Patrick Harrigan of Tulip — The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek

Transcript of the conversation between Grantek podcast host Sam Russem and Head of Global Alliances at Tulip Interfaces, Patrick Harrigan

Continuing our deep dive into Tulip Interfaces, I came across this insightful interview between Sam Russem of Grantek and Patrick Harrigan of Tulip Interfaces. To help raise awareness of the conversation, I decided to create a word-for-word transcript of the conversation, eliminating any errors in the automated transcript. It is my hope that others interested in learning about Tulip and IIoT in general can now find this content more easily.

The source video is here:

Transcript

Sam Russem: Hi and welcome to today’s episode of the Industry 4.0 podcast with Grantek, where we give our audience a look into the world of manufacturing with a focus on the modern technology trends that we commonly call Industry 4.0. Our guests join us to share their thoughts on the subject, their experiences around what works and what doesn’t, and share some tips on how to lead you to a successful digital transformation. My name is Sam Russem. I am the senior director of smart manufacturing solutions at Grantek, and today I am joined by Patrick Harrigan, who is a leader at Tulip Interfaces, their head of global alliances at Tulip. So, Patrick, great to have you here today. How about you tell our audience a little bit more about who you are and how you got here?

Patrick Harrigan: You bet. Thanks, Sam. I really appreciate the invite and certainly participating and working closely with Grantek over the past couple of months, getting to know you guys more in depth. Very exciting stuff you’re doing, and again, thanks for having me on. So, as you mentioned, I lead our global line strategy here at Tulip Interfaces. And for those who might not be familiar with Tulip, we provide a frontline operations platform, what we sort of consider the next iteration of MES technology or systems of engagement on the shop floor. I’ve been in the digitization of shop floor processes basically my entire career for the past 12 years, starting with a low code platform startup here in Atlanta, Georgia, and then moving to a Swedish-based industrial software company called Hexagon for five years. And then I’ve been at Tulip for the past 12 months leading this group. So, again, thanks for having me on, look forward to the discussion.

Sam Russem: Great to have you again and I really love the stuff that Tulip is doing. Curious just to see how Tulip’s technologies, in particular, kind of play into our conversation today. So, hey, we usually like to get started with a big bold question around Industry 4.0 and what it means to you and what you think the main themes of the word and the ideas. So, Patrick, what does Industry 4.0 mean to you?

Patrick Harrigan: Sure, it is a big question. It’s a big, hairy question, right? So there’s definitely a standard canned response that I quite often give in conversations, and that’s really focused on the utilization of the data that’s produced within our facilities now. But quite frankly, I’m often a little contrarian in my viewpoint on the term Industry 4.0, similar to buzzwords like digital transformation. If you ask a hundred people, you’ll probably get a hundred different answers as to what it means. And so I quite often like to dig in a little bit more to understand specifically who we’re talking to, the industries we’re working in, and try to tailor that message a little bit more than just a broad stroke of Industry 4.0. It’s funny. I was at a manufacturing site last week, and one of the IT leaders who we’re working with, this global automotive company, she was responsible for Industry 4.0 projects over the past 10 years within this organization, or at least that’s what was told to me. And my first question was, “Okay, what does that actually mean?” That’s great. It sounds like she’s done some amazing things, but that really doesn’t provide me much context as to the types of projects they’ve been deploying. And then I found that when you actually drill into what most people consider to be 4.0 type projects or initiatives, a lot of them really have underlying themes of 3.0 and things that wouldn’t necessarily fit in the box of Industry 4.0. It’s laying foundational work that’s important for Industry 4.0, but quite often I wouldn’t necessarily throw it in that bucket yet. So it’s a funny word for me. I quite often encourage our team to use as little buzzwords as possible. Now, I will admit myself, that’s challenging sometimes.

Sam Russem: It’s hard, yeah.

Patrick Harrigan: It’s very hard, especially digital transformation. You want this overarching umbrella of a concept that covers many things, and so those words play well there, but just as long as you can drill down deeper and deeper, you know, and move past that overarching verbiage, then I think you’re in good shape.

Sam Russem: I’m with you on that. The buzzwords are only good if they’re driving you to kind of something tangible that you can actually do with it. If it’s just an idea that you can’t actually put into practice, then it’s kind of, you know, what’s the point. But no, totally with you. Also, curious to dive a little bit later into that idea of that Industry 4.0 position that you saw in this company. We have one of our reader questions that came in is around some of the positions that you might see around an Industry 4.0 transformation, so that’ll be great. So as we’re going through and you’re applying these technologies, what types of problems are customers typically trying to solve as they’re adopting this more digital technology in their plants?

Patrick Harrigan: So let me preface and say that while I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the process world or continuous manufacturing world, I really have a passion for the discrete world. So, low volume, high mix, certainly that’s the majority of what we focus on at Tulip in the present day. The major challenges that we’re working to solve are really around the collection and interaction of human-centric data. And so, what does that mean? Human-centric data, unlike process manufacturing where they’ve gone through many cycles of automation and sensitization of lines, and we really have a pretty good understanding in that side of the world of how we’re functioning, how our machines are operating, our machine health, so on and so forth. On the discrete side, we’ve just begun to scrape the surface of understanding how our operators are performing versus the standard, and then ultimately how our production metrics are tracking for the day versus our goals. And in part because you can’t just attach a sensor to every operator walking around the shop floor, can’t just plug a wire into them and start pumping out data. And so, that’s probably one of the most common challenges I see, again, within discrete, is how do we begin to capture that information? That’s quite often a net new data set for most organizations, just because of the complexity in getting this information. It’s been that, you know, the can’s been kicked down the road for many, many years, and finally, we’re at a point where people are really starting to adopt that. With that, you know, the human-centric data, it’s an overarching lack of visibility into our production operations. I was just going to drive that point home one more time. You know, we think most plant managers, most frontline supervisors think they have a good understanding of how their cell line or plant are operating for the day, utilizing things like OEE and your standard metrics. But again, when you typically get in and understand the gaps that exist in these data sets, and once you fill those gaps with simplistic ways to capture data, the metrics that they think they’re operating with quite often aren’t the actual metrics. And so, it’s just very interesting in that regard. Do you guys, maybe a question back to you, Sam, do you sort of see a similar challenge or similar challenges within the organizations that you work in? Sort of this lack of data or gaps of data that exist?

Sam Russem: Totally. And it’s both kind of a lack of data and how real-time or close to real-time that data is too, right? So, there’s a reason you’re bringing up the discrete side of things. I think that I’m kind of more process. I do more food and beverage, life sciences, things like that, right? So, there are certainly instances where there is data that we don’t have today, but you’re right. A lot of times it’s a repeatable process. Our solution is slap in a sensor, slap in a new data collector, and we can capture that in a different way. But there is still a lot of information that is captured by people reading things or making their own decisions or kind of qualifying something, and the second that you have to write that on paper and not some type of digital system, it needs to go on the paper. Then someone else has to get it, drop it off somewhere, somebody else needs to read it, type it into the computer, and only then does it become actual data that you can use. And kind of the idea of having these interfaces on the shop floor guiding workers, kind of collecting the data as it goes along, reduces mistakes, makes that data more available. There’s just so much value to it. Anytime you’re seeing paper on the floor these days, this is an opportunity to digitize and see improvements.

Patrick Harrigan: Which, in our world, is the most common, you know. I would say 90 plus percent of the shops we go into still operate at least some capacity of their production operations, if not their entire operation on paper today. And then you run into, you know, another common challenge, of course, is scalability with transformational projects. Right? So, if you look at these global multinationals, they might be able to roll out some Industry 4.0 — I’ll use that term for you — type initiatives and concepts at the top three, five, ten facilities, but then you’re left with 100 facilities where it’s not necessarily cost-effective to make these huge investments into automation and big systems of record and things like that. And so, there’s a major issue with scalability when it comes to those things as well.

Sam Russem: Well and we’ve run into it too where the way that you could scale between multiple plants, like for some of these technologies, can be a real struggle, especially if you’re kind of immature on that data modeling side of things. And it’s and you really do kind of need to redesign your systems per plant that you go to. It could be a real struggle, which can, you know, a lot of the solution to that is, as much as you can make the data coming out of those systems on the shop floor consistent so that your actual processing of that data gets to stay consistent. But again, it is a challenge kind of throughout, and there’s always going to be some type of rework, some new configuration you need to do as you take a solution from one plant to another to another. And the more you can reduce that, the more likely it is you’re going to be able to successfully deploy these into those smaller plants that don’t quite hit those ROIs as the big ones that could fund the pilot. Right? And then also, so especially for a company like Tulip where so much of what you’re doing is kind of putting new tools in the hands of operators. Kind of, how does that human side kind of work these days, especially kind of as turnover has been a challenge and things like that in these plants. So, how does Tulip help with that?

Patrick Harrigan: So I would say if you were to pinpoint the challenge that’s brought up in the first 10 minutes of every engagement we have, it’s traditionally around labor, which is if you were to ask me even a year ago, you know, obviously with the pandemic, it was a challenge for everyone, we don’t need to go into all those issues, right? I think it’s well known by now.

Sam Russem: That was last season, yeah!

Patrick Harrigan: But what’s funny is I would have, if I had to make a guess a year ago, I would have thought that things would have come back a little bit to a little bit more normal on the labor front as we neared the end of 2022 going into 2023, right? But it still remains the primary issue for most of our customers, a good example being I was with a customer a couple weeks ago and we were reviewing their shifts, right? So they run three shifts, and I was asking if they had issues with labor, and you know, you should see their face, these frontline managers, they’re like, “Do we ever?” And they have 30% of their positions unfilled at the moment, within, so it’s still a massive, massive issue. So much so that they’re taking people off the street, meaning with almost no training, and putting them on the line on day one. So, and this is a common theme we see across the board. So, to your question, it’s sort of a roundabout way of getting to your question, how do we sort of focus on that and how do more modern digital technologies help address that? It’s the idea of, I put a lot of furniture, my wife buys a lot of furniture, I put a lot of furniture together from Ikea or Wayfair or whatever it might be, and you get this big packet of paper, and it’s okay, do I have all my parts? Do I have everything kitted? Do I have everything I need, my tools? Okay, now I need to lay out all of my components to make sure that the manufacturer didn’t forget something, and then I begin walking through step by step on actual assembly, right. So it’s not a process that is not unlike most manufacturers on the assembly side today. Still paper based. If you’re lucky to have digital or paper SOPs or work instructions, it’s still paper based. A lot of organizations, surprisingly, still don’t have that well-documented, and so the idea of taking someone and within 24 hours making them able to produce quality product is a major, major challenge, and because of the labor shortage, we now have major issues with quality, right, major non-conformance issues, major first pass yield issues. So think of when I do a home project, outside of building one of these, the first thing I do is I go to YouTube and I Google, you know, “Tell me how to hang a door, tell me how to put a new doorknob on,” and within two minutes, I have five videos that show me step by step how to do it, and I’m able to do it much faster and more efficiently. So it’s that type of concept of using multimedia digital to not only serve up the instructions where we’re talking videos, even things like GIFs, which are funny, use them in text messages all the time, right. Our customers use GIFs for work instructions, you know, almost every single one of them uses it in some capacity, so it enables you to really take someone who doesn’t know anything about the product, doesn’t know anything about necessarily what they’re building, but all they have to do is follow these simple step-by-step instructions, and it provides sort of a layer on top that ensures process adherence, meaning it monitors, did we perform the right step or not through cameras and sensors and things like that and allows me to advance in the process if so, and if not, it stops me. So we’ve seen that have huge impacts on reducing training time, especially, you know, centered around this labor shortage issue, and then certainly increasing quality in first pass yield with very inexperienced operators. So that’s a very long-winded answer, I’m sorry, sorry for going on.

Sam Russem: I have so many thoughts on it though, so we’re going to keep on going. I mean, at Grantek, we’ve seen similar success recently embedding training videos into SCADA applications and things like that, right? You know, which is normally, again you want your SCADA to only be your control system, why would it do anything that’s not controls? Well, because it can just pop open a web browser and point to a server, it pulls up a video, and again, that’s just how people are more used to learning. And I think that you’re right, not only does it increase your yield, not only does it increase your quality, it helps you with retention and that labor problem, right? When you’re building your Ikea furniture and you don’t understand an instruction, like, you’re not… you want to throw that Allen wrench through the wall. If you’re working a job, you might quit, right? But having those good instructions. And also, a lot of times, that we… when we lost people in the pandemic, and now we’re kind of rehiring, a lot of those people that left were 20-year veterans or people that really did kind of know the systems very well. And you’ve lost that expertise kind of coming in. So, the more that we can kind of use technology and nothing too crazy. You know, you can do AR and VR and goggles and all that stuff if you want, but you can just start with documentation and making that document available and things like that. And you can build to those higher use cases as you need to over time. I do think that technology is often thought of kind of helping with the labor problem by replacing the labor, but I also think there’s such an argument to be made that just by supplementing it and making those jobs easier and more enjoyable, it’s such a great way to keep people engaged in the workforce too.

Patrick Harrigan: You hit the nail on the head. We call that augmentation, so operator augmentation. Rather than trying to automate the job away, how do we augment them with modern technology to make them more efficient and productive? So, you’re spot on with what we’re seeing in the market as well.

Sam Russem: Awesome. So as you’re taking solutions like this to, say, a plant manager, beyond kind of that labor optimization piece and that augmentation piece, like what other stuff is kind of exciting those people that are really responsible for all of the operations that need to happen within a plant?

Patrick Harrigan: So I think one of the… it depends on where we’re talking in the organization, and you mentioned a plant manager. One of the major challenges, I would say, for again multinationals in this space is really around that scalability concept and being able to deliver tailored solutions at scale, meaning we have 50 different plants, we make 2000 SKUs. This plant builds vehicles, this plant builds seats, this plant does my foaming for my seats, whatever it might be. And so trying to take a one-size-fits-all approach, and it’s very much a traditional top-down approach. We’re going to issue an RFI or RFP, we’re going to select the best vendor, we’re going to go through and make sure to collect everyone’s requirements from all the different types of facilities or business units. And if you don’t get those requirements in that timeframe, good luck ever trying to get a system that fits your process right. So the one thing we see that’s the biggest area of opportunity, I guess, within plant management is providing a toolkit or a platform that enables them to take a centralized standardized solution and tweak it to fit their individual operations within their lines. Now, to go a little bit more in-depth, something for assembly and something for quality and something for maintenance are not one and the same, right? And so you have to have the autonomy to be able to tap on your local experts who know the process best and then provide them in our context with Tulip with the no-code approach, we call it citizen development. How do you provide them at the local level with the ability to actually tailor those solutions to fit their existing process? Because let’s, you know, it’s great to redo a process when going through a digital transformation or rethink a process, and I certainly encourage that, but you’ve been, you know, going through lean initiatives for 20 years within these plants, and they know their process. They have it pretty well optimized based on their current constraints. And so how do you take a solution and digitize it to fit that process rather than the reverse way? So one last thing I’ll mention on that around citizen development. We recently had or announced our groundbreaker awards a couple weeks ago, which really highlights our top customers for delivering these transformational projects within their facilities. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve really started my career in no code on the shop floor, and so I’ve been talking to citizen development for over a decade now. Sometimes people listen, and sometimes people don’t, and quite often, that is another buzzword that people often ignore. But what was really cool in this, this was my first groundbreaker awards I participated in at Tulip. If you see the people that were recognized, they were all process engineers or manufacturing engineers at the local level. They were not developers, and they were not from the IT organization. So it’s a really cool way to see that citizen development is really here. And then as we talk to executive management sort of above the plant management level, we say, look, our challenge always is resource constraints within IT to be able to scale these transformational initiatives. If we can empower the folks at the local level to be able to do these transformational initiatives, how much scale can we really get? And we’re seeing, you know, tenfold the amount of solutions and applications that are being able to be rolled out to these big multinationals via that approach. So that’s my interpretation of how plant management’s looking at the future. How do we solve multiple problems without having to bring on 50 different solutions, right?

Sam Russem: Well, and I think you’re, you know, you’re setting me up for a good Tulip promotion for you here, so I’ll take that bite. So, one of the things that I know Tulip does that really kind of helps with that is kind of your library and your marketplace, kind of starter applications you can pick from, right? Some from citizen developers, some from Tulip themselves, right? Where, again, I think maybe the misconception or kind of where people might get frustrated and walk away from that citizen developer model sometimes is they want something that does 100% of their use case when, really, that’s not the most realistic expectation. If you’re getting something 50, 60, 75%, it’s going to get you where you need to go, and you’re just customizing that last piece of it. That’s still a huge savings for you and your engineering effort. You know that you’re starting from something that’s high quality and kind of designed to the proper standards. And kind of to your other point, it’s a good way to get maybe people at the plant level more engaged with the software in a more accessible way too because that is, I think, kind of a big gap that comes up with this. You talk about kind of IT supporting scalability and things like that, the technicians that are kind of working on the shop floor today on PLCs and SCADA systems and things like that, there is a training effort for a lot of those resources or IT resources or things like that to figure out these kinds of digital technologies. You don’t just get to drop it in and sure, it will run on its own for a while, but something will break or someone will want to change something eventually, and having those resources available on your team or at your call, kind of when you need it, is really important.

Patrick Harrigan: it’s a great point because what happens today if someone needs a change, right? And you know when you pitch the idea of citizen development on paper, it’s great. In theory, it’s great, but in reality, a lot of IT organizations have been burnt by the promise of such solutions in the past, quite frankly. So if you look at the adoption of things like BI tools, right? The promise was, “Look, it’s so easy, your supervisors at the plant level can go in and configure.” The supervisor might do it for six months or a year, something comes up, they leave, they move jobs, then who does this fall back on to make these, yes, it comes back to IT. And now they have to support all of these requests. So it’s certainly an issue and something to be aware of. But for the first time, and again, after talking through this for over a decade, for the first time, I’m really seeing the manufacturing engineers be self-sufficient and deliver. The coolest part is they’re solving very, very large problems all on their own without any involvement from IT, without any involvement from Tulip in this context, and they’re able to then take that idea and disperse it across the organization through multiple plants and make real impactful change, ground up rather than your traditional approach from top down.

Sam Russem: No, absolutely. I’ve seen it plenty of times. It can be tough for those individuals at that plant level to get the sponsorship that they need to really kind of get those applications out there, but really, a lot of the times, there are people that really know how to solve those problems. And how do we kind of enable those voices and really kind of get those good ideas out and stuff? It’s a big challenge. So tell me kind of for Tulip how things are kind of changing and what you’re planning on doing with your product over the next five to ten years as you see other things change in the marketplace. What’s next for Tulip?

Patrick Hannigan: Sure, so if you look at the types of problems we’re solving now, you know, I alluded to a lot of them aren’t what I would consider industry 4.0 problems. It’s really setting up a customer or laying a foundation for them to move in that direction. But first and foremost, we have to get data in a digital format. That’s quite often replacing paper processes. It’s number one for us, right? So that’s sort of where if I were to look at what we’ve done in the past eight years, that’s been the core competency. Now we’re moving more and more into things like advanced analytics and better visibility. We use a lot of computer vision, so we partner with AWS and Microsoft very closely on computer vision for quality detection, anomaly detection, localization, numbering, all these cool things, as well as very simplistic things like picking and kitting, understanding, you know, do we have all the components that need to go in this box before shipping it to a customer and verifying that, or when performing an assembly process, how do we ensure that the operator selected the right material to perform this assembly with first another, and we use computer vision to do that. But you mentioned something that … that’s sort of where we are today. We’re moving in the future. You mentioned sort of video SOPs and tying that to SCADA and things like that. So I’m glad you mentioned that because that’s something that I’ve personally been very passionate about over the past couple of years, and I call it event orchestration. So how do you monitor what’s happening, all the conditions within your facility, whether it’s being produced by a machine or by a human or an operator, and then how do you deliver the right information at the right time to the right people that’s in context so that it helps drive their job right then and there. Let me give you an example. And quite often when looking at these industrial transformational initiatives, I looked at the consumer world to say, okay, how do we solve these problems today in the consumer space? One of the best examples I can think of that has done a phenomenal job of this is Waze, so the navigation application. The idea is, I remember my family’s all from Miami, so I used to take a 12-hour drive from Atlanta to Miami multiple times a year as a kid, and I would always have the map, you know, a physical paper map, and I would say, okay, turn here, do that. So that’s how we started, and then I thought, oh man, what a great invention of Garmin and TomTom, where you can just enter your endpoint, you have a start point and endpoint, it’ll get you there, and then you sort of look at the next evolution of that from TomTom to something like Waze. Waze is dynamic in that it’s constantly ingesting events from situational events from your surroundings and then making decisions based on those events, right. So if we were to take that same concept and sort of bring it into our world, it’s okay we have paper SOPs or instructions. Now we’re in a digital format, right, where some companies are, but we’re even trying to get a lot of companies to that point, and so what’s the next iteration of that, right? And it’s as we’re monitoring machines, as we’re monitoring process flow, materials inventory, downtime, all of these things that are now being collected, how do we have, you know, for lack of better words, these bots that are running in the background that are recognizing these patterns and then presenting the right information based on these patterns to the individuals it’s important for. You mentioned the video SOPs, that’s a great example. So understanding, look, this given operation is supposed to take two minutes to assemble. We’re now at five minutes. Do we need to go ahead and automatically send down a digital training video to say, hey, we noticed that you’ve exceeded the standard by x amount of time, here’s a quick video if you’re stuck. That type of proactive, everyone wants to move from reactive to proactive. That type of proactive interaction, monitoring all of these events, delivering down the right data to who needs it, that’s the direction we’re moving in the next couple of years. We have a really cool product coming out called Tulip Automations, and that’s going to be our first big step into that space. So hopefully in the coming months and year, you’ll start to see more and more of that shift to a proactive approach to manufacturing operations.

Sam Russem: Cool, that’s really exciting to hear, and I’ll even, you know, I know that we were talking about buzzwords a little bit at the beginning of the pod, but it’s kind of coming up again because I always think of those Waze and Google Maps as actually one of the best examples of a digital twin that people actually interact with today, right? It is some mother system in the cloud that is getting all of this real-time data from this physical thing that is happening, interpreting all of that, running all of these bots in the background like you’re describing, and then recommending the next course of action to you, the next driver based on a bunch of conditions that you could never possibly know. So that idea for manufacturing, this idea of knowing exactly the state of where everything is at in your plants, and now I want to do something new, or now I have a problem. Given the current conditions, what’s the best way to solve it. That’s the promise of a digital twin. There’s a lot that we need to do to get there in most applications, but we do that over time through iteration. I think kind of what you’re talking about around automating some of these workflows, that idea of identifying an issue and having a couple of different ways to solve it, and trying the best one, I think it’s a great idea, and it’s really cool to hear that Tulip has taken steps in that direction.

Patrick Harrigan: Yeah, I love it. No, you’re spot on there.

Sam Russem: So hey, we’re getting towards the end. I do want to forward along a question that we had from a previous guest, and I’ll give you an opportunity to ask one for a future guest. So we were talking about roles involved in digital transformation earlier. One of our guests was asking specifically if you’ve run into titles around data officers and data titles as you’re talking about digital transformation: Chief data officer, data governance officer, things like that. I’ve seen it a couple of times. We all talk about how data is so central to the core of all this, but is it Industry 4.0 director? What are those titles that you’re seeing that might lead to something successful or kind of how that works out?

Patrick Harrigan: So we have our most success selling through operations leaders, so we quite often don’t engage with IT leadership until further on in the cycle just because of our promise of, look, you can customize and tailor at the plant level with limited IT constraints and pulling on those resources, right. So VP of operations, director of operations, certainly there’s always folks in the continuous improvement and OpEx teams that are quite often involved. Chief digital officers or some iteration of that title. You’ll see multiple versions of that, but basically, I’ll bubble that all up into one category. But to your question around data officers, I personally haven’t seen a lot of that title myself. We do a lot within the pharmaceutical and med device space where compliance is obviously paramount, and there are certainly a lot of compliance officers or similar titles that are involved in a lot of our projects to help validate processes and ensure that our technology remains validated in the processes and so on and so forth. But regarding a specific title around Chief Data Officer, that’s fairly new to me. I might have seen it once or twice. I probably couldn’t even recall if I did, though.

Sam Russem: Well, but you know what, I backed that up. I would say through my experience too, I’m in a similar position. I know of the role. I’ve run into a couple, but they’re certainly not always in the room with me as we’re doing a big Industry 4.0 transformation. And there might be something to that, and again, I’m speculating a little bit here, that again, maybe that’s also indicating the problem of integrating all of this manufacturing data with all of the other data that runs a business, right? And the way that we’ve separated out IT and OT networks. If I’m a data officer today, I’m probably focused more on the supply chain and financial data and kind of my ERP data and all of these things that are already available to me in my Power BI or Tableau systems, right? And I’ll get to the manufacturing one day if I can, but right now, I have plenty of work to do with just the enterprise data that’s available to me.

Patrick Harrigan: Yeah, it’s a really good point. They might exist, they certainly aren’t prevalent in the types of projects that we work on today. I think you’re right there.

Sam Russem: But, and that there’s potentially opportunity there, and it’s indicating a bigger problem. So, how about you? What kind of questions do you want me to ask a future guest and try to stump them with?

Patrick Harrigan: Oh, okay. So, you know, I saw a question asked on LinkedIn a couple of months ago that’s really stuck with me because we’ve spent the majority of this conversation talking about labor issues. We always talk about how do we attract new talent into manufacturing, right? Someone proposed this question, I can’t recall who it was on LinkedIn. Rather than looking at additional ways to attract new talent, if you look at the retiring workforce, so look at the upper, opposite end of the spectrum. We have folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s who’ve been doing this for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. They have all that tacit knowledge, but a lot of them physically, you know, manufacturing is a very physical job, and a lot of them physically can’t stand on their feet for eight, nine, ten hours a day anymore, performing a lot of these bending, lifting, shifting tasks. But they maintain a lot of this knowledge and experience. And so I’m really racking my brain, and I would be very interested to get other people’s opinions on this, on how do we take that labor pool, use some sort of modern technology, whatever it might be, to further extend or repurpose some of those positions so that we still have that knowledge in-house because we don’t want to lose that knowledge, but we can’t have them standing on the line for 10 hours a day. So, how do we utilize modern technology to sort of bridge that gap? You know, some of the crazy things, so anyway, that’s my question. And some of the crazy things that you think of is like, how do you, you know, this concept of remote mentoring that a lot of people have adopted now. That’s certainly an area where we can put them in the back office, and they can help coach people through different situations and scenarios. That may be an answer, but I think it’s something as an industry we haven’t really explored. I think it presents a huge opportunity, especially when you look at the increase in robotics and communication and connectivity. They don’t have to physically be on the line to be able to provide that expertise. So, that’s one of the big challenges I constantly think about these days.

Sam Russem: Totally. And I’ll tell you, and for people that might not kind of realize the challenge or kind of the opportunity in that sometimes, a quick story. I remember years and years ago, I was commissioning a system for a candy manufacturer, and I had the night shift. It was just me and one of their most senior operators, one of the few guys that could run the line on his own. And I’m just babysitting, right. I’m just watching in case things go wrong, already in case, you know, we need to troubleshoot. And the guy would just be sitting there, and then all of a sudden say, ‘Oh, that machine over there is going to break down. I’m going to go over and start getting ready for it.’ And I’d be like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I heard this bang back over there, which means that this is going to shut down in the next two minutes.’ Which means I was like, ‘How on Earth do you…?’ Exactly. We could digitize these systems as much as possible, but some people have been working these for decades, and there is so much that they know. And some of that is in the system, and some of that is just from their knowledge they picked up over these years. And exactly, how do we capture all of that and try to translate it? It’s a big challenge. Patrick, really, really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you so much for joining. I really had a great time.

Patrick Harrigan: Me as well, Sam. Thank you so much, and I look forward to hopefully more of these in the future, right?”

Sam Russem: Totally. We’d love to have you on again. So thanks a lot to our audience for listening today. We would love to hear from you as well. So please do follow Grantek on LinkedIn to stay up to date with everything that we’re doing. And you can subscribe to this Industry 4.0 podcast with Grantek wherever you get your podcasts. You can always email any questions or your feedback over to info@grantek.com. And join us next time on the Industry 4.0 podcast with Grantek. Thanks again, Patrick.

Patrick Harrigan: Thanks, Sam. See ya.