Episode 2: Bob Buttermore

Welcome to the Factory Ops Exchange podcast hosted by the US center for Advanced Manufacturing and Guidewheel. I'm Lauren Dunford, CEO of Guidewheel and executive committee member of the US center for Advanced Manufacturing. Today I'm joined by Bob Buttermore, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Rockwell Automation. That is a big job. And Bob have spent decades helping shape how products are made around the world, not only by Rockwell, but also by their many customers. In our conversation, Bob shares lessons from leading not only during his decades at Rockwell, but also through the last five years of pretty unprecedented supply chain disruption. He shares how he and his team had to completely rethink what their operations looked like and how they've been able to be at the leading edge for what the factory of the future can look like. I was very surprised by even the huge potential to improve that he and his team were able to find in incredibly advanced factories. Bob also shares a lot of thoughtful advice on how to introduce AI and automation in ways that deliver good results while strengthening teams. Let's get started.

Bob, so great to get to chat today. I feel so lucky to get to dive in. As we start, would love for you to just share a little bit about your awesome journey you've had decades now within Rockwell Automation. Have a fun story of how you got started as well. Can you share a little bit about how that ARC has looked?

Yeah, sure, Lauren. So Bob Buttermore, chief supply chain Officer for Rockwell Automation. And you know, I started, I went to school at Ohio State University, got my degree in mechanical engineering. And while I was there I did five interns. And you know, why is that important? Five interns? There was two things. One, all of my interns were in manufacturing. The second thing is, and really why I got to where I'm at in the automation and digital, you know, industry is the second thing is in every intern I met the Rockwell Automation Alan Bradley, salesperson that was calling on that account. So then when I was coming out of school, you know, the focus for me was getting a leadership development program, a rotational program in manufacturing and going to work for just a company that has great people, a great culture. And Rockwell Automation was there and it was just a perfect fit as I started my career. They had the right program and they had great people.

Yeah, yeah, that leadership development program is just the best.

Love it.

Any moments you remember when you realized, oh, this, you know, this industry is for me?

Yeah, you know, I spent my first four and a half years in manufacturing, but I think the defining moment of that, you know, this industry and being working for Rockwell Automation was when I transitioned from operations to sales.

Yeah.

And you know, when I transitioned from operations to sales, you got to every single day go into and different manufacturing environment. Whether it was jellies and jams at the Smuckers company or peanut butter and jelly, or going into a steel facility, you see molten steel running down the line to your next sales call was, you know, a curing press at a tire company. And seeing the way all these things and our technology, you know, brings these consumer products to market through our automation and digital capabilities, just really resonated that this was the place to be. This is such a great industry, so such an exciting business and what we get to do every day. And bringing really products to life for the consumer.

Yeah. Oh, I feel so lucky too. How do we get to see how all these amazing things are made? Any mentors either growing up or at Rockwell that shaped how you think about what innovation and operations looks like?

Yeah. There's so many people that have impacted my career. I could go on and on, but the one that I would talk about is actually my grandfather. He, he. I grew up right next to my grandfather. I grew up on a farm in Ohio and I grew up right next to my grandfather. And we didn't work the farm, we rented most of the land out. But he had a day job and then he had an afternoon night job and weekend job of a moving business. And, and this moving business, he had a big GMC truck with like an eight foot cap on the back. And he moved people's houses, he delivered for furniture companies in town. I mean, you name it, he moved it. And I started working with him when I was 12 years old. And you know, this really just helped me learn the value of creativity, innovation and just hard work and never giving up. And every day we'd be trying to pull something that was crazy out of a house. £3,000 and we're going to get it out of the basement. And we did. Now no one ever got hurt. I think back to this now no one ever got hurt in the, you know, 15 years I probably worked with them, but it's kind of amazing. But we would find ways to get things out of the house. We would find ways to get things into a truck and get it in one load and get it to the next location. And you know, the value of just always creative. You know, you'd look at that truck and be like, there's no way we are going to get all this stuff in that truck. But my grandfather would figure out a way with Us helping him on how to get it in there and get it to the next spot efficiently and make the people happy that, that we were trying to help out in the community. Community. And you know, that just resonates with me that never give up, always innovating. Creativity was created early on in my, in my life.

I love that example and particularly I think that example of staring at the truck and seeing something that definitely physically could not be done and then repeatedly seeing it could. I sure. Like, that's a really powerful education.

It was, it was, oh, amazing.

If you were starting your career over today, what would you do differently?

If anything, I'm very fortunate. I, I've had just a wonderful career. I wouldn't change anything. You know, starting out in operations was just such a great way to start. A matter of fact, I'd recommend that everyone. I don't care whether you're going to be an investment banker or you're going to actually be in supply chain the rest of your life, you're going to be in sales. You should actually do a little stint in manufacturing first because that, the strength of that manufacturing has carried me through my career. As I went into sales, as I went into the business unit, as I went into my regional roles. Living in Asia for six years, you know, when I went from operations to sales because I understood the plant, I could get a meeting with a VP of manufacturing and go in there and make a sale because I understood manufacturing. When I moved into the business unit, I had to work with the operations team every day and it was easy for me to develop that relationship and frankly run my business better because I understood manufacturing and I could work with those teams really well. And even when I moved out to Asia, you know, there were things that were impacting our customer service that I was able to identify and work with the operations team on and, and you know, really create better value for our customers so I wouldn't change a thing. I started in manufacturing was, you know, probably one of the best decisions of my life besides marrying my wife.

Yes, well said. And I, yeah, I could not agree more on that recommendation. It's also so interesting because the principles and the empathy and the understanding of how things are made. It's also funny because I'm in these two worlds of manufacturing and software. So I listen to a lot of just software Silicon Valley type podcasts as well. The number of podcasts recently from completely the Silicon Valley world that are mentioning the goal as an approach and talking about some of the basic principles of operations. I feel like it's increasing. Yeah. It's a cool thing. Well, in that amazing career, you've also led Rockwell through a number of just challenging times in the world. I can imagine the stories you have of challenges that you've overcome with the team are probably a pretty. Pretty crazy and fun. Any that come to mind. Any examples of challenges you've been able to overcome?

Yeah, you know, I think in operations, every single day, you have challenges. And I'm sure all the chief supply chains officers out there know what that's like. Every day there's a new challenge. But if I looked at, you know, the last five years have just been unprecedented disruption, disruption after disruption after disruption. And it's, you know, really completely change the way we need to think about operations. You know, it used to be just focused on performance. Now it's got to be. You got to perform and transform at the same time. It's. Instead of just in time, it's just in case, you know, you have to build that resiliency. And I think a couple examples of that for us, and this is a continuous journey for us. But before the pandemic, before COVID before the supply chain crisis in the electronics space, we ran five, you know, three, five days a week, you know, maybe two or three shifts, maybe not even that sometimes in our plants. And. And then as the supply chain crisis hit, we went to running 24 7. And when we ran five days a week, we would have power disruptions. We didn't have power redundancy. It was no big deal. We could make it up on the weekend, make it up on. Run a little overtime during the week, and we'd be fine. But when you're running 24 7, you can't afford for that facility to be down for a second. You have hundreds of people there standing around. And. And so we had to go and implement power redundancy across the globe in all of our facilities. And. And that's just been replicated. We needed to build more capacity and redundant capacity. And it's. It's changed from that just in time to just in case. And it's created really, a steady stream of investment that we're doing every single year looking at how do we build more and more resiliency and agility into our integrated supply chain.

Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. And as you've been rethinking so many different aspects of the operation, whether it's power redundancy or staffing or whatever it might be, are there operational kind of practices that used to fit and now no longer do any that you've rethought or phased out on that kind of operational front.

Yeah, yeah, there's, you know, I think this is something that you constantly have to be looking at is does you know, the past way that you've operated continue to be the way you need to operate and look at yourself into the future. Now give you a couple examples that are a great example of that. You know, when I came in, we looked at 30 different metrics and, and you know, you can imagine the challenge of that. You're, you're in a review trying to go through 30 different metrics that are determining your performance. And the questions everyone's trying to figure out, how is this metric measured? Is this a 12 month rolling average? Is this a three month rolling average? Is this a, is this a one month number? Is, is this, you know, whatever a blended number? And you know, people would get bogged down in that and then people would zone out. There were so many metrics to go through and by the end you really accomplished nothing. You had no actions. And so what we did is we changed from talking about 30 different metrics at an executive level to five. We said these are the five most critical metrics that there's lots of metrics down through the organization. Thousands. But if these five metrics are good, then all these are probably good. So focus on these, focus on what's working, what's not, what's the causals of, you know, missed performance and drive actions against those and you'll deliver great performance. You'll wow the customer. As I say, if you, if you do those things right and that's been a game changer for us. You can really, really focus and drive performance when you look at just the top metrics that matter.

Yeah, I love it. That principle of 80, 20. And if you do everything you do, nothing plays out. Just all the time. Yeah, yeah, love it. Maybe just you've seen, I'm sure, tons of practical examples of manufacturing transformation. Big impact both within your customer base and Rockwell's own operations. Any that are particular stories you love.

You know, the exciting thing about working at Rockwell is that, you know, every day we're working with our customers.

Yeah.

To, you know, help them bring the factory of the future to life for them. And that's what every customer is coming to us today and asking for is help us build the factory of the future with your technology and with your partner ecosystem. But what's interesting about this is exactly what we're trying to do internally. We're trying to become the showcase for the industry and for our customers on how to build a factory of the future. And so Singapore is one of our large facilities in our network. And about a year and a half ago we went on this transformation journey with Singapore. What's interesting about Singapore is it was already a world class facility for us. And what I mean by that is that you look at external metrics and you look at efficiency and you look at quality, you look at cost. It was already at those world class levels.

Yeah.

But we decided that we're going to go and integrate a transformation there and, and put automation, more automation and AI digital trans, more digital transformation and automate material movement. And we saw a significant impact by doing that in a world class facility. We got 35% reduction in costs. Wow. We got a 25% reduction in energy. And one of the most important metrics to me was the time to competency for our associates. By integrating AI and new technology, we were able to improve our time to competence by 60% for our associates, which is huge as we go into the future.

Those are some crazy numbers. That's amazing. Especially because of what you shared. This was already a very advanced facility. If you're achieving Those types of 30%, 25%, 60% improvements from a really high base.

Wow. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was really impressed with the work the team did. The team did a great job. Yeah.

Amazing. I also of course always like to find, you know, not everyone is in that world class already state. Are there low lift, high reward things or of simple tweaks that you've seen tend to have really high bang for the buck or you know, impact for the size.

Yeah. And I think that's the exciting thing about technology today. It's how rapidly it's evolving and the time to value. It's creating so many opportunities in every part of manufacturing. Even in job shop manufacturing, it's creating opportunities for automation. But to give you an example of one that was just a. It might be a little bit bigger than a little tweak, but is we have an engineered order business which is really, you know, high labor content, a lot of manual work. And one of the most complicated jobs in those engineered order facilities for us is wiring up of big panels or units as we call them for the customer with all these different products in there and wiring them together and, and this is the hardest job in the factory and it's all manual, it's the highest turnover, it's the worst quality and it's the least job satisfaction role. It's the toughest job an associate has to read a 2D piece of paper, a 2D schematic, and then look at this big panel and figure out, where do I need to wire this? And they would have to cut the wires to length and, and strip them. And we, we, we integrated some technology. We integrated a machine to do the cutting and, and, and stripping of the, the wires, but then we integrated a digital screen that shows them exactly where to put the wire in the panel. And this was developed. What's really interesting about this, too, is so we use digital 3D. We use digital tools instead of manual tools. We used an automated machine to help with some of the, the wire cutting. But what's really interesting about this is this, this, this came about because of an innovation challenge that we run at Rockwell Automation. Every single year, we run an innovation challenge, and different teams compete to win the challenge. Well, this team won the challenge, funded the project, and then we implemented it in the, in all of our ETO factories around the world. And what we've seen, and I think this is where, this is where the impact is, is if you go and talk to the associates and you interview the associates, I mean, hey, it's been great for us from a productivity perspective, a quality perspective, all those things. But if you go talk to the associate that does that job. Yep. What you'll hear from them is it's transformed the way they feel because they'd leave work being, feeling bad because their job was so difficult and it was so hard to get perfection and produce at the rate they wanted to and they wanted to be successful. This tool now allows them to be successful. And when they leave at the end of the day, they feel fantastic. It's like, job well done. And I think that impact, that people impact and making their job easier and more rewarding is what the biggest impact of that tweak in putting a little bit of automation in place made for our team. Yeah.

And I love that thoughtfulness around having an innovation challenge, speaking to folks, natural competitiveness. But also that people are gonna know the most about what affects them. And so if they can be creating and suggesting the solutions, that's by far the best way to have it happen. Oh, so much.

Yeah.

I love so much about that. Okay, as we start to draw to the last sections, I wanted to get your perspective on some of the trends shaping the factory of the future. You have a very unique and cool perspective on the. All these different trends. AI, ar, VR, predictive maintenance. What manufacturing trends do you think are genuinely reshaping things and having a Big impact and what are some misconceptions.

Yeah, you know, something I said earlier, thinking going back to, you know, how rapidly technology is advanced and continues to advance every, you know, every week, every year, every, every five years, coupled with the time to value, the time to value for technology is just transforming what we can do in manufacturing today and really creating the opportunity for us to bring factories of the future to life. But there's three, I think there's three big technologies that are changing the game. And one of them is software defined automation. And when we think about this digital world and being able to design in a digital twin an entire facility digitally and then actually run it with, you know, the automation integrated into the equipment and all the mechanical equipment in a 3D model in a digital twin and being able to do that before you buy anything and find out all the mistakes that you could make are really changing the game for productivity and really the how fast you can implement something in today's world. And that's just one example with digital twin of software defined automation. But it's transforming what we can do. That helped us in Singapore as an example, using that digital twin got us to the right answer much faster than if we would have been doing it on paper or 2D. But that software defined automation is one. Number two, I'd say is production logistics, you know, automating material movement, you know, automating warehouses, automating material movement from the warehouse to the line, through the line, back out of the line, into the warehouse, into the shipping dock. That automating of material movement, that production logistics and the technology and capabilities that are out there now with AMRS is really changing the game on the indirect side. And that was a huge piece of our transformation in Singapore. We're implementing it now and in all of our facilities around the world to help us accelerate that material movement automation. And then the third piece is AI. You know, AI is, is a game changer and how fast you can implement solutions, but how it takes complex challenges that you had in the past and allows you to put practical solutions in place in your factory. It really, you know, in the factory there's, there's just endless opportunities for AI. I think those three are really transforming, you know, the pace at which you can get productivity and changes into your factories.

Yeah, yeah, Incredible. To that topic of AI automation, how do you at Rockwell think about how to implement that in a way that makes sense? You talked also about the people focused view. How do you balance those things? What are some tips and tricks you might have or Stories of how to do that.

Well, yeah, sure. Actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come to that question in a second. I missed the second part of your question on the previous one. The misconceptions. Yeah, I wanted, I did want to hit that. You know, I think one of the most big, the biggest misconception is that all this technology is going to eliminate jobs. If you look at all the data, the data tells you that we have a gap in the number of people to fill manufacturing and supply chain jobs today. And so I think that's one of the misconceptions is that the technology is going to eliminate jobs. Actually, we need more people to go into manufacturing. We need public and private coming together and encouraging people at a young age, in middle school and in high school and programs after high school to move into manufacturing supply chain. Because, you know, the, the reality is we need the makers for all of us to improve the quality of life for, for the world. And I think, you know, what we need to do is inspire generations to become the makers in manufacturing and supply chain. And it's not, it's not the elimination of jobs. It's actually getting more people interested and engaged in being a part of their career beating integrated supply chain and manufacturing. So that's that. I wanted to answer that one. I missed that one.

As we were through so such an important point. Oh, just. And I think people just don't realize how incredible this industry is and that there are so many new types of, of jobs being created. Yeah, it's super exciting.

So now to answer your question there about how do we integrate this technology in a methodical way and do that in the proper way? There's three things that we really think about as we look at AI as an example, as you talked as your question was, one is return on investment. Two is disciplined innovation. And then three is fusion teams. And I'll talk about each of those a little bit. But first is it's got to have a return on investment. And you know, I get asked every day to integrate new technology in our factories and in our supply chain. And the first thing I go back to is, okay, let's look at the roi and, and you know, there's times where we'll say, you know, that new piece of technology is not going to work here, but how about over there? Yeah, well, it does work over there, but we got to focus on ROI and because, you know, Lauren, what's the first question that a, a customer asked me when they walk in our facility and they see, oh, you integrated this technology. First question they asked me, ooh, how.

Much did it cost?

That's good one, that. They definitely asked that too. But they asked investment. They asked the roi, right? Yeah, yeah. So when we do it, we have to make sure that that's our first principle. Does this have an roi? Second is then disciplined innovation. And here is, we've, we've got to be careful. You can go and go wild and implement automation everywhere real quickly, but you could create some dis, you know, some disabling your supply chain as you go through that. So what we focus on is identify the best opportunities or use cases to implement AI. And then we pilot that and then we scale that. And, and that's what I mean by disciplined innovation. It's not going out and doing 20 different use cases at one time. It's focus on a couple, pilot them, then scale them so that you can, you know, continue to run a successful supply chain. I'll give you an example where this could really go bad.

Yeah.

If I just said to my 20 plants, every planning group in those 20 plants, I want you to go implement an AI use case in your planning of your plant, and they all go, and they all create 20 different AI models. And all of a sudden, what do I have? I have a complete mess in my supply. I have, I have things not working right. I have customer service problems. I have. People don't even know what's going on because we've implemented this technology. But we don't, we're not, we don't have any control. Whereas it would be better to go and say to those 20 plants, hey, I want you to come together, come up with the top use case that you think we should work on from an AI perspective. And then let's go pilot it in one plant and then we'll scale it when we get it done. So discipline, innovation is the second one. The, the third one is, is around fusion teams. And this is pretty simple. It's bringing the right people together in this, this new world of AI. It's bringing subject matter experts for the process or the machine, together with digital.

Engineers, data scientists, and then the associates to work together on how do we implement this so that we get the results we want out of that, whether that was better quality or better throughput or better productivity, all those things. It's those teams working together in a fusion teams that we're trying to do to implement AI technology across the organization.

So much good stuff. I know you have a very big job, so I want to make sure you can get back to doing it. Any last things you want to say before we close?

Well, you know, I think just emphasizing that there's such, so, so much rewarding and great careers, you know, in the, the automation industry and in manufacturing. And I encourage people to look into it and, and jump in and, and really, you know, go out there and promote it and, and find ways to get more people integrated, interested and integrated. Supply chain and manufacturing day. There's great rewarding careers there and, and I look forward to that journey myself as we go forward. A couple things I'd leave you with, just so you know.

Yeah.

You know, who I. Who am I? Outside of work? Yeah, you know, outside of work. Yeah, It's. I grew up on a farm, right. And growing up on a farm, it was all about family and being outside. So it's no different for me today, right. Everything I do outside of works about my family, I coach my kids sports. I spend a lot of time on family vacations, family activities. And the only thing I really do for myself is I love to run and lift the weights and. But I, I love to run outside. And that kind of goes back to my upbringing of farmer. You know, growing up on a farm, I, I really struggle to run on treadmills.

Oh yeah, no treadmills.

Running outside.

Amazing. Bob, thank you so much. Such an honor. I feel like I learned a ton in this conversation. Really appreciate you making the time.

Well, thank you, Lauren. Appreciate it.

A huge thank you to Bob for sharing such a rich set of stories and lessons. His career is a reminder that the most lasting changes in manufacturing happen when we combine new, new technology with a clear roi, disciplined rollouts, and a focus on making work better for the people on the floor. If this episode gave you ideas, share it with a colleague and follow the factory ops. Exchange for more conversations with leaders who are building the future of manufacturing. Thanks for listening.