse. A lighthouse is not a mean by itself. I think then you need to start that you get the entire organization to kind of moving to transform the entire value chain, the entire production network. So you could almost see that. And that's how I see it.

I think we're very blessed with these lighthouses because, for me, they are a little bit of the window into the future. That should be the standard in three, four years for any manufacturer. So if you ask me, maybe 10 million so all the factories should become lighthouses. Now, every lighthouse will be a little bit different and needs to be built within its context.

TROND: But are you saying that in order to qualify to be a lighthouse, there is an aspect that is better than the average? Because otherwise, you shouldn't be looking at it. Now I'm just trying to figure out, well, one, you how you select it, and on what features you select these things. And on the aspirational side, if I'm a factory owner or an organization and I think I'm inspired by what you're saying, how do I interact with this project? And how do I learn from the lighthouse? How do I build my own lighthouse? What is this thing?

ENNO: So I think you're spot on. We said we wanted to create the Japan of digital manufacturing, that was a vision, and that is still to be true. So what we want to have on the platform is lighthouses that bring learnings to others, that are willing to share those, and that are towering, and these learnings are important and interesting enough that everyone can learn from it. So yes, it should be over the average. It should be better than anything. It should be a best practice. Yes, of course.

We are not looking for someone who has invested a ton of money into technology and has not gotten any returns out of it. There are a lot of examples of that. We are looking for the ones who have smartly invested into technology, also driven the people transformation, also have driven a business transformation with technology and with that created impact at scale. That's the number one we're looking for: impact at scale.

Number two is, is it driven through real technology innovation? And are these use cases there? And then is this sustainable? Is this just kind of a quick blip of a performance? Or is this something where we feel that this company is taking this lighthouse really to fully transform themselves and literally the cluster they are working in?

TROND: Can you give me some concrete examples so some of these lighthouses? There are 54 that have been announced. I mean, that's too much to cover in one quick talk, but give me a sense of what kinds of things you already have in the portfolio.

ENNO: Yeah, so we started initially with factory lighthouses, so the ones that are very factory. We had initially 16, and then we scaled this up. One example is, for example, Procter & Gamble, the Rakona site, really interesting, was about to be closed. They had one last chance, and the factory team was amazing. They said, "We go all in. If you let us do it, we will go in. We take the challenge."

And they turned around the site with digital, with fully digitizing it. It was really on the bottom of the P&G manufacturing sites. It was a brownfield; I think 100 years old, very, very traditional. And they transformed it fully. And they are now one of the top performing sites in the Procter & Gamble network, which says something and which says that anyone who has the ambition and has the leadership and is going full in can do it.

It's not a question of whether you're a greenfield; this is a brownfield. It's not a question of whether you're a new site or an old site. That's one example. Another good example, because we have quite a breadth there, I talked about Alibaba, a digital native company that fully went into apparel manufacturing to innovate apparel manufacturing.

Another example is Henkel. They had very ambitious sustainability goals from the very get-go. They said, "We can only achieve that through digital transformation." They connected over 30 sites with a digital twin. They get really deep into the energy management, into predictive actions. And they were able to reduce their energy consumption by 38% and their water consumption by 25%, very sustainable example.

Another one is Schneider Electric, and I could go on, who reduced their carbon footprint by 78%. So we're not talking about let's do another 10%. If someone comes to me and says, "Look, let's do another 10% of this," I say, "Okay, you most likely don't need [inaudible 18:08]. Think harder. How do you want to hit customer breakpoints? How do you want to do something really spectacular? And then let's build the full stack of digital together to innovate that."

TROND: Well, you've already given out some secrets, I guess, around transforming operations strategy these days. Is a lighthouse strategy the first thing you recommend when you go into a company these days, or what is your approach? Because you are an operation strategy expert in manufacturing. Is that the first thing you suggest, or is it kind of to look inward? Or what is the first thing one should do today?

ENNO: The first question I have is, what business impact do you need to drive? Because that determines everything because a lighthouse is not a lighthouse. So, first of all, I need to know whether you want to drive growth, whether you want to drive agility, mass customization, sustainability, productivity, or speed to market. Let me know that. And that's already a hard question because a lot of CXOs, CEOs, COOs say, "Well, I haven't thought about it. I thought I'm coming to you, and we're building a lighthouse." I say, "No, we're not building a lighthouse just for the lighthouse sakes."

So let's figure out what is really the business impact you need, then let's go from there backwards and say, out of the 110 use cases that we have seen in the lighthouses, what are the ones that will really help you? Typically, it's 20 to 30, maybe 40 use cases that immediately will drive fundamental value. Let's take them.

And then the most important thing is let's figure out how do we scale this? Because that's what has been the biggest challenge, and I would say that is what differentiates the 1% of the lighthouses, or less than 1% of the lighthouses, and the rest of the 99%. It's called pilot purgatory. We've seen thousands of flowers bloom approaches, pilots, over pilots, and they are not scaling.

TROND: Why is there such a purgatory? Why is it so hard? And what did those 1% do that the others don't?

ENNO: I think we are looking at this question for quite long. And I think it's partly; I would say, cultural in the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing sector in the past was the one that would...as a CEO, you're asked, okay, give me another 5% cost reduction and don't interrupt the production. There was no question of, okay, look at this strategically. Tell me about how manufacturing can be a competitive advantage. So really, the thinking and being strategic about manufacturing, I think that's one part.

The other part that I think is cultural is lean has learned us...and lean is really a fundamental and important part of the digital transformation. But lean has learned us to disaggregate, to democratize, and to spread literally everything across all our production network and let everyone do a little bit of something.

Now the problem is that we'll be coming back in the future, and this is great. Democratizing technology is the right thing to do. But at the beginning, to get this started and getting out of pilot purgatory, you need to have some kind of a guided approach that is strategic, that is focused, and that is building certain capabilities that most likely these companies have not in their networks.

TROND: So are there really distillable, small nuggets of best practices in this field of manufacturing? Or is it so complicated that everybody has to....yes, they can look for paragons in the lighthouses. But you have also said one of the reasons you're so fascinated with this is you have to just hear the music. So what is the balance of, I guess, listening to your own music, really just figuring out what is happening in my own work process versus looking at other people's work process? What is the balance between the internal, the external, the inspiration versus the perspiration, I guess?

ENNO: I think it's, like always, you need to start from where you are. And I think I'm glad that you asked this question. This is not about taking the lighthouse, and then that's my blueprint, and then let's just do it and copy it. No, it won't work. You need to start from where you are. So it starts with a diagnostic. It starts with, as I said earlier, it starts with what business goals. Everyone has different business goals. Then it starts with where's your situation? So how do you manufacture? There are thousands of different types of manufacturing.

So what's your starting situation? What's your maturity? What's your capabilities? What's your tech capability? All of that and then build on that. I think there's for anyone a tailored journey on how do you then mobilize your people? How do you build the right capabilities in-house to be then really able to scale something? And there are a lot of learnings from the lighthouses how they have gone about it, how they have mastered to excite the shop floor.

All of these lighthouses the people love it, so they get them excited. But you need to get the middle management also excited because they are sometimes I call them the clay layer or something. They're maybe not so excited about all this change. So you need to get them on board that it's really helping them to do their job better. So that's something you need to figure out.

And then you need to figure out...that's another thing that is big is, in the past in manufacturing, we have already said, okay, the IT guys leave the IT guys where they are, and we're only calling them when we really need them. But you need to closely work with IT because otherwise, you cannot scale it. And then, you will need to work with OT like the operations technology so connecting the sensor. So there's a lot to do. And I think you need to find your own way, and the puzzle pieces are in the Lighthouse Network. You can find them there. And then, you need to put your puzzle together.

TROND: I know you've worked with this for a long time. What are some of the surprises along the way that have shown up in your work? In your experience, what are some of the good and bad surprises that you have learned along the way, things that you didn't expect either when you built out the Lighthouse Network or as you have been spending time listening to this factory music?

ENNO: Yeah, I saw a couple of surprises. So one biggest surprise for me is...so I'm German, but I came over to New York 10 years ago. And so I'm pretty now in the U.S. I'm rooting for the US. I'm also rooting for German engineering. But guess what? The U.S. is behind on adopting these technologies. And it's not behind on developing; it has fabulous startups. It has fabulous technology companies. But the digital transformation is not happening in the U.S., not as much as in China, and also not as much as in Europe. And we should ask all ourselves, why is that?

How do we mobilize the U.S. manufacturing? That's for me, one, and I can tell you I have turned every stone in the U.S. and looked under every stone to find lighthouses here. But the fact is we have many, many more lighthouses in China. And the fact is also, if you look at them, they are freaking exciting. So we can learn from China. Is that a surprise? Yes, that is a surprise. That surprised me.

TROND: Does this make you popular walking around in America when you point this out?

ENNO: No, most likely not. But I want to help U.S. manufacturing. I'm totally excited about U.S. manufacturing. And I think there is all the capabilities. We have the technology here. We have the leadership. We just need to do it, just do it. And as you said, it's about getting the inspiration. I think we should very quickly look at what's out there, and then figure out a way, and then put real effort behind it. And the U.S. has shown that over and over again, once we rally around something, we can really achieve big things.

TROND: But what is the problem here? Is it a technology fix or maybe an overconfidence in, you know, the U.S. has always been innovative, and we're leading everywhere and not looking at the human aspects? Or is it specifically a training challenge? Is it a misunderstanding of how some of these things work? Is it just the old outsourcing thing that people have just said, "Well, all of that stuff is going to happen in foreign factories anyway? It's not important here anymore"? Or how did it start, and how do you think we can get out of it here in the U.S.?

ENNO: I think we have neglected manufacturing. We have neglected manufacturing in the entire Western world. We found an easy way to offshore and bring it to low-cost countries. A couple of decades ago, we have written off manufacturing and have said, okay, there will be a constant decline in manufacturing. Now, I did a study in Germany, I think ten years ago. And honestly, the result of the study was sobering because there was no digital and there were no ideas. We couldn't bring ideas together to innovate manufacturing.

Now, I must say what I've seen now and what is possible is, well, you can be really competitive in the U.S. with manufacturing because the labor differential is not the core thing. But what you need to do is you need to invest, and you need to invest in the people. You need to build and rescale. And you need to augment with the technology, your people, and make sure that they get more productive. That's what you need to do, and then you can be productive. So I think there's something happening now, and I can see that it's really taking off. The conversations I had over the last six months, I would say, are fundamentally different from what I've seen before. So I'm very optimistic.

TROND: That's great to hear. Next for me in my mind is you spend all of your time presumably on this. Where do you go to get your insight? How do you sharpen your teeth? Are there influencers to look at, or are there particular lighthouses? Or do you use yourself a lighthouse strategy? Or how do you digest all of the evolving manufacturing insight that's floating around? I'm just curious.

ENNO: That's a great question. So first of all, I sometimes sneak into some of these factory visits, and I just do a real go see and see what they are doing. And I'm at the source [laughs], so I have the benefit. We have a big team, and they have walked all their shop floors. And I can let them walk first, and then they tell me, "Enno, this is the factory really," or "This is a supply chain that you should really see," and then I can do that. So that's one inspiration.

I think another inspiration is we have an amazing industry 4.0 expert panel that we have created with the WEF that is literally selecting these lighthouses. And it's very independent, so I'm not on there to make this also very independent. But it's a power source. There are 30 individuals around the globe that I would say are the most experienced in industry 4.0, and it's some academics. I think the right portion of academics is important. But then it's also a lot of practitioners. And that's where I'm getting my inspiration.

And then, I get my inspiration typically from client work. I'm spending time with CEOs with COOs. And we are at the moment building something truly amazing in the biotech sector, where we're literally bringing all the best of digital manufacturing to this client. And that's for me always an innovation with young teams, with people who really want to make a difference, and then with people who have really a lot of domain expertise. So I think also these teams of bringing the young, aggressive, technology-minded, and then bring the ones in manufacturing who have the domain expertise, who have seen this for 20-30 years, bringing this together in teams is a true inspiration.

TROND: What about the future? Where are we heading? We've talked a little bit about it. You think it's a very exciting situation. Things are coming together. But we've also spoken about how long things take. Is there a danger now that the story has become one of revolution? And indeed, there are so many exciting things happening, yet they have taken a while. How do you see this? What's next? And how fast is the next going to evolve? We have talked a little bit about the U.S. being somewhat behind, at least from this lighthouse context, other places. How quickly is this entire thing kind of coming together? And what's the outlook really for manufacturing?

ENNO: [laughs] I will give you not a timing answer because I built my first digital manufacturing startup in '99. And it was just 20 years too early, and it failed miserably. Because all the ideas were right and if I would have built it now, it would be maybe very successful but 20 years...so I will not give you an answer on timing. But I would say that we have audacious goals in the world.

So number one, I think we really need to do something in terms of sustainability. The carbon footprint of manufacturing sector is 20%, 54% of the energy consumption worldwide comes out of the factory and out of manufacturing. And we've seen the lighthouse examples. We have maybe a dozen of lighthouses that make truly an impact on how we go to carbon neutral. So how do we scale this up? That's for me, one. And I would say we have the toolset. We have the examples. We have the role models. We need to grab it by the horns and do it. That's number one.

I think number two is with this pandemic which is really bad, is there's a need for rethinking, and there's a need for growth. And there's a need on how do we master through a looming recession? And one thing we're seeing with the lighthouses is they're a true inspiration for growth. So how do you grow with best digital capabilities?

So I think the good news is we have the toolbox. It's ready. We have a real momentum here. Now we need to get everyone on board and everyone doing their work because a lot of work is for the next years ahead of us. [laughs] But there will be also great outcomes out of that. So it's always worthwhile the journey. [laughs]

TROND: So do I take it that for you, there is a true renaissance of manufacturing? I mean, the last Renaissance came after a plague, arguably, right? I mean, if you look at a very long historical perspective, the Renaissance came out of the Black Death; at least that's one version of the story. Without making that entire comparison, taking it too far, the Renaissance of manufacturing, it can happen, you think?

ENNO: It is happening, and not can happen. It is happening. What I've seen is when it hit us in New York in March, my practice, we were doing usually physical shop floor visits, and we switch within the day to virtual. It was possible. We couldn't believe it before that it's possible. We went 100% virtual. I talked to CEOs that entirely managed their shop floor network from the couch in a way that they had their digital tools to really know what's going on because they couldn't go to the factory. So I think it's really happening.

And if this pandemic has one positive, I think it gave us the pause and also the need to really rethink, and that's what is happening now. So, I see Renaissance, yes. And we have also seen how important some products are that we need those products. They are important for not only the well-being, but they are like life critical in part. So having that seen, it was a good wake-up call. And this will foster a lot of innovation in the coming years.

TROND: Fascinating. Enno, thank you so much for this talk. I hope we can stay in touch.

ENNO: Trond, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

TROND: You have just listened to Episode 4 of the Augmented podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was A Renaissance of Manufacturing. Our guest was Enno de Boer, Partner and Digital Manufacturing Lead at McKinsey & Company.

In this conversation, we talk about what is digital manufacturing? How to transform operations strategy, best practices, specifically the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Factories. We also tackle future developments: how to stay up to date in this fast-moving field, and what’s next?

My takeaway is that manufacturing is indeed undergoing a renaissance. There should be a tremendous amount of excitement among policymakers, industry professionals, and frontline workers about the changes in play. Technologies are maturing. The digital factory is becoming a reality. For those who already took on board the lessons of lean manufacturing and are exploring the latest opportunities, automation has become augmentation. Yet, there's still a lot to learn. The World Economic Forum's Lighthouse factories is one place to seek inspiration.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 1 on From Automation to Augmentation or Episode 2 on How to Train Augmented Workers. Augmented — the industry 4.0 podcast.

Special Guest: Enno de Boer.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. 

In episode 9 of the podcast (@AugmentedPod), the topic is: The Fourth Industrial Revolution post-COVID-19. Our guest is Francisco, Betti, Head of Advanced Manufacturing and Production, World Economic Forum.

In this conversation, we talk about why he got into manufacturing and how the World Economic Forum works. We discuss how the Forum has changed over these past 5 years and how manufacturing has become the lead topic among the global elite. The manufacturing platform is now, arguably, the primary among 17 flagship initiatives at the World Economic Forum. We go deeply into the changing business models of manufacturing and what the next decade holds.

After listening to this episode, check out World Economic Forum as well as Francisco, Betti's social profile.

• World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/
• Francisco, Betti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisco-betti-10074342/?originalSubdomain=ch

Trond's takeaway: Manufacturing has escalated in prominence during COVID-19, and for good reason. What we can produce decides what we can become. The deep digitalization gains society has made over the past few years had to quickly be implemented on the factory floor. Surprisingly, a large part of the industry was ready. But the process now needs to complete and the results will likely be an entirely new production platform for the world. 

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or episode 6: Work of the Future. Augmented--the industry 4.0 podcast.

Transcript:

TROND: Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In Episode 9 of the podcast, the topic is The Fourth Industrial Revolution post-COVID-19. Our guest is Francisco Betti, Head of Advanced Manufacturing and Production, The World Economic Forum.

In this conversation, we talk about why he got into manufacturing and how The World Economic Forum works. We discuss how the forum has changed over these past five years and how manufacturing has become the lead topic among the global elite. The manufacturing platform is now arguably the primary among 17 flagship initiatives at The World Economic Forum. We go deeply into the changing business models of manufacturing and what the next decade holds.

Augmented is a podcast for leaders hosted by futurist, Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG.works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at The World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast.

Francisco, it's great to have you here.

FRANCISCO: Excellent. Well, thank you for hosting me, Trond.

TROND: Well, Francisco, you are an international development professional. You are now working for The World Economic Forum. And I meet you regularly because you support an enormous amount of activity there in manufacturing. But I wanted to bring us back a little bit to your origin. I know you went to The Sapienza University in Rome, studied international relations, and then worked a little bit in consulting. What was it that got you interested in manufacturing? Because it's a path that I always have to ask people about. It's not the obvious path today. But perhaps it would be the obvious path tomorrow, which we'll get to. But I'm curious about your way.

FRANCISCO: It's a great question, Trond. And indeed, I have a background in international development relations, economic development as well. And I had a past career in consulting. How did I start focusing in manufacturing? It was at The World Economic Forum back in 2015. Actually, when I joined the forum, I realized there was a need to launch a new piece of work, a new conversation on the future of production on the future of manufacturing. And we started at the time working on a very small concept that was pretty much oriented towards...it was the policy angle, which is why there you get the connection with the international development space.

At that time, we were in conversations with a few governments who were not yet aware of this concept of The Fourth Industrial Revolution but who started to see coming a wave of transformations that they knew were going to disrupt their manufacturing base and have an impact on their manufacturing base. And therefore, we started the conversation with prime ministers, with minister of industry, that then led to put together a product concept that evolved over time.

And today, it's one of the 17 global platforms and initiatives that The World Economic Forum is running that I lead on the future of advanced manufacturing and production. At the very beginning, we started focusing pretty much on the policy angle. Today it's a real public-private platform where both companies and governments advocate for the actions that need to be taken to shape the future of production that works for all.

TROND: Francisco, it's a fascinating journey for you. But it's also an incredibly fascinating journey for the field of manufacturing. And I wanted to address a little bit how manufacturing as a platform became one of the 17 flagship initiatives, and by that, how The World Economic Forum itself has changed over these past few years.

And then lastly, the last year has meant enormous change with preparation around COVID. And again, manufacturing has been escalated into this enormous importance. And I would imagine that your development background has come in handy because the kinds of issues that suddenly became foreground were a little unusual, I guess, for manufacturing as well. So firstly, what has happened at The World Economic Forum over these years that has catapulted manufacturing into this prominence?

FRANCISCO: What I think is that in the conversations with our private sector community but also with the public sector, we realize that there was an urgent need for a public-private dialogue to be brought back on top of the agenda. We all know what happened with COVID. The disruptions that we saw in manufacturing, I think, made us realize that when things go wrong in manufacturing, you run out of essential products, not even talking about the protective equipment, ventilators, and all the things that were most needed because of the public crisis. But even basic supplies such as food or toilet paper became an issue, and people started talking about those.

So let's say that there was a realization that manufacturing still plays a major role in our global economies and society. And that's something that is quite exciting and interesting, but you need to look a couple of years back. And I think if you look at the pre-COVID war, and you start thinking about how different megatrends were shaping the war, you also realize why manufacturing came back and became an important issue on top of the global agenda for both private and public sector communities.

And what I'm talking about is the combination of mainly probably three or four megatrends, but it's The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is a concept that our Executive Chairman launched back in 2017, mainly referring to the blurring lines in between the OT and IT war that are transforming not just how our companies operate but probably who we are and what we do as human beings.

So it was the concept of The Fourth Industrial Revolution together with climate change, the imperative for sustainability, with the geopolitical trends and tensions that we saw over the past four to five years. And, of course, all things that relate to the geo-economic evolution in which you can add elements such as aging population or the slowing of the global economy. But it's all those trends and combinations that made people realize the importance of manufacturing, and that brought it back onto the global agenda. So it's been a fascinating journey.

There have been plenty of discussions which would trend from the technology angle, and how technology can transform manufacturing for the good, and what's the positive impact it would have in society. And most recently, about the role that manufacturing can play in the context of this concept of stakeholder capitalism and the need to create value, a new value that is delivered not just to shareholders but to shareholders, workers, society, and the environment overall.

TROND: It's fascinating because many of these concepts to some of us are fairly abstract still because like stakeholder capitalism unless you truly are in this battle, or you either were fighting for it to even emerge, or you are at the C-level, and you're basically being tasked with figuring out what this concept is going to translate into...

But it seems to me that what you're saying is that with manufacturing becoming such a forefront of many battles in society, this is not theoretical anymore. And it's something that all people can relate to whether you are on the factory floor implementing your OT, as you said, your operational technology or you are at the leadership level and trying to strategize about what this means for the organization as a whole.

FRANCISCO: And, Trond, you're absolutely right. Manufacturing needs exactly what change is happening today. We are hearing on a daily basis global companies making commitments towards the SDGs. There was the concept of stakeholder capitalists setting very ambitious targets by 2025-2030 getting CO2 emissions. The only place in which we are seeing that happening now it's in manufacturing. Manufacturing is changing the speed.

When you double-click on how digital technologies, digital solutions advance manufacturing, industry for control, it's transforming the world of operations, driving massive efficiencies, productivity revolutions, driving growth, and at the same time, augmenting workers, contributing towards the sustainability targets by cutting energy consumption, water consumption, material consumption, optimizing waste management. I think that's when you realize that it's probably in the real economy space, in the manufacturing space, where all those commitments are starting to come to life, and that we are seeing real change and real action. It's extremely exciting.

TROND: Yeah, and it's also an interesting time because without getting into the politics of this, there clearly is a bit of an outcry because of the success of technology in other fields. Social platforms and other digital advances that we have made have created both an enormous opportunity, which of course, explains why so many things can be achieved in manufacturing. But they were about to run awry a little bit in the sense that they weren't or aren't still contributing to the global good in the direct sense that the manufacturing industry, of course, is primed to do but for so many years was not.

It still boggles my mind, though, that we are having these conversations at the forum. These conversations are happening. But I don't think that everybody is fully aware of how far manufacturing is about to change and emerge on the world stage. Give us a little bit of a sense before we get into the meat. And I want to talk about business model changes in the industry. But what do you think is needed for the greater public? And by that, I mean young people, older people to realize that manufacturing is actually where things are happening today. What does it take to see it?

FRANCISCO: Well, I think that it's a great question, Trond. And I think that one of the...we probably need to start by asking what can manufacturers do to get closer to the general public? And things like open up facilities so that people can see what both a factory, you know, not of the future but the factory of today looks like and how shopfloor operators are interacting with new software technologies, new interfaces, the world of advanced robotics. We are even seeing drones flying within facilities with inspection, right?

The level of technological transformation and the pace in which it's happening within manufacturing facilities it's amazing. And if you link that to the jobs conversation and how that connects with new generations, I think that...I'm sure that you know younger generations will get very excited if they have a chance to see. So I think manufacturing has been traditionally, and because that's the role that it used to play, always behind the scenes. I think that we do have an opportunity for manufacturers to start showing to the general public what it is, and what it really looks like, and how exciting it is, and also the contribution it makes.

A lot of the things that we enjoy today in life could not be enjoyed if there wasn't a factory, if there wasn't a facility, if there wasn't an entire supply chain behind it. So yes, I think that there's something that the manufacturing community can do better, which is to talk more about the things that are happening in manufacturing in a very transparent, open way. And that's one of the things that we are looking at the forum, providing that platform to interact with the general public.

TROND: I just wanted to point out that, again, these are sensitive things, but the forum for a long time was just the way it was set up was a conversation between leaders. But I have seen over the last few years that more and more you realize, or maybe explain it to me, that it's more than a conversation between leaders. Clearly, this conversation is more important than ever. But in addition to a conversation between leaders, you and the industry need to foster a conversation with small and medium-sized enterprises and, as you pointed out, actually, with the greater public because the battle here is kind of a battle of interpretation.

Is this an interesting space to be in? And if so, we all need to innovate within this space. That must be challenging for a network that was basically mostly set up to dialogue with leaders. I wanted you to talk a little and begin this discussion because I know you have written a paper on changing business models. But at the same time, as you're writing this paper, the forum is almost having to change its own business model. So I want you to address that just because business models is such an abstract thing. So I wanted you to personalize it a little bit as you're explaining what business models mean in manufacturing these days.

FRANCISCO: Absolutely. And I think that we are all transforming our self-set speed within the current context. It's either transform, innovate, or die nowadays. And that happened to every organization regarding this space in which they operate. Maybe on the first part of your question, I think that 50 years ago or 51, when the forum was founded by the Executive Chairman, Professor Klaus Schwab, of course, the main role was to convene leaders. But then, over time, we evolved and became an international organization for public-private cooperation in which dialogue is just an important component of what we do.

What really happens at the forum is the formation of communities that are able to drive action and impact over time. Now, of course, in the context of the current pandemic, it’s how do you bring leaders together? And how you orchestrate and incubate those sections that will deliver impact became a challenge. But it forced us to adopt digital technologies at a pace that we didn't think we could. We were doing that before, but COVID played a major accelerator role.

And I'll give you an example to make it tangible. You hear about our initiative, which we call The Global Lighthouse Network, that we are deploying together with McKinsey and other colleagues. And what was fascinating is that we had a process in place through which we were physically assessing the facilities. As soon as the COVID crisis started, we were now forced to change the approach. And we ended up coming up with the process to run virtual remote visits, and we realized that the technology was ready.

By shipping a simple kit in which you have a phone stabilizer, a headset with a canceling noise effect, and a few other very basic technologies, you could almost get to the same product that you could get when visiting the facilities in person. So we reorganized ourselves. And what I'm very proud of is that if you look at how we have been running some of our key gatherings but also some of the initiatives that are having a real impact on the ground, we were able to triple the pace in which we were operating.

And we have seen the same happening in the manufacturing space to connect that with your second part of the question, which is how are business models and operating models evolving? I think that during the crisis, because of the shortages from the supply disruptions on the demand side, every company in the operations, in the manufacturing space was facing new challenges, which forced them to take innovations to new and unprecedented levels.

Now what we saw is, in a very short period of time, new ways of generating and delivering value coming up. When I say generating, I'm referring to the operating model, the operating model in the way in which we defined it together with the professors who wrote for that position paper you referred to. The operating model is a way in which your company generates, creates value. Now the business model is a way in which that value is taken to the customers. It's delivered and then converted into revenues.

And someone could say that the innovations that we started to see accelerating at speed probably were of three or four main types. The first one is that we saw companies finding new innovative ways to make the products they were making before, so a lot of innovations in the way in which they were operating, finding new sources of supply, but also adopting technology to take those products to a new level, and very often finding that those products could be made even better because of the innovations that were injected.

The second relating to that was the emergence of new products. So companies started to repurpose and reposition manufacturing to be able to deliver new goods that were in high demand. The most obvious example there is the companies who started to make masks and any type of protective equipment or ventilator, or hand sanitizer. But what that shows and proves is that quite rapidly, with the right level of technology innovation, you can repurpose, and you can turn into a manufacturer of something different, which can generate new value linking that to the business model.

Now, the third type is this idea of topping up products with services. So this is providing a digital thread across your entire value chain to be able to generate new value and deliver new value to the customers not just by the hardware or the physical products that companies were selling but by setting them up with new services, being able to get data all the way from the customers to continue to improve performance and augment the experience that customers were getting.

And then the fourth one that is a very exciting one is the as a service concept. We have seen many manufacturing companies that were able to rapidly sort out operational and business issues for themselves and became services providers. Now, if you look at those four things, what I believe is exciting is that someone could argue that manufacturing it's again at the age of becoming a new engine of economic growth.

I mean, there is a lot of growth that is going to come from all these innovations that we're seeing accelerating and who are, let's say, experts, emerging from manufacturing. And at the same time, because of what we discussed before, we have the opportunity to make that grow more sustainable, inclusive and make sure it works for a larger number of stakeholders. So that's what makes it very, very exciting.

And maybe the final thought on that is that because of the connection with business models, because of the ability to enable growth, manufacturing today is seeing CEO compensation. We are seeing more and more CEOs getting closer to the operation. Or the other way to look at it, we are seeing more and more chief operating or chief supply chain officers who are either stepping into the CEO role who will likely become the next generation of CEO for their companies.

TROND: Francisco, this is fascinating because it almost brings us historically back to the heydays of manufacturing. And manufacturing has always been at the heart of every Industrial Revolution. And I think when Klaus Schwab first wrote about The Fourth Industrial Revolution, I don't know that everyone really accepted it because it sounds nice, right? And it would be nice if it was happening. And arguably, you're looking at these technologies. You're saying there has to be a revolution.

But back in the day when that was written and the precursors of this discussion, in all honesty, there was perhaps no revolution yet. Because there were platform technologies that were available, but you would still have to implement them. But what you're talking about now is how it is basically over the last very few years becoming implemented into not just large but also smaller organizations and then creating new ones.

But to address the first part of what you were saying about these larger firms, so these kinds of superstar firms, I believe you call them in your report, there is a value there as well in an economy to have superstar firms that are actually creating value. There's, of course, less value to a society to have superstar firms that are only creating value for themselves. So that's an important distinction to make. But I wanted to bring this a little bit into the discussion on education.

I was reading the other day about, you know, in the olden days when Prussia basically recreated the modern education system, it was largely factory owners who were supporting that even economically and in terms of the pedagogical models. And I was reminded that it is almost a similar challenge we're facing today because it's quite an education challenge on all levels. I wanted to ask you how do you see this happening? How is this shift truly going to take place? Because now the technologies are starting to be put in place. How is the world's worker base going to benefit from this fast enough?

How are we going to reshape the education system? Surely we can't put them in four-year colleges. And if we start to reframe the gymnasium, which was the strategy back 250 years ago, that, again, is a nice strategy if you're talking in decades. But this industrial revolution isn't happening over decades; it's happening over years and months.

FRANCISCO: I think it's a very important piece of the bigger puzzle. And you cannot talk about the future of manufacturing without talking about the future of skills and pretty much skills revolution that is needed because we know that today there is a skill shortage in manufacturing. Wherever you go in the world, that is happening and not because there are probably not enough hands available but because the people who are coming out of universities do not have the required skills, or out of college, do not have the required skills that are needed on the shop floor or across your engineering base.

And maybe to break it down, I could share three different avenues that companies and governments are exploring. The first one is rethinking the way in which companies, universities, and colleges, and governments interact. I think that the concept of you get a college degree or a university degree and then you are all set for life is outdated.

If you look at the pace at which technology is evolving and which factories and supply chains are being transformed, we will need to find new mechanisms in which people who work in manufacturing will and should be able to continuously go back and forth in between formation, training, technology updates, and the shop floor and the supply chain. I think that's the very first thing that companies are starting to think about.

And there are interesting pilots that are being deployed in many places with new partnerships forming between a specific university and a specific company in a specific location, or people who are or companies who are investing in training students in a specific college by giving them the chance at the very early stages to get an experience on the shop floor. So that's probably the first basket of change that we need to see happening.

The second one is maybe around the skills needs. I mean, if technology is growing and developing exponentially, and I'm talking about technology not in general, but technology applied to address very specific production or business issues in the manufacturing space and to be able to develop new use cases.

But if that is changing and continuously changing at the pace at which it is changing, we will need to find mechanisms to constantly monitor and identify the skills in which we train people on and how often a college curriculum or university curriculum gets updated; I mean, not often enough. So which should create a new dialogue between those who provide the training and those who are able to identify these key needs to go into a continuous, let's say, update and upgrade process there as well.

And the third one, which is the most exciting, is that we probably need to think about how we democratize training in manufacturing. And the best analogy there, you know, how much training did you get to learn how to use the apps that you have on your mobile phone? None, right? You get a new app. You just download the new application that you need, whether it's for navigating a city or learning a new language, or whatever. And after half an hour, you are ready to go.

So I think that there's a lot that can be democratized when it comes to training in manufacturing is we leverage technology, not just to transform production but also to transform the way in which people interact in a factory. So this concept of new interfaces and also the fact that we need to think about technology not as a given but as something that we can influence, and that we could tailor, and that we can put...the concept of the series that you are running is, you know, the augmented. You used the word augmented.

I think that we can leverage technology today, and we weren't able to do that a few years ago. But we can leverage to augment workers' capabilities. I think that's the secret, and that's the path forward to democratize training in manufacturing and learning. And if we can top up with open source, and we can get companies and in the manufacturing.works platform that you guys are driving; it's amazing how there are more and more companies getting exciting and willing to make their training modules available. So I think that that's going to be probably the fastest way to reach the millions of people who work in manufacturing today.

TROND: It's fascinating. As you're speaking, I'm reminded that there obviously has to be a link back to business models with training because if this was simply a case of saying, we're going to outsource these to existing universities, or we're going to outsource the training to these new online training providers, and then the problem is solved, first of all, the incentive wouldn't be there for industry to completely do that. But also, the value created would be isolated to these other institutions.

But I think what you're speaking of is some sort of a new dialogue. And there's a combination, though, because open sourcing and democratizing learning, I guess you're not saying that it necessarily forever has to be free. There's a business model, or there are multiple business models that have to be formed around training where there obviously must be incentives for those who create that kind of training. Speak to me a little bit more about the new emerging platforms in manufacturing.

And I was fascinated by what you said about technology and interfaces needing to be more intuitive. Historically, that, of course, hasn't been the case (Well, I'm arguing. Let's see what you think.) in manufacturing. If you think about manufacturing technologies, they have been fairly complex, or at least they have been perceived as complex. What is needed, in your mind, to structurally change that aspect? Is it almost like mandating that any technology on the shop floor should be that easy? Or is it just a mindset change among those who buy the technology? Or is it the technology providers that need to themselves take this more seriously? How can this change happen?

FRANCISCO: It's a great question, Trond, and we may be at the very beginning of another little revolution within the manufacturing space itself with this concept of new platform or platform tools that are emerging. And for me, the reason is that when you look at some of the data we have when we consulted about why companies failed when it comes to the deployment of new pilots...or to put it in a different way, many companies have been developing great pilots and were able to develop a lot of new use cases. But they failed in the implementation phase because there was pushback from the shop proprietor because they were not developing the right way, or they were not easy to adopt, or not easy enough to adopt.

So I think that whichever type of platforms and interfaces that can help create that connection between the technological solution that is going to be deployed on the shop floor and the way in which it will be operationalized and managed on a day-to-day basis can bring huge, huge, huge benefits to the workers, to the shop floor. And I think that something that we keep hearing from companies is that whenever you give shop floor operations a technology that makes their life easier, there is no way that you can get that technology back. There's no way that you can get that use case out of their hands.

So I think that it's all about...and it links back with the concept of democratizing the access to training, democratizing the access to tools. But there are some challenges. I think there are things that we need to overcome to take it to the next level so that it connects back to the concept of open source. So, for example, there are many interfaces or tools that can be powered by AI or at least by big data and analytics.

The only way to train those algorithms and make them super performant is by having a large volume of data sources. That's something that is not happening yet because you still have companies who are not willing to share their data with the service provider of a specific platform. But they will reach that level in which everyone is comfortable sharing data in a certain way.

These tools will be taken to a new and unprecedented level, and I think that is going to be a must-have. I think that workers, when you will be hiring or trying to attract talent if you don't have these types of solutions, they may just not be interested in getting the job or may prefer to go to another manufacturing company who does have them. I think that it's a fascinating topic. And we're at the stage in which we have seen those solutions being deployed for the first time at scale. So I think that very soon we'll see the results of that, and it's going to be very exciting.

TROND: Francisco, these are fascinating developments. I hope that I can tap into your expertise several times and on a regular basis on this podcast. This has been a fascinating discussion. And it seems like the gains even in just a short year during...or I guess we cannot say post-COVID, but it is during COVID that a lot of these changes have been enacted. And you have had a central place in coordinating the global response, I must say. Fascinating developments, thank you so much.

FRANCISCO: My pleasure. And I think, Trond, the next challenge for the manufacturing community, for the overall manufacturing community, is to see how we can keep the high pace of innovation that was great over the past couple of months. I think that's going to be the greatest next challenge. But thank you very much for hosting me; a real pleasure.

TROND: You're welcome. You have just listened to Episode 9 of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was The Fourth Industrial Revolution post-COVID-19. Our guest was Francisco Betti, Head of Advanced Manufacturing and Production at The World Economic Forum.

In this conversation, we talked about why he got into manufacturing and how The World Economic Forum works. We discussed how the forum has changed over these past years and how manufacturing has become the lead topic among the global elite. The manufacturing platform is now, arguably, the primary among 17 flagship initiatives at The World Economic Forum. We go deeply into the changing business models of manufacturing and what the next decade holds.

My takeaway is that manufacturing has escalated in prominence during COVID-19, and for good reason. What we can produce decides what we can become. The deep digitalization gains that society has made over the past few years had to quickly be implemented on the factory floor. Surprisingly, a large part of the industry was ready. But the process now needs to complete, and the results will likely be an entirely new production platform for the world.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 4: A Renaissance in Manufacturing or Episode 6: Work of the Future. Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast.

Special Guest: Francisco Betti.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In episode 21 of the podcast @AugmentedPod, the topic is: "The Future of Digital in Manufacturing." Our guest is Çağlayan Arkan, VP of Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft (@Caglayan_Arkan).  

In this conversation, we talk about where manufacturing has been in the past, why manufacturing has been lacking a sense of urgency in the sense of industry 4.0 but how everything we know about manufacturing has changed. We also discuss workforce transformation, democratizing operational technology, and the future of industrial innovation.

After listening to this episode, check out  Microsoft's manufacturing approach as well as Çağlayan Arkan's social media profile:

• Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/manufacturing/microsoft-cloud-for-manufacturing 
• Çağlayan Arkan: LinkedIn,
• Blog: https://aka.ms/CaglayanArkanBlog

Trond's takeaway: The future of digital in manufacturing is enormously impactful. Yet, even deep digitalization will not make workers obsolete. Rather, the challenge seems to be achieving a dramatic workforce transformation which also entails empowerment, upskilling, and autonomy through augmentation of frontline operations.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode 9, The Fourth Industrial Revolution post-COVID-19, episode 4, A Renaissance in Manufacturing or Episode 20, The Digitalization of Körber.

Augmented--industrial conversations.

Transcript:

Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In Episode 21 of the podcast, the topic is The Future of Digital in Manufacturing. Our guest is Çağlayan Arkan, VP of Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft.

In this conversation, we talk about where manufacturing has been in the past, why manufacturing has been lacking a sense of urgency in the sense of industry 4.0, but how everything we know about manufacturing has changed. We also discuss workforce transformation, democratizing operational technology, and the future of industrial innovation.

Augmented is a podcast for leaders hosted by futurist, Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the frontline operations platform, and associated with MFG.works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at the World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast.

Çağlayan, how are you today?

ÇAĞLAYAN: I am very well. Great to be here. Thank you.

TROND: So I am alerted to the fact that you're an outdoor person. And I wanted to cover that just because a technology discussion in manufacturing is not complete without a little bit of personality. And I think you said you are a backcountry skier. I was curious about this.

ÇAĞLAYAN: I am. Skiing is my passion, one of them, but probably the one that makes me happiest, the one that I love the most. I like ski touring, and I like skiing the backcountry, the off-piste. I like climbing. I'm a very physical person. And on a similar note, I also am a cyclist. I'm a sailor, a windsurfer. I just love being out, and I love the wind on my face.

TROND: So at some point in the future, when the pandemic is over and behind us, I think my next podcast with you we will simply go for a hike.

ÇAĞLAYAN: Well, let's do it. But doing it with me has the following potential downside for you. The other piece of my outdoors work, or kind of world, if you will, is that I love miserable weather. I'm a winter person. I love my rain, my cold, my wind. [laughs] And people typically, even if they categorize themselves as outsiders, like outdoor people, they will just love fair weather, I don't. I'm not that person. I don't like the sun on my face. I don't like a lot of people out. I like trails to myself. I like mountains to myself. [laughs] If you're up for it, we'll do it together.

TROND: Well, this is probably something you didn't realize. But I grew up in Norway, and there are no people. And we have plenty of bad weather. So admittedly, I don't live in Norway, so that could give you a clue. [laughter] But there is something there.

ÇAĞLAYAN: All right, we're on. We're on.

TROND: Yeah, we're on. Okay, so having settled that, I wanted to ask you this question. So we're going to talk about, I guess, the future and the current state, present state of manufacturing. But where has manufacturing been in the past? And by the way, when you think past, how far do you go back? I mean, is this just pre-COVID? Because I've heard you talk a little bit about manufacturing traditionally, and I want you to just give us a quick sense of where you think the industry was just a few moments ago.

ÇAĞLAYAN: You started personally. Let me personalize manufacturing for me. I'm an industrial engineer with an MBA. And so, my whole education was in plants in the manufacturing environment. And I studied from operations research to metallurgical engineering, to electrical engineering, to construction, to electrical. You just name it. And so that has been something that I really really liked, the system's thinking, the optimization. I've done a lot in OR back in the day, linear and multiple. So maybe too much detail for now.

But where is manufacturing? Manufacturing has been mostly manual siloed with a separation between information technology and the data estate that that brings to the table and operations technology that that brings to the table. Technology has never really been, particularly from an IT standpoint, top of mind. Digital transformation has not really been a sense of urgency in manufacturing because things worked. Yet people at the shop floor and things were working until the pandemic hit.

So pandemic question, slap on the face for manufacturers. Business continuity none. You can't send people to the shop floor. You cannot operate. You don't see your inventory. You can't see your suppliers. You don't even know whether they're surviving or not, financially or otherwise. So it was a huge, huge, huge problem. But the silver lining of all of this is now there's acceleration into the transformation of manufacturing.

Look, why is manufacturing important? Let's spend a minute on that. Manufacturing, unlike many other industries (And I kind of make fun of my peer industry leaders at Microsoft as well.), manufacturing is very real. Manufacturing creates employment. Manufacturing creates growth, builds the economy, builds capacity. Manufacturing is about innovation. Manufacturing is about competitiveness. So it is core to populations, countries. It's core to politicians, to business leaders, and it's just phenomenal.

And so if you do things right in manufacturing, things work, including climate change, and sustainability, and a lot of other stuff. And if you do things wrong, you could see a lot of damage done. It collapses economies. It collapses, grids and stops, and creates a lot of disruption. So it is very real. And so I'm sorry I'm providing a long answer, but you can tell I'm passionate about it. It's very personal for me.

But by and large, I'm actually excited about where we are. We are at an inflection point. And we'll see a lot of acceleration coming out of the pandemic, the crisis. And stuff we're working on is actually to ensure business continuity and resiliency. Those are the things that are the conversations going forward.

TROND: Çağlayan, you took me in an interesting direction. I was just thinking as you were speaking, right before we go to the inflection, it's actually not just a little bit surprising but actually quite surprising that there haven't been any reported massive disruptions due to the pandemic. If you think about all of these mission-critical systems that we have around the world, in every manufacturing-related industry, how do you explain because, as you were saying, historically...and some of these silos are sort of still there, although obviously, we are at this inflection point so somehow already transitioned.

But how do you explain that we haven't had more horror stories? And by horror stories, I guess I mean operations completely collapsing, or I guess grids falling apart, or that one manual worker couldn't go in. So X happened that they had never, never thought about. Why haven't we heard anything like that? Are those stories going to come out, do you think, or did nothing seriously happen?

ÇAĞLAYAN: Well, it happened. I know for a fact because once this started, I started calling down on my customers, like, "How are you doing? What do you need?" For one, I think that from a table stakes standpoint, we've seen massive teams deployment because people wanted to communicate. They wanted continuity in terms of being able to talk to one another, being able to work, and then work from home, of course, because they couldn't go to their plants or to their offices. So there was a lot of pain. There was a lot of disruption.

I talked to some of my customers, and they were like, billions of dollars are tied in inventory, and we have no idea where that sits. Again, they're disconnected from suppliers as well as their customers, and so there was disruption. But luckily, we've had some leaders actually having foreseen what is to come, or they were disruptors or at least early adopters. And they have taken pre-COVID pre-crisis steps for digital transformation.

And I love my examples and partnerships where Erickson had started work pre-COVID in terms of digital manufacturing, Outokumpu, a leader in steel manufacturing, significant progress including during the pandemic, Airbus, Unilever. I mean, those are leading examples, only some of them. But you look at the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network; there are so many lighthouse factories that are just like literally lighthouses for people to look at and look up to. That work started years ago.

So there are some extremely encouraging examples. There are some very, very dark stories in terms of complete stoppage and horror stories. But by large, we are at a good place in terms of we understand the issues and we understand how to deal with them. And I think most importantly, that notion of time to value is accelerated in manufacturing. And we're coming from prohibitively expensive, I mean, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars of IT projects that never end to now negligible cost and like 10-12 weeks, a couple of months, and then you stand up a digital factory capability. You have visibility into your supply chain by standing up a control tower.

And then, in the case of Airbus or Alstom, you can have your 2,000 engineers still keep doing design and engineering work from home; examples go on. But we understand the issues. We have a very quick ability to build capability, to show that stuff works and you can operate remotely, et cetera, et cetera.

TROND: But would you say that this is the definite end to, I guess what you were alluding to is kind of this pilot purgatory? Is COVID the definite end to pilot purgatory? Or is it just that this particular situation was so serious that everybody kind of scrambled, and most of them got it right? Or would you say that...I guess possibly because once you have made this transition, that is the hard work. Do you think that these pilots that everyone was waiting for will that problem disappear because people have learned that this is not the way to introduce technology? You sort of learned it the hard way.

ÇAĞLAYAN: Oh, well, my view is if you take a step back, Trond, here's how I see it. One hundred years ago, we were by and large an agricultural society, and we had like 50% of the workforce in agriculture. Today we are by and large an industrial society. And we have like 2% of the workforce in agriculture, and we brought everyone along in terms of The Industrial Age. Today we are at the next junction; some call it industry 4.0, some call it other names. But we as a society assume...like humanity, we're moving from industrial to digital. So that's the higher order.

Now, what's the role of the pandemic in this? I think it's that of acceleration. So in any major shift, there are behaviors and categories of actors or players. There are the disruptors. There are those who go and make a market, build a trend. And we have seen those, and we're still seeing them. They are the early adopters. We talked about some of them as well. And then there's going to be the slower adopters and the laggards. And then some of the laggards will not see the light of day or will not maybe exist after we transition to the new reality, new realm, or that notion of digital society.

So what I'm saying is it was going to happen, those pilots or people's way, like, slow adopters' way of touching it, putting their toes in the water. For some, it's proving value and acceleration. Pandemic, again, that kind of disruption is going to accelerate and bring more to the table. But it certainly has a role to play. But the higher-level order is we are moving to a very, very different reality for manufacturers and supply chains and even as a society.

TROND: Super interesting. Çağlayan, I've heard you talk earlier. And I guess we talked a little bit in the prep about whether this is a different wave of technology because I know you have some views on the democratization of basically operational technology because there are different waves of technology in manufacturing. And traditionally, like you said, the industry has been siloed. But one of the reasons the industry was siloed is that the technology then also turned into silos, arguably.

And what is it about the technology these days? Is it getting simpler? Are you, for instance, in Microsoft spending more time on user interfaces than you were before? Or I guess even the introduction of your company so deeply into manufacturing is in and of itself a bit of a novelty. The tech players that weren't specialists are now going deep, deep into industry segments. Give me a sense of why this is happening. And what exactly is this democratization? Gartner calls it citizen developers.

ÇAĞLAYAN: Yeah, that's one aspect of it. The way I see it is, very shortly, technology now works.

TROND: [laughs]

ÇAĞLAYAN: Honestly, I don't know, like five years ago, it just didn't. It was so hard for implementations, for integration, et cetera. It now works. There's virtually nothing technology cannot deliver today. It's up to the leader's vision, leader's ability to execute, and magic happens. There's so much at play right now, that's one.

Secondly, technology is the business right now. I mean, technology was isolated. Trond, you will remember those days not too distant past. We had our own language. The CIO, it's like they were from Mars in the organization. [laughter] And they were not mainstream as an executive in the company. Company did their work, and CIO did stuff that nobody really understood.

Now, technology is the business. I mean, if you look at any research, you will see that the mainstream business leader, whether it's the CMO, the Chief, Marketing Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Financial Officer, whatever those may be, they're making more technology decisions and have bigger technology budgets than the technology people themselves. So that's the other piece that business is technology. Technology is business.

The third piece is that the siloed nature of not only manufacturing, so many different industries, was because it was an application-led view into enterprises or into business. Now, it's data-driven work. And so data dictates everything, and data is actually end to end. So to the extent that you have a data architecture, enterprise-level data architecture, and a system-level approach to things, it's a completely different world.

And to bring those three together as a business, you have to forget more than you remember. And then you have to reinvent yourself. And if you do that, everybody knows cliché examples here, but then you find yourself as a completely different company or services company or actually at the risk of being disrupted by competition in ways that were not thought of or unprecedented. So that's what's happening.

So what we like to approach this whole kind of...I like to call this opportunity. It's a major opportunity. It's a huge inflection point. It's all about reinventing your business. None of that is about technology. Technology is a tool. It's a powerful tool. It's a tool that works. It's very capable. But it's about the business outcomes. Because we said, you have to reinvent your entire enterprise, starting from your culture, how you operate, your value proposition, all of that.

It is where you start should be dictated by which outcome is most important for you, or the highest value for you, or the most burning for you. Whatever your drivers are, focus on the outcome. Go back to work to find the relevant data for it and get to that in weeks, literally seriously in weeks and get to the next outcome, the next outcome. And don't forget the people and culture. It's all about the people piece, and we can talk about that later. I think we should. But those are the things that I will say to your technology question.

TROND: That's great.

ÇAĞLAYAN: Focus on data, lead with culture, and always major prioritizations on the outcomes you want to drive.

TROND: You said lead with culture, but it's not just company culture, I guess. It's the whole nature of the skills that are now needed in this new workplace. A lot of people are saying that that is changing and that the workforce needs are changing. So you initially said well, technology now works. So that's true, but what are the skills that then are needed?

So okay, technology is easier. But what are some of the tasks that are, I guess, less relevant because of this influx of call it industry 4.0 type technologies? And what are some of the skills that are more relevant? And the frontline worker of the future, what should they be focused on? And your clients, what are they starting to teach their workforce?

ÇAĞLAYAN: Great question. I will say at the highest level, Trond, it is a data-driven culture. I mean, in manufacturing, maybe other businesses and industries as well, we operate on the basis of past successes, habits. This has been delivering for me. This has been working for me, et cetera, or experience. You kind of listen to stuff. You kind of watch stuff. You anticipate stuff. And you're like, I've been doing this for 25 years. None of this has anything to do with data because, again, we established we were using less than 1% of our data, at least in manufacturing. Now the biggest cultural change is data-driven.

And then once you go to data telling you what to do, data giving you predictions, data giving you systems of intelligence like the insights in terms of what to do, and when to do it, and how to do it, et cetera, then that dictates actually two things. Again, I'm trying to come down to it in terms of a hierarchy. Manufacturing had a skills gap, has a bigger skills gap in the face of digital. And we're not an attractive industry. The young generation does not see career opportunities in manufacturing. Actually, manufacturing is fantastic. It's real; it's innovative. So we have to change that, and so we're working on it.

And secondly, the existing jobs, even if they may still be the most important jobs in manufacturing, those people have to learn new skills in terms of doing their jobs using technology. Let's see now a couple of examples. You talked about the frontline workers, first-line workers, or just shopfloor, the very people who get the job done. They typically did not use any technology. They were all mostly manual, what we called HMI, like Human-Machine interfaces, old, very, very, antique equipment, if you will, blue screens. I think anyone who's close to manufacturing will know that we used a lot of paper, et cetera.

Today's frontline worker is actually acting on data, acting on predictions, double-clicking under the modern interface, and responding to traffic lights, responding to alerts. You got to be able to do those, wearing augmented or virtual reality devices. We call it mixed reality with the unique technology that we have in terms of HoloLens in our entire mixed reality platform.

But you come to a job, and then you don't need to learn to do the job. You just wear your HoloLens. And the mixed reality platform will actually teach you how to do it with your two hands-free. If you're in the field service, someone at the back office, remote connections, or remote assist capabilities can actually guide you through as to how to deal with that; I don't know, grid asset, extruder, or packaging line because they know how to and you don't need to. And then this is the way you learn how to do stuff.

So I guess the gist of it is some jobs will no longer exist. Most of the repetitive low-value-added jobs can be automated, robots, artificial intelligence, and other means in terms of process automation, et cetera. Most of the jobs, if not all of the jobs, will be rescaled in terms of technology. And at the highest level, probably 75 million jobs will go away. Again, this is a World Economic Forum study. One hundred thirty-five million new jobs will be created. What are those jobs? Data jobs, software jobs.

And then how you do your design and engineering, you have to be able to understand AI-led generative design, additive manufacturing, 3D printing to be able to be successful. And so, all of that is a call to action for universities, policymakers, corporate learning officers, for all of us, and calls for partnerships to lean in. And again, I used agricultural example. Bring everyone along from the Industrial Age to the digital age.

TROND: It's a fascinating challenge, and it's a big one. I was just curious; there's a lot of talk about middle jobs meaning jobs that are somewhere between more than high school but less than traditional college. But then you also have an echelon above that, of course, which traditionally certainly Microsoft was hiring into, which is more high-level cognitive jobs which required bachelors, and masters, and PhDs traditionally in computer programming. But I'm guessing now certainly in your field in sort of hybrid engineering studies where engineering plus IT.

The middle jobs is a big challenge, even just from an operational point of view. It's hard to educate a billion people worldwide or whatever it is that we have to do continuously to keep the lights up. How is all that going to happen? And what sort of effort does this require? Can we use the existing institutions we have to do this? Or do you foresee that it's going to be a lot more on-the-job type of training in digital training?

ÇAĞLAYAN: I'll say all of the above in the following ways; for one, we're already working with Purdue, University of Wisconsin, and many, many universities and education institutions. So for one, manufacturing-related jobs were kind of graduate jobs. We're trying to bring the curriculum to undergrad, if not high school, so there's that. So vocational training, et cetera, all of this is important.

Secondly, we partner with the National Association of Manufacturers, MxD, Sesame, obviously Tulip, and many others in terms of call to action and doing institutionalizing, programatize, very, very important for all of that. Thirdly, I deliberately talked about corporate learning officers because a lot of people, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in large corporations, actually had to learn new skills. And it is happening as we speak in multiple ways in many, many, many, many leading enterprises. But it's a huge part of the whole equation.

And then, I talked about the World Economic Forum and the Global Lighthouse Network. Programs like that actually bring it to everyone's attention in terms of what is possible, and how it works, and how some leading institutions deal with it, which brings me to this notion of what I like to call art of possible. I think leadership at large, political leaders, enterprise leaders, any institution, education, leadership at large has to understand what I call the art of possible, and that is how technology has already transformed everyone's lives.

And what is that leaders need to do differently? Starting from communication, setting new standards, to building the new curriculum, to encouraging everyone, bringing everyone along, and all the rest of it from cultural change to change management and defining the new normal. But by and large, just bringing everyone along. And so that is really, really important that we start that education and understanding with the leadership because it's all about leadership. It's all about them having the right vision and being able to execute to that.

TROND: What is the role of actors such as startups? You mentioned Tulip. What are startups' role in the emerging manufacturing and frontline operations ecosystem? Tulip thinks of itself a little wider than manufacturing. But what is it that startups can do? Because clearly, this is a game, technology overall, and also industries. It's an industrial game. Industrial companies are massive traditionally.

So the juxtaposition traditionally in the old world would be between the industrial conglomerates and then the SMEs. And the game was to get the SMEs to be useful providers and suppliers into the supply chain ecosystem was an educational challenge. But you now have startups somewhere in this picture as well. Can you address how you think these startups function in the ecosystem going forward?

ÇAĞLAYAN: Yeah, I think the example that I would use is startups are like Tesla for automotive, Airbnb for hospitality. They're the disruptors. They have zero legacy. And so we're talking major change, major transformation. What happens in change? Lots of the legacy will drag their feet. They will want to protect status quo. They'll be slower. What startups do is they teach you the new normal. They teach you the art of possible, and they go on and do it. This is how you carry from years of implementation time to weeks. This is how you go from hundreds of millions of dollars to pennies and cents.

And so Tulip and many, many others that I'm so excited to work together with, define the new normal. They make it happen. They go and make stuff. And actually, they are the ones who bring what I call art of possible to life. Let's take Tulip's example. Again, they go into the shop floor. And they look at that low-code/no-code citizen developers, a term that you used in this very conversation. And then they bring it to life in the context of manufacturing operations.

And so suddenly, the human-machine interfaces are modernized. The legacy-heavy applications that do not necessarily connect the enterprise have changed, and there's a new workflow in place. And people just act on data and intelligence. The job is much easier to do, et cetera, and then you can build on it. And so what they do is just extremely important, actually much bigger than their sizes or the number of people that they employ. The role that they play is actually what's going to change economies. And this is one reason why we embrace and work very, very closely with the likes of Tulip at Microsoft through multiple, multiple tools and investments that we have from Microsoft for Startups to M12 and to many others.

TROND: Yes, I understand. That's fantastic. However, it does remain the case that right now, you are a gorilla in the big space, and you do have a privileged position to analyze what you think is happening. So if you use that futurist hat that you have from your vantage point of a large player that does work with everyone, I guess, where is this now heading?

You said it's a disruptive time. It's an inflection point. You were using big, revolutionary words. We're talking about industry revolutions. There's also some uncertainty, and we have been dealing with resilience issues. But you pointed out simplicity has improved. Where is all this taking us, all of these bits and pieces altogether? Where is the manufacturing industry heading?

ÇAĞLAYAN: Manufacturing is very complex, and it's actually not one industry. So many industries are manufacturers. So let's kind of break it down and simplify to maybe customer-facing systems, sales, services, et cetera, design, and engineering making stuff which is really manufacturing, supply chains, and then maybe you look at people.

In the customer systems, particularly the pandemic, taught us that online sales and delivery, omnichannel strategies, profit optimization, pricing, contact lifecycle management, all of that is here to stay. Connected field services or field services at large is going to be changed forever. Again, we talked about mixed reality, remote assistant, remote capabilities, all of that. So that is where that is headed.

In terms of the design and engineering piece, we talked about AI-led generative design, where AI engines actually design stuff like mother nature. They don't have corners. They're not straight lines. So the existing manufacturing paradigms like welding, and bending, and et cetera, can go away, and 3D printing actually is very revolutionary in that it's the only way to actually make the stuff that is designed by AI engines which is faster, stronger, lighter, cheaper, et cetera. But again, you can only build them with the new 3D or additive paradigms, and so there's that.

And obviously, from design and engineering, that whole design supply chain is moving to a virtual environment so that you do not have to send designs in paper when it comes to like...You look at Boeing, and they have like six million suppliers. You look at Rolls Royce, the same deal. And then what they do now is they send electronic drawings. You can validate. You can verify the source is correct. You can just keep building in the virtual environment, and you can run simulations and tests. I can go on and on, but that is completely disrupted and changed forever.

Manufacturing as we know it is moving to...some call it lights-out manufacturing. But this whole remote capability being able to...business continuity, people at the shop floor being able to remotely operate, manage and monitor your assets, get predictions on them, actually have predictions visibility into your suppliers and be connected to their environment. Digital twins and digital threads are actually huge enablers from that perspective. So this whole kind of lights-out manufacturing conversation can happen. Again, technology is capable of delivering it. You have to optimize or rationalize for your own enterprise. Supply chains, completely moving to an autonomous and sustainable fashion.

And then finally, at the highest level, what we're seeing perhaps the largest opportunity is go from your...even your own enterprise was siloed. Let alone your enterprise, go and reinvent the whole value chain that you operate in. We tend to think about industries, but actually, value chains are made up of multiple adjacent industries. Look at food; it starts with perhaps the farmer, but the farm equipment manufacturer, the likes of John Deere, Mahindra, et cetera, do play a huge role. There's a lot of data there.

Then you look at warehouses, then you look at mills, and processors, and packagers, and shippers, and then you go all the way to retail. I've talked about seven different industries. The notion of I call it lead with opportunity as opposed to leading with risks. Share your data for the greater good. New value creation at the value chain level we haven't even begun starting that journey, really. And so, just some of the examples of how everything we know is already disrupted. Again, do all the leaders know, the world leaders know how to deal with it or where to take their enterprises, their people, their cultures, their businesses? And so that's kind of the conversation.

TROND: Indeed it is. Disruption at the value chain level that seems to be at the core. And then I guess my last question for you really is to take this back to the human being because I know you think that fundamentally, this is not really about the technologies or even just the various industries at the center, and maintaining and constructing is the human being.

The augmented human capabilities that these new structures and technologies enable, what does that look like? I mean, if you think augmented reality and mixed reality, HoloLens is like a beginning of that vision. But it seems like we're arguably going from a day where the idea was automate, but you have a vision of more augmenting, meaning you're supplementing the human as opposed to replacing them. How do you see the human being in this picture? What is going to be the role of the human worker?

ÇAĞLAYAN: Well, it's going to be a combination of vision and maybe aspiration. But I'll say augmented society first because of diversity and inclusion. Let's start there. Let's bring everyone along. Let's not leave one person behind, wherever they may be, whatever background. Let's bring everyone along. And as a society, let's elevate everyone. Let's make everything accessible, technology, and data, and education, and health, and water, and safe food, all of that accessible to everyone.

The new set of paradigms actually might create value at such a level in which we can give people more free time, more fulfillment, provide better work-life balance, provide other means of seeking reason and purpose in life and communicate and work together at very, very different levels. And so all of that is just, again, I think this whole kind of leader, art of possible, and what technology is capable of today. If we put the people in the center and go from there, I think we can remember these days as some of the best kind of inflection points in history.

TROND: Wow, that's a great way to end. I thank you so much. This was a whirlwind of observations. [laughs] Thank you very much.

ÇAĞLAYAN: Thank you.

TROND: You have just listened to Episode 21 of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was The Future of Digital in Manufacturing, and our guest was Çağlayan Arkan, VP of Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft. In this conversation, we talked about where manufacturing has been in the past, workforce transformation, democratizing operational technology, and the future of industrial innovation.

My takeaway is that the future of digital in manufacturing is enormously impactful, yet even deep digitalization will not make workers obsolete. Rather, the challenge seems to be achieving a dramatic workforce transformation which also entails empowerment, upskilling, and autonomy through augmentation of frontline operations.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player. View our YouTube channel and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 9: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, post-COVID-19, Episode 4: A Renaissance in Manufacturing, or Episode 20: The Digitalization of Körber.

Augmented - upskilling the workforce for industry 4.0 frontline operations.

Special Guest: Çağlayan Arkan.

In episode 10 of the podcast (@AugmentedPod), the topic is “A Brief History of Manufacturing Software.” Our guest is Rick Bullotta, Partner, TwinThread, and co-founder, ThingWorx.

In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee of Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which merged with BTR to form Invensys, which, in turn, merged with French multinational Schneider Electric, and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the co-founder of Lighthammer Software which was later acquired by SAP, then in 2009 founding ThingWorx, the first complete, end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry.

After listening to this episode, check out Thingworx as well as Rick Bullotta's social profile.

Trond's takeaway: Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx are prominent parts of manufacturing software history, and there's a chance that the 4th company he now is involved with, Tulip, also will be. I do things with things is Rick Bullotta's motto. The things he does, he does them well, and it is an internet of things, more than anything else. I, for one, am eagerly listening to what he predicts will happen next.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or episode 5: Plug-and-Play Industrial Tech. Augmented--the industry 4.0 podcast.

Transcript:

Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In Episode 10 of the podcast, the topic is a Brief History of Manufacturing Software. Our guest is Rick Bullotta, Partner at TwinThread and Co-Founder of ThingWorx.

In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee with Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which then merged with BTR to form Invensys, which in turn merged with French and multinational Schneider Electric and later the CTO.

Rick Bullotta was also the Co-Founder of Lighthammer Software which was later acquired by SAP. Then in 2009, founding ThingWorx, the first complete end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things, which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry.

Augmented is a podcast for leaders hosted by futurist, Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG Works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at the World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast.

TROND: Rick, how are you today?

RICK: Good morning.

TROND: Well, it's a nice morning. I wanted to talk to you about some history.

RICK: Sure.

TROND: Well, you are a bit of a legend in this field, Rick. You've been basically part of almost every development in this field for several years. I wanted us to spend a little time today, not just going into your history of background as the founder of several startups that have had very significant impact on the industry but also just bring people in a little bit to the environment and how it has changed, and how based on your perspective, you see it evolving.

You had a degree from Cornell, and then you went on to fund several companies. Can you bring us back to those days when you were studying industrial engineering at Cornell? What was the environment then for manufacturing? And what was it that brought you into the thought that you would start engaging sort of entrepreneurial software development in manufacturing of all fields?

RICK: Just to be clear, I barely graduated. [laughter] So I had a fantastic time in college. But that was when I think we thought of engineers as mechanical engineers, or chemical engineers, the physical aspects of making things, building things, vending product as opposed to...I think software and technology was kind of a nascent concept there, at least certainly in manufacturing.

But I actually switched degrees from mechanical engineering to operations research mid-stride there, realizing that looking at pieces of broken metal under a microscope wasn't for me. So I graduated. My degree was in operations research, and actually, my first position was at a very progressive steel company called Lukens Steel, doing essentially industrial engineering work.

However, this was what? 1985, dawn of the PC, dawn of a new gen of computing. And some opportunities opened up there to kind of take on some additional responsibilities that involved applying computing to simulations and optimization models, all the stuff that I studied but never thought I'd actually practice. So I'd spend a lot of time in the local library checking out software, take the disc home, teach myself to code.

An opportunity then opened up to go into steel plant operation. So I used to run a heat-treating process. And that's one thing that a university degree won't prepare you for, having 15 steelworkers working for you. That's where you get a real education. You also quickly realize that the exception is the rule on the manufacturing floor. And we'll talk later about how it gave me a great appreciation of the importance of the role of people in this whole process and not just technology.

But yeah, I spent a few years in that role and then moved back over to an industrial computing group. And we were applying at the time very advanced technology, mini computers, very innovative user interfaces, high levels of automation to some of these processes back at the very site that I worked. And the very operations that I worked at was one of the first places for that. So that's kind of where I got into the technology side of things.

But I like to say I was blessed and lucky, right? This crusty, old steel company happened to be very, very committed to investing in technology. And it was a learning opportunity for me. And then, across the years, I moved into systems integration. I did some stuff in discrete manufacturing. I had the opportunity; again, luck sometimes happens here, to work for arguably the first well-known company in the industrial software space company called Wonderware, first IPO in the space. And I joined very early, which is kind of cool.

TROND: The Wonderware story is somewhat famous for people inside of manufacturing, but just in case, there are some listeners here who don't really appreciate how early Wonderware was. What was the situation when you created your first product? And why, in your account, has it become so emblematic of that early-early era? And what year are we talking about exactly when that entered the stage with Wonderware?

RICK: So late '80s, early '90s Wonderware came on the scene. I joined in; I believe it was '93. And my role there was actually in sales. So you'll find that a lot of my life experiences are all the elements that help build a successful business: sales, marketing, technology. So the founding team there...and there'll be a circle of life moment here in a little bit when we talk about how ThingWorx came to be.

The two key co-founders there, Dennis Morin and Phil Huber, recognized the value. And they harnessed the PC revolution and Microsoft Windows. So we're talking Wayback Machine when Windows looked like the Mac user interface. There wasn't a lot of PC application on the plant floor. There were some very interesting companies that I had worked with, competitors to Wonderware but a bit earlier companies like [inaudible 7:28]

But we were just kind of at that inflection point where people were comfortable with the role of the personal computer as this kind of human interface to all the automation systems that we had. What Dennis and Phil did was really twofold. And this, I think, ties into a lot of the innovation we're seeing today is they democratized the ability to build applications. They made it easy and fun.

So the whole experience wasn't coding; it was very visual. It leveraged kind of a drag and drop experience. You didn't need to understand software to apply it. You could build these incredible applications literally in minutes or hours, connect them to the physical world. I don't know if you've ever seen some of the classic applications they've built. But they're those process mimics, very dynamic graphics that represent the physical world.

And I learned a lot during that period about the importance of two things: one is ease of use and empowering others to build applications, particularly in the manufacturer domain. Second was, ironically, the importance of marketing. If there's one thing, that company did extraordinarily well in addition to having a great product was getting the message out there, maintaining a larger-than-life image. And the company grew rapidly to 5 million, 10 million, 15, 20, and on and on, and then IPOed.

But there wasn't anybody in history that didn't know the name. Go to a trade show...this is a company that kind of put some perspective. I think the first year I was there; we did about 20 million in revenues. We spent about a million-five on a party. That's kind of the priorities were well balanced there. But what an extraordinary group of people to learn from; I developed lifelong mentors and friends at that company that fast forward to my last company, some of those same people came and joined my team. So it was a complete honor to work with them again, so yeah.

TROND: So back in those days, what was it that Wonderware apart from the marketing side, and like you said, the menus and things...first of all, who was the target audience at this point? Was this still process engineers that were doing this, or was it still the IT department managing?

RICK: Typically process engineers, and that was the democratization, taking it out of that...let's go back to my time in the steel industry. We were writing Fortran code, PL/M code. We were writing code. We were creating database schema, all the kinds of classic development processes. And it was part of a corporate IT function. Now, this shifted to empowering two main groups, process engineers inside these manufacturing companies and, secondly, a new breed of systems integrators that were very, very focused on this automation domain.

So historically, they may have done the physical automation, the PLCs, the actuators, sensing distributed control systems. Now they were able to take on this role. Two other things happened. Just prior to the advent of things like [inaudible 10:42] and Wonderware, that user experience was physical gauges, and push buttons, and things like that, and sliders. Now, it became digital.

In a way, this was almost like magic at the time. It's virtual reality. It's like a lot of people the first time...I'll never forget my mother the first time she played solitaire on a PC and that virtual card dragging. It was just utter magic. Well, similar experience here, right? People were able to reproduce these and rapidly reconfigure. But to your point, I would say, yeah, it was those in-house process engineers and the systems integrators that helped implement these systems.

TROND: Were you all aware of how innovative you were? I mean, clearly, the marketing department thought you were something special. But did you realize at the time how timeless and etched into manufacturing history Wonderware would become later? Were you aware of how far ahead this was? Or were the customers telling you that clearly?

RICK: That's a great question. I think it was a combination of both. We had an almost cult-like customer following that was pretty unique, and it created a lot of energy. They knew we were doing something interesting. But we had very legitimate competitors who were also doing super cool stuff. I think another life lesson here was a lot of companies create great products. To bring great products to market at scale is a whole nother task. It's a whole nother challenge.

And I think what we had going for us was an absolutely extraordinary distribution channel, global distribution channels, and very energetic, bright people, independent businesses that could sell, support, implement this technology. That allowed us to achieve scale pretty quickly. But the customers were the primary feedback loop. We won all kinds of awards from the trade rags, all that kind of stuff. I definitely think it was the kinds of applications that the customers were building. That always gives you energy when you see that.

TROND: Rick, give me another sense of as we're sort of moving to your next company, just bring us back to that time with the early years of Wonderware. What were some of the things that were challenging to you on the application side then that today we would laugh off and it would just be like a line item? What were some of the things that were really complicated that you were so proud of having accomplished?

RICK: Well, let's just take the obvious, which is sort of the inverse of Moore's law. If we turn the clock back that many years, we have half as much compute power every year. And to have a very graphical dynamic user experience, it had to be reliable. I would not underestimate the incredible work that that development team did to take not only a new product in what we built with InTouch, which was the product at the time but also Windows itself. It wasn't evolved. It wasn't mature. It certainly wasn't targeted at these kinds of mission-critical applications.

So those were the kinds of things you had to work with. You had to make it robust, reliable, and take advantage of very, very limited compute and visualization capability at the time. It changed the modalities by way...people typically, you know, we were all used to keyboards at the time. Now it's touch; it's a mouse. It's a different means of interaction. And then how do you bring that? Some interesting challenges. Like, I'm a task worker down on the floor in protective equipment and gloves, and how do I interact with that? So all kinds of creative stuff to try and bring a whole new modality of human interaction to a pretty demanding segment.

TROND: So what then happened to you? What happened around you leaving Wonderware and moving on to the next challenges? Because you've also had a foray in larger companies, but then you immediately went back to the startup world. Give me a sense of what was your thinking then?

RICK: Sure. So there was a little detour as there are often in our careers. [laughs] I left and experimented. I actually came back to Wonderware a second time prior to my first startup in a product management role. I got to see M&A. So we got involved in a couple of key acquisitions that I was intimately involved in. So that was another learning experience for me. Then I saw this opportunity at a level above the Wonderwares of the world, of the OSIsofts of the world, of all these kinds of operational systems that we had. They were islands.

No one had that holistic view, a supervisor, an operator. No one was sharing information. And so the light bulb went off. This is actually about when the web technologies were starting to get a little traction, the browser, the Netscape effect, ubiquitous TCP/IP connectivity, Ethernet, and the plants. So that's when the light bulb went off. Let's see if we could do something not dissimilar from the way a Wonderware product will connect all your centers and controllers. Why not provide a unified way to see all the systems that you have? So basically, that's what became Lighthammer, and that was in 1998, we started that company.

But the intent was, again, to provide that unified view of first...it was called the Plant Information Portal. That was another cool word at the time, right? Portals. And so that was the objective, it's kind of unified visibility. I started the company with some colleagues that I knew from Wonderware. And we built, I think, something pretty groundbreaking there.

TROND: And the situation then was there was this need for almost like an information service to kind of...it was almost like an early portal for the industry in a sense.

RICK: I think what we found...the unique thing about the industrial space I like to say that everything's a legacy the moment it gets put in. Everything has proprietary APIs, interfaces, and protocols. My approach has always been solve hard problems because you're going to have fewer competitors, and the value is there. So we tried to solve a pretty hard problem, all these like debubblizing all these different crazy systems that were scattered around.

Yeah, so that's really what the objective was initially, unified visibility. But then we realized if people can see that information, why can't other systems? So it rapidly progressed from just being empowering people with information to empowering other lines of business systems. So your supply chain systems, warehouse systems, ERP systems can now be informed with real information in a timely manner. And that was what got us on SAP's radar.

TROND: Well, because the point was there that you started discovering the importance of standards. And there were standards at that time, but they were very basic web standards. And you started realizing that even in the side of the industrial field, you had to start depending on that. Is that also what got you involved in the intersection of interoperability and also open sourcing certain types of software?

RICK: Yeah. In fact, we were actively involved in a lot of open-source projects. I think that was also early in the open-source world. So if something was broken, no one was going to fix it for you; you fix it, right?

TROND: [chuckles]

RICK: So yeah, if you want to leverage and get value out of open source, you better be prepared to give back. So as a company, we definitely gave back to a lot of interesting projects that became part of the Lighthammer stack.

The other thing that I think is important to understand is, and this pattern repeats itself in my career, is building tools, not applications. My goal was always to empower people to build interesting stuff. They've got the ideas. They've got the innovations living inside them. But if it's hard, if there's friction at every point in the process, cost, time, whatever, they're not going to undertake it, so whether it was Wonderware stuff we were implementing, Lighthammer, ThingWorx. And nowadays, with solutions like Tulip, it really was all about that takedown friction, empower non-technical people to be innovators and do it fast.

TROND: So, Rick, then you got on SAP's radar. Tell me a little bit about not necessarily your experience there per se but just the difference for you in having straddled a startup that gets on the radar of a large company, and now you're working in a large company. What's the situation there? What is their understanding of the shop floor, and how does that all work? Because it gets more complicated when you're that kind of a software environment.

RICK: Well, I think SAP was a very good place to be for a number of reasons. SAP was dominant in the manufacturing vertical in terms of cost manufacturing. Customers, the vast majority of them ran SAP for their back-office systems. SAP had kind of light solutions for the manufacturing domain but a desire to go deeper. Secondly, they were launching a partner ecosystem at the time. We wanted to prove that, in fact, partners are an integral part to their offerings. So we were able to kind of get that visibility, but also, we started stealing some revenue.

So when you start taking customer spend instead of upgrading that module in my ERP system, I'm going to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on my plant floor. That gets you on the radar too. Interesting sidenote, so after SAP, the salespeople told us something fascinating. If you think about in a typical manufacturing company, there's arguably four to seven times more blue-collar...I hate the term blue-collar, task worker, you know, frontline workers, so to speak. But that's got a new meaning nowadays as opposed to back office.

Secondly, we had something that not only had a user license for each manufacturing worker but also manufacturing site costs. So think about comparing selling something to the CFO’s office that will run in a data center. The scale and size of the deals were pretty substantial, and there was real value being created. So I think in the first year, our sales grew like 800%, 900% from a pretty good base, having that ready base of manufacturing customers to sell into a global company with global sales and support presence. It's pretty easy to get traction there.

TROND: But then you had a stint back at Wonderware before you went on to found a new company. What was that like? So you came back and now kind of almost running the show at Wonderware for a little bit.

RICK: No, not really because I think the company...this was an interesting dynamic. The company had grown substantially by that point, so from 60 people in my first experience to probably 800 at that point. I was a remote CTO. This was long before remote work was a thing. It was extremely challenging. And I just think those dynamics kind of made it probably not as effective as I could be. That said, some work that I had done in SAP research is what kind of led to the ideas behind ThingWorx.

And I actually think, to be blunt, I think Wonderware at the time could have realized those pretty well. Collectively, we could have brought that product to market probably faster of what became ThingWorx. But it just for a variety of reasons, it wasn't the right time, fit, location, all those kinds of things. So dove back into it again, got the band back together, so to speak.

TROND: How did that happen? Because at this point, you're not new to startups, and you have had a taste of the corporate world, in fact, in two leading positions, I guess. What is it that then motivates you to go back into that grind, and then you found a groundbreaking company? [laughs]

RICK: Part of it is you feel like you cheated on the test. You've got the scars. You've had the lessons learned. I think we had a pretty well-rounded idea on what the new product was going to be, how we were going to take it to market. So I think we actually went in with a pretty solid plan rather than just A; we're going to do some R&D.

Secondly, my business partners at Lighthammer were my business partners at ThingWorx, common investors. And some new folks that I worked with at Wonderware joined the team. It was sort of...I'm not going to say we couldn't fail. There were a lot of things we could have done wrong. But we had an incredible team of people with a lot of experience building companies like this, selling software like this. I had a pretty good feeling that we were on the right track there.

TROND: And what exactly was ThingWorx in the early days? Because you read things like machine to machine, and those are terms that only much later...today we call internet of things. But you guys were very, very early, honestly, in that domain to produce products in that space when most people were just starting. Machine to machine didn't mean anything to people back then.

RICK: And I think where we did well was going a little bit beyond that. And you'll see, once again, it's a pattern that repeats itself, the importance of people, the machines, and the other systems and processes that people have in their companies. Synthesizing all those together is actually where the value nexus is just massive. Any one of those taken in isolation or the connections between them, yeah, there's value to be done.

But so we went in kind of with a broad...rather than just machine to machine. And there were some companies doing cool stuff just for getting updates down to an MRI machine or whatever. But we tried to go beyond that. We also realized early on the classic issue; it's good to know what you don't know. And remote access over unreliable links and all that stuff was something...My team had primarily lived in what we would jokingly call the internets of things. Everything's on the local network. You have different considerations.

So we acquired a company, a super team, a small company that had a lot of expertise in the kind of internet of things and that remote connectivity, remote management, and that was this the second wave of rocket fuel to get things going.

TROND: That's interesting you say that because I think that temptation for many would be you're so far ahead, and you start building things, and you're building things in the future. But I mean, surely, the reality is the shop floor and other things, and you're dealing with poor internet connections. Forget skills. I mean, you're actually dealing with a network that doesn't scale to your idea.

RICK: Exactly right. And it was a very interesting balance between...I oversimplify kind of that industrial IoT is smart, connected operations and things like that, so factories, power plants, and then connected fleets of stuff, trucks, MRI machines, light towers, and cities, radically different requirements. One's 98% on-prem, one's 99.9% cloud, one's intermittent, unreliable, expensive connectivity, one's reliable, isolated.

So we built a platform to serve both of those tests. In retrospect, we probably made compromises along the way to accommodate that. But still, today, I think PTC’s revenue with ThingWorx is fairly well split between those two domains. But that was an interesting challenge on its own because the requirements were dramatically different.

TROND: But again, you got acquired. So is this a pattern in your companies? Or is it more a pattern in the field that, at a certain point...because, I mean, I'm making this up here. But is there something about the industry itself that lends itself very easily to just in order to get that scale, you have to be acquired, and it's very desirable? Or is it more a choice that you each time made to say we've built it to a certain scale?

RICK: I think in our segment, there are the rare few that an IPO track makes sense, and it's achievable. I think, for the most part, companies in our domain are...they're talking acquisitions to technology companies, cloud companies, enterprise app companies, industrial automation companies. So they have the luxury of we can be the innovation engine. It doesn't have to come off...

If you think about a BigCo that wants to build something organically, every dollar they submit...first of all, they're typically 10 to 20 times, and it's just reality, less efficient in developing software for a variety of reasons. And that money comes off the bottom line. So it's actually an interesting dynamic that it's almost more attractive for them as well.

But the ThingWorx story is super interesting in the sense that I told someone the other day...so Jim Heppelmann super visionary right there. He had this concept of the digital twin and IoT connected with products way back. And he actually took some of his best and brightest people, his CTO, a number of other people, moved them out of their office, put them in the Cambridge Innovation Center, and said, "Go create something."

Well, along the way, we got introduced to that team. And they came to the conclusion that, hey, it's going to be faster, cheaper. We can get to market capture mindshare quicker through acquisition. And if you think about it, that's a very...immature is not the right word. I don't even know what the word I'm looking for here, but it's you've just been given an opportunity to intrapreneur. You've got a clean sheet of paper, all the fun stuff after grinding out your day job for years.

And you make that decision to well; we're not going to do that. We're going to go buy a company. I have huge respect for that. And it turned out to be a very good decision for everyone involved. So that's actually how that happened. We were an intrapreneurial effort at a relatively large company, decided to go and become acquisitive instead. And that's worked out quite well.

TROND: So we haven't talked so much about the surrounding companies throughout these years. But were there other companies doing innovative things? I'm not so familiar with the history of all of the kind of less successful or less visible manufacturing IT companies throughout the early '90s. What was wrong with some of those, and why don't we talk about them? I mean, are they also still part of the picture? Were there smaller acquisitions that go into this history?

RICK: Yeah, there's actually a lot that we were doing right. It was a big enough pie that the gorilla, you know, in the segment might only have a 20-something percent market share. So it was still fairly fragmented. It's partially because of geography, partially because of different segments, and partially just because it was such a big opportunity. The companion market to a lot of what I was doing, for example, at Wonderware and Lighthammer, was the data side of it. So that's the historian companies.

Greatest example of that recently is the acquisition of OSIsoft by AVEVA for $5 billion, biggest little company you never heard of. I mean, just a fantastic success story. They stuck to what they did very well and built essentially a dominant market position. They had competitors with good products as well. But I think they're one of those success stories in that space that's only visible to most people now. We had competitors in almost every company I've ever worked at that had great solutions.

But this is, again, where I think the X factor stuff comes into play. Your go-to-market machine, the passion that your team and people have that's contagious. If people really believe and they interact with customers and partners, it's just magic. The second thing was, again, where you're really doing useful stuff for customers. Some companies were software companies. Some companies were really just integration companies masquerading as software companies. But, Trond, you know this. There's no shortage of bright people on this planet, and it's --

TROND: Well, sure, there's no shortage of bright people. But I guess this is the third segment that I wanted us to get into. You kind of have a third career now, which is this portfolio life, I guess. [laughs] You can characterize it yourself, but I don't know how to explain it otherwise where you're seeing, first of all, a number of companies and the maturity, I guess, in the space, that's a little different. But you are in a different stage in your career. And I want to eventually get to Tulip and discuss why you got involved with that. But first, maybe you can address some of these portfolio things that you're doing right now.

RICK: Sure.

TROND: Obviously, mentoring a lot more and getting involved on the board side. How do you see even just the last five years? What's happening right now? Where are we right now with manufacturing software?

RICK: So generically, I would say I'm doing manufacturing and adjacent stuff, kind of IoT industrial. I am so excited that it's cool again, right? Because it was for two decades. It was like --

TROND: Well, you were never concerned about that, surely. [laughs]

RICK: But, you know, what's the old...in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So if you were cool within your segment, you didn't have to be that great. And you could have done underselling what we achieved at the different companies. But I think it really has visibility now. There's investment money flowing into it. I think the increasing importance of...we kind of hit that little productivity inflection point where it started to flatten out. People are investing in technology.

The challenges around people there's just not a lot of know-how, or there's much less know-how about everything from manufacturing operations to the different tasks that get performed to the technologies. So, how do we offset that? So technology is starting to fill an increasingly important role of focused VCs, and focused investors, and focused incubators around this kind of stuff. I think that's probably the biggest change.

And then, like any technology segment, the building blocks, the Lego blocks that we build from, just get better and better and better. Someone that wants to add AI capabilities to their solution today, it's never been easier. I want to add Vision. Now, what you do with it can be very differentiating. But my point is that the building blocks we have today are just better than ever.

I think the challenge...what's changed maybe in a negative, I think the way you get to customers, get to market has changed and become more challenging. An example, if you think about a venture-funded or otherwise funded startup, turn the clock back 10 or 15 years. We primarily sold perpetual licenses plus maintenance. So you get a big chunk of revenue upfront.

Today in the SaaS and subscription world, in essence, we're all in the financing business. We're financing our cost of sales, our R&D., So the capital requirements for companies in our segment are bigger than they ever have been. And we see that with some of the raises, but that's just a reality. That dynamic perhaps even gets ignored sometimes, but it is a big change. Yeah, and then, you know, just to --

TROND: And what got you to Tulip?

RICK: So I think it was actually indirectly through Wonderware, if I recall. So Natan and team and Rony and team were looking around at comparables. What are some companies that have been successful growing a business in this space? And he kind of had the hit list of Wonderware folks that he wanted to talk to. And somewhere, somehow, I don't recall the exact moment, but we connected up, and I got it. When he explained what they were doing. The light bulb went off, and I said, "I'd love to be part of this." So I'm both an investor and advisor in the company. And also, I love smart people, like innovative people.

TROND: [laughs]

RICK: And there's no shortage of those in Natan’s team. So first visit there, seeing what they were doing, meeting the team, it was like, all right, there's something going on here.

TROND: So tell me what it is that you saw because I was also...I was at MIT at the time when Natan created the company. And I remember vividly going into the lab or whatever you want to describe his early workspace. Because that's what it was, right? It felt like a lab.

RICK: Sure.

TROND: But the stuff that was coming out was incredible. What do you think? Was it the product vision, or was it just a capability of the people that you saw early on? And now that you're looking at Tulip and its environment, what is being accomplished right now, would you say with this new app reality?

RICK: I think it was the aggregate of all the above. Because great example, if you recall the first demo scenario with the mixed reality projecting instructions onto the work –-

TROND: That was crazy. That demo was for me, the demo of all demos in the -- [laughs]

RICK: Absolutely.

TROND: It was crazy.

RICK: And I said, wow, you're taking a very fresh look at a problem here. And obviously, with their collective backgrounds, really interesting mix of skill sets, they're going to do cool stuff. And I think Natan and team would be the first to admit they were coming in with not a lot of domain knowledge. They had been involved in companies that made stuff, but there was a learning curve for sure. And that's what a lot of...not just myself, but they had a lot of advisors, customer feedback, brought in some folks into the team, and then just learned on the job training, engaging with customers, engaging in pilots.

So I think it took a year or two to kind of get grounded in what are some of the realities of the shop floor, not that they didn't have a good idea. But once that kind of confluence of smart people, customers starting to do cool stuff with it, and the end the product itself evolving, then that's kind of when the rocket took off.

TROND: Well, this is interesting what you're saying here because as I'm interviewing a lot of people who have innovated in this space, time and again, what comes back is this is not just your average software innovation garage. A lab is not a garage. Literally, you can be as smart as you are. You can have a big team of smart people. But unless you get coupled up with that manufacturing shop floor experience, you don't stand a chance, or you just can't build. You can't get past the demo.

Tell me more about that one because you have had it ingrained. We talked about this a few minutes ago. You started out that way. But there are so many more innovators these days that they can't; well, maybe they can start out, but they haven't started out on the shop floor, so many of them.

RICK: I wish they would...everybody who wants to get in this space needs to do...the equivalent of in law enforcement would be a ride-along. You go and spend a couple of nights working the streets. You realize how things really work. It's not like TV. It's not like you read in your textbooks. So there's no substitute for it, even if it's like super-concentrated real-world experience actually going out and spending some time with customers, real-world experience.

But I also think it's the third leg of the stool, which is important. It's the technology expertise and creating products. It's manufacturing domain knowledge and then figuring out how to get it in front of customers and sell it. We can never underestimate the importance of that. So that's another thing that I think Tulip took a lot of very iterative and A/B style testing approaches to go-to-market models and continue to innovate and experiment.

It's a challenging space to do low-touch, but they've found a niche with that, particularly as a means to plant seeds of customers that can take a first taste of the technology like, wow, that's pretty awesome. The holy grail, I think, for a lot of companies in our space to try to figure out how to do that. No one's really completely cracked the code yet. So it's a kind of combination model. But the domain expertise, a couple of key hires, for example, a great example is the hires they made in the pharmaceutical industry.

So life sciences now has become a really, really powerful vertical for Tulip as a result of bringing in civilian expertise plus the evolution of the product from a platform and tooling and some hardware to application, so the app marketplace that they launched. Now when I'm a buyer, you can approach not only that developer buyer, that integrator buyer, but now you can approach a business buyer and say, "I've got all these apps you can assemble together or just use as is." That was also a maturity thing. So it took the domain knowledge, interaction with customers, and then you can progressively build more into the software itself and less that the customer has to configure. That maturation has been pretty exciting to see.

TROND: Rick, we've been through a history here that's very, very exciting to me and, I think to listeners. What's next for the digital factory, for the manufacturing, execution systems, all these acronyms? I tried to shy away from them a little bit because we had so many, many other interesting things to talk about today.

But if you're looking to the next decade, the holy grail you mentioned, or this final integration project that would marry software, hardware, shop floor, and considering all the challenges that just the past year has brought us, and let's not even bring into it all of the other challenges of this decade and of this century, if you're going to go into the big words. Where are we headed?

RICK: I'll maybe focus on where I hope we head, which looks perhaps a little bit different. I started the discussion with one of the things that I learned in my first job working in the plant flow is the importance of people, the knowledge that they have, the experience that they have. People in a lot of our processes are still the sensor, the algorithm, and the actuator.

Like it or not, we haven't yet reproduced the human hand. We haven't yet reproduced the human brain. There are some really unique things about humans. And in that context, I hope that the next decade or so is about collaborative technology and how we use robotics, and AI, and information, and mixed reality to help people be better at what they do. And there's always a risk of dehumanization in something like that where people become interchangeable and they don their Iron Man assembly suit.

But I'll maybe take a more optimistic view that it's really...we're going to continue to increase productivity output. But there are so many roles like that that could benefit from the synthesis of all these cool technologies that we have. I maintain that there's no such thing as an AI market. There's no such thing as an IoT market; that they're all just building blocks, right? It's what we assemble to solve some actual problem that is interesting.

I'm hoping, and I'm confident, that the bar to implement these things becomes increasingly lower. AR is a great example today. It's hard. Building content is time-consuming and difficult. So maybe that's the next one that needs to bring the content creation to mixed reality, next-gen robotics, codebots, and some really interesting stuff happening there. The democratization of machine vision, and audio, and meta sensing that's happening.

TROND: But it's interesting you're saying they're still our building blocks, and they're still our collaboration challenges. And maybe those collaboration challenges are going to have to last longer than a decade, and maybe we need more building blocks. But what comes after that once a critical mass of building blocks get assembled? And you have watched this decade by decade that there's a certain coalescence of building blocks, and then a new platform is formed.

But still, in this industry, as you have said, so far, most of the time, these new platforms merge into the more traditional platform players, or they merge into more established. Is that a pattern that you see also in this decade? Or will we see the first mega conglomerates come out of completely new manufacturing combination platforms that are integrating all of these technologies and doing something truly new and can sustain their own new creation, whatever iteration of the manufacturing industry that would become?

RICK: And I don't know if it's going to be necessarily the suppliers that become the mega innovators. What may well happen is that the manufacturers themselves start to become because the tools have become so powerful that they become the mega. If you actually take a deep dive into a lot of really innovative manufacturing companies, it's the machines that they built to make the product. It's the processes they use to make the product. That's where some of the real breakthroughs happen. That doesn't come from outside. Now, sometimes suppliers can provide some of that equipment. So maybe this is just an amplifier for that.

And the second thing is I know is coming is this massive disintermediation of manufacturing. So we already have companies where the brand owner contracts the design of the product. It contracts people to make the products. It contracts people to service the product and sell the product. So they're literally just the brand name on top of it. Now you matrix that, right? Where you have companies with very, very flexible manufacturing capacity that's additive or traditional. Who knows, right?

But I think a manufacturing supply chain 10-20 years from now is going to look radically different. Fewer companies will be making stuff on their own. But the companies that are making stuff will be really applying some innovative technology to be flexible, versatile. That's never going to happen for grunt commodity stuff where the cost to produce matter; you do purpose-built. But increasingly, look at the proliferation rate on new product introductions and electronic products and so many different things in our lives, clothing, right? There are so many things that we could innovate faster if the manufacturing systems themselves could adapt faster. Maybe that's an outcome.

TROND: Well, I mean, whichever of these scenarios pan out, it seems to me that at least segments of this industry, if it remains, you know if you can talk about it as one industry anymore, is going to be super exciting. So that brings me, I guess, to just my closing question. If you were to advise a young person today who is maybe thinking about college, or they're thinking about should I follow my passion, which happens to be actually going and making and building things? Or should I get a theoretical education, or is that a false choice? Where should they go today?

There's this dichotomy between getting a four-year education versus just going and getting some skills like we have been talking about, so you have some inkling of where you actually need to be to understand in order to produce the innovations.

RICK: I think all the above, and let me elaborate on that a little bit. When I was in university, I created my own co-ops in the summer. So I worked...I sought them out. My son's at Drexel University now, and a co-op program is an integral part of his education there. For a lot of folks, getting kids particularly exposed to co-ops and those kinds of internships give you two things. It might tell you what you don't want to do just as much as you want to do, which is I think a lot of people in their career would wish they knew that earlier.

It helps you get that real-world experience and just interacting with people. So I think that aspect of in your university education doing a diverse and interesting set of co-ops would be very valuable. Having a liberal arts aspect to any technical education or focus skills education is still valid. You have to know how to read, write, speak, those kinds of things.

Design is ever increasingly important. The polymath is going to be a great skill to have. Secondly, learning has never been easier. You've got so many online resources as well. If you need a technical skill, I mean, I could probably learn neurosurgery on YouTube if I really needed to if there was no other option, you know, 60% chance that patient would live.

TROND: [laughs]

RICK: But we have so many different resources. I'm a believer in lifelong learning. So it's not a static thing. Certainly, a highly specialized skill if you're going to be geneticists doing CRISPR whatever, you need to spend 8-10 years of true rigorous study to master a lot of that kind of stuff. Maybe not; maybe that's even getting easier.

TROND: Ricky, you just brought me back to eighth grade and my one-week internship at the National Geological Lab, where I was sorting through minerals. And it's incredible how one week is etched into my mind. I don't think about it every time, and I haven't thought about it for years. But while you were just describing with seeking out these internships, you brought it all back to me. And I can almost remember how the Monday was different from the Tuesday rotation when I went through that institute. There is just no comparison to that kind of real-life experience.

RICK: And the other advice that I give any person is versatile set of skills. Do a sales role sometime in your life. You might hate it, you might despise it, but you're going to learn what the salespeople in your company go through. You might love it, and it becomes a career. Communications, what your marketing folks have. Having a diverse set of skills and getting exposure...maybe it happened accidentally for me. Those were the opportunities that presented themselves, but I think having that diverse skill set and toolbox is extremely valuable, particularly if you want to start a company.

TROND: Rick, I thank you so much. We have gone way over what I had promised and even my promise to our listeners to be very succinct. But this has been, for me, at least a fascinating roller coaster through your career and throughout manufacturing, both history and future. I thank you very, very much.

RICK: My pleasure.

TROND: You have just listened to Episode 10 of The Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. And the topic was A Brief History of Manufacturing Software. Our guest was Rick Bullotta, Partner at TwinThread and Co-Founder of ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee at Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which merged with BTR to form Invensys, which in turn merged with French multinational Schneider Electric and later the CTO.

Rick Bullotta was also the Co-Founder of Lighthammer Software, which was later acquired by SAP. Then in 2009, founding ThingWorx, the first complete end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things, which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry.

My take is that Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx are prominent parts of manufacturing software history, and there's a chance that the 4th company he now is involved with, Tulip, also will be. I do things with things is Rick Bullotta's motto. The things he does, he does them well, and it is an internet of things, more than anything else. I, for one, am eagerly listening to what he predicts will happen next.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or Episode 5: Plug-and-Play Industrial Tech. Augmented- the industry 4.0 podcast.

Special Guest: Rick Bullotta.

Welcome to episode #86 of the Augmented Podcast (@AugmentedPod). Today's episode will be a reflection on Season 2. Join host and futurist Trond Arne Undheim (@trondau) as he reflects on season 2 of the Augmented podcast, diving into a few highlights from the season.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What’s next in the digital factory? Who is leading the change? What are the key skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0? Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (@trondau), and presented by Tulip Interfaces (@tulipinterfaces), the frontline operations platform.

In Season 2 we honed in, covering a specific topics relevant to manufacturing, such as marketing, frontline operations, reshoring, digital lean, startups, supply chains, pricing strategies, the manufacturing software market workers, the low code/no- code issue, diagnostic manufacturing, operational data, life science manufacturing systems, the industrial tech transformation outlook, the future factory, the evolution of lean, and industrial interoperability. As you can see, these ranged from technical topics to HR to investing to management principles--all of which go into operating and innovating in manufacturing and industrial tech.

Guests featured in this episode:

Joe Sullivan (@sullivan_joe), host of The Manufacturing Executive podcast and founder of Gorilla 76 (@gorilla76)

Thanks for listening. If you like the show subscribe to augmentedpodcast. co or on your preferred podcast player. And rate us with 5 stars. If so, let us know by messaging us your thoughts. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in this show or in other episodes. Please, if you do, let us know by messaging us. We would love to share your thoughts with other listeners.

The Augmented podcast is created in association with Tulip, the connected frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and the systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring. You can find Tulip at Tulip.co

Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading.

To find us on social media is easy, we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/augmentedpod

See you next time. Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.

Special Guests: Dr. Gunter Beitinger, Harry C. Moser, Joe Sullivan, Lydia M. Di Liello, and Yossi Sheffi.

This week on the podcast, (@AugmentedPod) we have Leon Kuperman, CTO of CAST.AI (@cast_ai) Futurist Trond Undheim hosts (@trondau), this is episode #85 of Season 2 and the topic is: Industrial Cloud Interoperability. In this conversation, we talk about cloud interoperability, whether it exists, why it's needed and what it could accomplish. We also get into the technical underpinnings, such as Carita, containerization and the outlook for public private and hybrid clouds as well as the vendors that supply advanced infrastructures.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What’s next in the digital factory? Who is leading the change? What are the key skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0? Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, and presented by Tulip, the frontline operations platform.

Trond's takeaway: A.I. is a silent enabler of collaboration between systems, which by the same token affects collaboration between people and organizations, its technical complexity often limits the debate about the subject in non-specialist circles, which is a shame given the pivotal importance of cloud infrastructure in today's computing environment, the relative progress made on interoperability will determine the course of products, flexibility, security, and productivity.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmented podcast.co or in your preferred podcast player and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode #17 Smart Manufacturing for All. Hopefully you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes. And if so, do let us know by messaging us, we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners.

The Augmented podcast is created in association with Tulip, the connected frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and the systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring. You can find Tulip at Tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading.

To find us on social media is easy, we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/augmentedpod

See you next time. Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.

Special Guest: Leon Kuperman.

This week on the podcast, (@AugmentedPod) we have Michelle Segrest, journalist, content creator, and owner of Navigate Content, Inc. (@michellesegrest) Futurist Trond Undheim hosts (@trondau), this is episode #83 of Season 2 and the topic is: Factory Journalism.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What’s next in the digital factory? Who is leading the change? What are the key skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0? Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, and presented by Tulip, the frontline operations platform.

Trond's takeaway: Factories are enormously diverse depending on industry country, region, and they also change over time. More importantly, they are thriving in a way that the public doesn't always appreciate. So getting inside a few factories from time to time might be the best service you could do yourself or for your kids to reorient yourself toward the importance of manufacturing or the important activity of making things, which has not gone away just because of the digital revolution.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmented podcast.co or in your preferred podcast player and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode #79 The Future Factory. Hopefully you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes. And if so, do let us know by messaging us, we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners.

The Augmented podcast is created in association with Tulip, the connected frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and the systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring. You can find Tulip at Tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading.

To find us on social media is easy, we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/augmentedpod

See you next time. Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.

Special Guest: Michelle Segrest .

This week on the podcast (@AugmentedPod), futurist Trond Undheim is in conversation with Torbjørn Netland, Chair of Production, Operations Management at the top Swiss university, ETH Zürich, and co-founder of Ethon AI (@tnetland) (@). In episode 84 of Season 2 of the Augmented podcast, the topic is "The Evolution of Lean" In this conversation, we discuss Lean as a business phenomenon,

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What’s next in the digital factory? Who is leading the change? What are the key skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0? Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (@trondau), and presented by Tulip, the frontline operations platform.

My takeaway: Lean might be an ever-evolving concept centered around how to best improve industrial performance. The orthodoxy around what it means is not helpful yet clarity about clear objectives and tactics is important. The role of technology in Lean is controversial. But one thing is for certain, Lean is primary to technology.  

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmented podcast.co or in your preferred podcast player and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode #49 Lean Manufacturing in the USA with guest Karl Wadensten, who is the CEO of VIBCO. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or other episodes. If you like what you hear, let us know by messaging us, we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners.

The Augmented podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring. You can find Tulip at Tulip.co

Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading.

To find us on social media is easy, we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/augmentedpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AugmentedPodcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Y1gz66LxYvjJAMnN_f6PQ

See you next time. Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.

This week on the podcast, (@AugmentedPod) we have Torbjørn Netland, Chair of Production, Operations Management at the top Swiss university, ETH Zürich, and co-founder of Ethon AI (@tnetland) (@eth) (@ethon_AI). Futurist Trond Undheim hosts (@trondau), this is episode #84 of Season 2 and the topic is: The Evoltion of Lean.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What’s next in the digital factory? Who is leading the change? What are the key skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0? Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, and presented by Tulip, the frontline operations platform.

Trond's takeaway: Lean might be an ever-evolving concept centered around how to best improve industrial performance. The orthodoxy around what it means is not helpful yet clarity about clear objectives and tactics is important. The role of technology in Lean is controversial. But one thing is for certain, Lean is primary to technology.

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmented podcast.co or in your preferred podcast player and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode #21: Lean Manufacturing in the USA with guest Karl Wadensten, who is the CEO of VIBCO. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or other episodes. If you like what you hear, let us know by messaging us, we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners.

The Augmented podcast is created in association with Tulip, the connected frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and the systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring. You can find Tulip at Tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading.

To find us on social media is easy, we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/augmentedpod

See you next time. Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.

Special Guest: Torbjørn Netland.

This week on the show, (@Augmentedpod) futurist Trond Undheim (@trondau) interviews Dr. Gunter Beitinger, SVP of Manufacturing at Siemens AG. Dr. Gunter is also the Head of Factory Digitalization and Head of Product Carbon Footprint/SiGreen (@beitgugb) (@Siemens). In this conversation, they talk about the digital transformation of the factory floor. This is episode #79 of Season 2 and the topic is: The Future Factory.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. Technology is changing rapidly. What’s next in the digital factory? Who is leading the change? What are the key skills to learn and how to stay up to date on manufacturing and industry 4.0? Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim, and presented by Tulip, the frontline operations platform.

Trond's takeaway: It is pretty clear that the factory of the future will look different from that of the past but what's less clear is the path to get there and what role digitalization will play in getting us there. What does seem clear is that we still need creative heads. We need people to produce the needed innovations and machines to hum, along with to the human beat, as opposed to the other way around. 

Thanks for listening. If you like the show, subscribe at Augmented podcast.com or your preferred podcast, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode #21: The Future of Digital in Manufacturing.

Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in this show or in other episodes. Please, if you do let us know by messaging us. We would love to share your thoughts with other listeners.

The Augmented podcast is created in association with Tulip, the connected frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and the systems used in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring. You can find Tulip at Tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading.

To find us on social media is easy, we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/augmentedpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AugmentedPodcast/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Y1gz66LxYvjJAMnN_f6PQ

See you next time. Augmented--industrial conversations that matter.