Advancing Industry 4.0 for Small & Mid-size Manufacturers: A Unique Approach

Well, welcome to the club, the Industry 4.0 Club. I'm Mike Yost, the CEO and one of the founders of the club, and I'm joined here today with Patrick Gahn of Axiom Systems. Welcome, Patrick.

Welcome, pleasure to be here, Mike.

Excellent. We're going to be talking about a unique approach that Patrick and his team have taken to helping make Industry 4.0 accessible to manufacturers of all sizes. But first of all, if you're not familiar with the club, I want to say welcome and point out that our goal at the club is to help drive the advancement of Industry 4.0 specifically for the value that it brings to manufacturers and to the communities that rely on manufacturers. So we host open conversations on LinkedIn multiple times a week, oftentimes, and we try to host practitioners and thought leaders, executives, academics, entrepreneurs, anybody with a point of view that can help drive the understanding of the potential impact for Industry 4.0 into manufacturing. So these events that we have, Wednesdays are typically our day for fireside chats when we invite specific guests on, experts in their field, just like Patrick is. And we ask them to share their experiences with us. We are streaming on LinkedIn Live. So please, if you have questions, go ahead and put them in the comments field. And if and as we're able to take those in the flow of the conversation, We will do that, include that in the course of today's conversation. Our goal is to go for about 30 minutes or so and pull as much value as we can out of all of Patrick's experiences. So we will get started here in just a second. Patrick and his group are focused on helping manufacturers understand the value of operational excellence. Also, obviously, the Industry 4.0 technologies and new business models, new ways of getting access to experts and expertise. So we definitely want to talk to Patrick and learn more about him. But first of all, just a couple of housekeeping items that I want to point out. Our goal is always to have a positive environment that fosters thoughtful and inclusive conversations. It's one of the main missions of the club. So if you do make comments, please keep them in line with that. And again, if you aren't familiar with the club, please follow us, follow us online, follow us on LinkedIn, and join us for these shows as we have them every week. So again, today we are focused on a unique approach for advancing Industry 4.0 for small to midsize manufacturers. And with me is Patrick Gaughan, who's a partner at Axiom Systems, which is a digital manufacturing consultancy and solution provider that's offering new models to deliver value to manufacturers of all sizes. Patrick brings over 30 years of corporate engineering, supply chain, and quality experience with a focus on lean manufacturing to his role at Axiom. So with that, Patrick, welcome. Would you maybe take a minute or so here and—

Sure.

bound a little bit on the brief introduction that I—

Sure. Thank you, Mike. Yeah. So how did we get to here from there, right? And so unlike a lot of folks today, I started my journey at a Fortune 100 company and stayed there for almost 34 years. Started in the engineering department, worked my way through various roles there, and eventually landed sometime in global supply chain, sometime in quality systems. And I developed in the 1990s a very specific focus in lean manufacturing. That focus in lean manufacturing really kind of shaped my view on things moving forward, and I was able to sort of apply that part of the craft not only in regular continuous improvement, but also in the design space, which is the part that I find most fascinating. It's often overlooked. We talked about continuous improvement all the time, but there's fantastic opportunities when you start to look at it holistically, from all the way from design inception all the way through the deployment piece, not just in the manufacturing and business processes. So in my years with that company, I did rapid improvement workshops. If any of your viewers are familiar with those, high-intensity 5-day events, a little bit of setup, 5 days of complete re-engineering, and by the time you're done, you've re-engineered an entire process. And that was so rewarding and so enjoyable Had a lot of fun. We took what was a 15-day cycle time for our suite of products at the facility as I started at, from 15 days down to 3 days. What that means practically speaking is we created about 5x on the capacity side for what was already a multi-tens of millions of dollars business. And in that, that exercise really shaped the way I looked at things and all the opportunities that came from that point forward. At the end of my career, I started to look at it from a much higher level and realize that you can do a lot of work in optimizing what humans do, but at some point you're going to want to start to take a look at some design elements that are talked about very openly in Industry 4.0 to really make the transformation stick. One of the challenges that you have in a highly manual process is that you're still beholden to people, right? And people can do things that are highly variable, and that becomes a bit problematic, not by intention, just by natural consequence of variation in the process. And so I started to work on how do you put together a framework where you can leverage an intentionally designed space that allows you to implement Industry 4.0 methods to drive out that variation and make for a very robust process. And so I finished my career With that as my end project, we were looking at a global MES solution at the company. And I got to a point in time where I decided that if my entrepreneurial spirit was ever gonna do anything, when they had a downsizing, when things got tough around COVID, I needed to take the buyout and kick the tires on entrepreneurship. And I met with a great bunch of guys, exceptionally talented. And as you know, Mike, when you start to work with cool people, great things happen, right?

Yeah.

So I jumped in with both feet into the deep end of the pool with my partners at Axiom, and we started to work on and become evangelists for taking those practices that we learned in the Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies and using that experience to help the folks in the small to mid-sized manufacturing space.

Yeah, and that's definitely an area that we want to jump into. I just want to comment again that we— feel free to drop your comments into LinkedIn. I see we have Karen and Chris already commenting, so welcome and thanks for joining us. Chris is asking about the website for Axiom, and I believe the website is axiomsystems.io.

.io, yes. Okay, thank you.

So, um, so welcome, and anybody, if you have questions, please, uh, please feel free to chime in. So maybe to your point, Patrick, about, um, big company experience, my background similarly is framed initially with working with big companies and then working more with smaller companies and nonprofits, but For a smaller organization, could you just maybe frame up operational excellence practices and, you know, the value of them? And, you know, are we talking specifically lean manufacturing or is it more broad than just lean?

Yeah, that's a great question, one that we often get asked. You know, a lot of folks hear about what is this OpEx that we keep hearing about, right? The operational excellence. And I think as much as anything, it starts to describe a philosophy. It's not necessarily rote, like people think of TPM and some of the other core elements that drove operational excellence. And I would suggest that it's sort of a series of consequential steps that an organization undertakes to be able to drive from where they are to what their ideal state is and what the methods are capable of. Some of the core elements that define that, Mike, And this is not in any particular order, but I'm going to start at the top. You have to have executive sponsorship that's committed to the cause, that says, whatever we're doing today is not quite good enough for what we need to do tomorrow. So that's step number 1. And if you have that, then you can get to the next step, which is you start to find yourself some evangelists within the organization. So that was my role at the company that I was with. I was identified as a potential evangelist and absolutely became an evangelist. So, you find people that have a burning interest in saying, hey, I want to learn about this new methodology and I want to be able to deploy it and teach others. That takes us to the next step. Now, you start to engage the right people to be able to figure out what your core strategy is going to be. There are many directions that you can take. There's all sorts of options. And this is often where a lot of people in the small to mids become paralyzed.

Right.

When I would sit around the table and have these sort of strategic conversations, there's a lot of people that I could look to that were absolutely experts in their space, and we could get a lot of really good answers. When you get to the small and mids, you look around and find out that there's very few hats at the table to represent them. So it's often a couple people saying, listen, I hear about cybersecurity, I hear about rapid improvement, I hear about MES and all these other terms, and, you know, I'm not exactly sure, you know, which direction I should go. I know my business really well. I know what I do today. But I'm very fearful about what the future looks like if I don't figure this out. Okay. So, you've got to sit down with people that can help you frame in that core strategy. That becomes the next step. And then, that takes you to the next 2 most important steps. Once you've got a core strategy that's defined, and I encourage you to go find experts to help you with that. This is not the type of thing you just do blindly.

Okay?

Start to educate the masses. Talk to people openly, candidly about the strategy that you want to deploy. and engage them. And what should end up happening in a well-designed OpEx strategy is that those evangelists will start to clear the rocks out from the things that oftentimes many of those people that actually had value wanted to do all along but didn't have a voice.

Sure.

Once they have a chance to do that, set up your series of workshops and start to engage them. Take those roadblocks out and let them celebrate. Now, The last most important one, and there's certainly more steps, I'm just trying to hit some highlights.

Sure.

Is you have to become a metrics-driven organization. If you're not willing to put in the time to gather the data, show the data, give it to everyone, then you're not going to be successful. You're going to have false starts and it's not going to work. So any one of those levels I just described, if you don't do them, you can create a lot of chaos, confusion, frustration, right? But once you put that metrics piece in place, whether you change management, whether you change philosophies, metrics will always speak for themselves. Are you getting better or worse? And that starts in the hour-by-hour charts, Mike, so that people can see how they're doing personally in their alignment to the core mission, all the way up through day-by-day, week-by-week, work cell by work cell, month-by-month, year-by-year.

So now I think it's, It's great as you describe it, like your personal experience of driving OpEx within a large organization still has the same types of principles and the same processes you would follow no matter what the size of the organization is. So you talked a bit about essentially having to evangelize, and I would not use the word sell, right?

Right.

'Cause you're not trying to sell that, like you have a bill of goods to sell something, like you're trying to evangelize for the cause, and driving that. So I would like to come to a question that Karen posed here in a second, which is going, I think, the opposite way. But maybe just talk about that for a second, like your experience, and maybe now at Axiom with what you guys are doing, how are you finding that conversation when you are, especially if you're coming in as an outside organization, you're evangelizing on behalf of the organization. Are you finding, what has your experience been of how receptive people typically are? And what are you finding nowadays with the smaller organizations?

Yeah, this is a great question. So oftentimes, and I'm going to get at one of the core faults that I've seen in my history, and this is something my sensei taught me back in 1996, I think it goes way back. And that was when you start to do these re-engineering efforts, he told me, don't ever have supervisors in your workshop events. And I thought he was nuts. I said, how in the heck are you going to get anything done if you don't have supervisors in? And true to form, I experimented with his teachings.

You did?

I really did. That became a bit problematic. So, to your question, if you go in and you engage the team of folks who are adding value and you clear out the roadblocks for them, bring their ideas to life, they are very engaged. And I'll tell you, these workshop type of events to get to another place, They're a lot of work. People are exhausted when they're done. They have to become hyper communicators because you have to keep everybody in it together, right? All across all shifts, all days. And I have never had one person in a workshop at the end of it, when we did our evaluation, say, I never want to do this again.

Yeah.

Matter of fact, I had the exact opposite. I had a supervisor— well, he was a manager, not a supervisor— who did this to me one time. He found out what we were doing. He just went like this. I said, What is that, Max? What are you doing? He said, I don't want you doing any work in my workshops. Now, we report out on our workshops day 1, day 2, and day 5. Matt— I shouldn't probably say his name. Some folks will know who I'm talking about. But when he came to this, he— this epiphany came up. And he came to me after the workshop and said, I had no idea that this is what you guys were doing. He said, I just heard you were changing a bunch of stuff. He said, you can help me meet all of my goals within my first 3 months if I can get you to do my workshops. I said, yeah, but I can't do it like this.

Right, right, for sure.

Invite me in. And that's exactly what he did. And he was forever changed and actually started leading his own workshops very rapidly. So the engagement question you asked, it's all about how you deliver, right? And if you do it the right way and you're truthful in what you want to do and help people, you want to grow the business, so they can grow their job, so they can grow their wages, so everybody ends up with a better life, you'll get engagement.

Yeah. Well, and I mentioned earlier a question from Karen. She talked about sort of the opposite of an aversion. She said, for a company that's in the infancy stages of the transformation— here we go on the screen— how do you help them overcome the aversion to change starting at the top? So you started at the beginning, and it's It's like we haven't talked at all about technology here, right? Everything you're talking about is change, right? And operational change. And this is the same way, like, I've been selling or I've been involved in positioning, evangelizing, and selling software solutions for years. And it's the exact same thing. So are you seeing today or have you seen cases where, to Karen's point, there's hesitation from the top to own this and drive the change? I have.

I've experienced it firsthand. And I will tell you that if you're going to get into this space of getting into significant change management, rapid improvement, re-engineering, whatever term you want to put on it, you've got to make sure that first of all, you have thick skin, right? Because at the very beginning, you're going to have challenges, right? And I'm going to back into the question a little bit. The person who asked me if I wanted to do this was the plant manager. He was the top dog at the plant we had and brought us in. There was 4 of us and we started to go to work doing all of this activity. And on day 1, minute 5, he would deliver a speech, 5, 10 minutes and say, you can do whatever you want. As long as you don't jeopardize safety and you, you don't cause us to shut down our customers, as long as you don't substitute money for brains. In other words, don't ask for $15 million projects that you're going to put in place in 5 days. That's just not practical.

Right.

And you can use that language throughout a workshop to get people past that place of not believing in themselves and what they can do. Now, If you don't have that person at the top that's willing to walk in day 1 and say that to those folks, right? This is the question that's being posed. My suggestion is a couple candid conversations with that leader. If that doesn't work, go to the leader above that person. Have another candid conversation about what you perceive as being a problem. And if you don't get anywhere, it's time to go and find other fertile ground. You cannot change an organization that does not at its core fundamentally wish to be changed when it's at the leadership at the top. Conversely, if the leader wants to change, it can be done. As long as you win the hearts and minds of the people, you gotta be willing to do that part.

Excellent. There's another comment that came in or a question. Henri has put a question in asking about right to repair. And I have to be honest, I don't know what right to repair is referring to. So maybe Henri, if you could just add into the, into the chat the definition of what you're looking for there, we can circle back unless you have thoughts on it immediately, Patrick.

No, I'd like to— can you put that back up for just a second so I can see it? I only see it when it's on your screen. Okay.

So we definitely want to dig into these types of questions and topics. I could guess what it is, but I think that would be a bad use of our time if I guess incorrectly.

Yeah, I think we'd— I'd like to see that question framed just slightly differently. I think I understand the essence of what we're talking about, so, um, I'll try to make it somewhat analogous to that. So a lot of the folks that we work with in the small mids, um, you'll find them working on paper, and, and that's exactly how I started my career. Even though it was a Fortune 100 company, um, there were no computers when I first started in the engineering department. I know that sounds crazy, especially if you look at like, well, how old is this guy? For God's sake, I can't possibly be 80, right? But that's not, that's not the case. Computers started to find their way into the workplace in the 1980s, and I was part of that transition. And so people that are in that situation become a bit fearful of the fact that you've got systems now that you have to maintain that would otherwise not have to be there and potentially be an impediment. So if this is sort of the line of questioning, what I would suggest to you is that you have to make sure that you invest in very robust solutions, and that comes all the way from the level 0.

Mm-hmm.

devices that are in the field all the way through your infrastructure that allows you to have structured data that you can actually start to rely on.

Yeah.

It can easily be done, but it has to be done intentionally. And that's all about the selection of what you do. For what— if no one takes anything else away, please listen to this. Do not go out there and if you're a small to mid-sized company, don't try to build your own systems. There are fantastic people that have invested years of time in solutions and platforms integrate them and save yourself this repair issue, at least as it relates to data and structure. Make sure that things are elastic, they can grow with you and your business, and that it's very simple to bolt things on to make everything work. I, you know, we are kind of a self-defined hybrid systems integrator. I'd love to see us eliminate our jobs to the extent practical.

Hmm.

No lie, I really would. I'd love to see us be able to, to go to so many manufacturers that we can deploy systems so rapidly using lean concepts That everything flows from that, right? And in that, that means you can't have to fight with data and sensors that don't work in order to be able to maintain that structure.

Yeah. And so I think— thank you, Henri, for putting some more clarification, talking about access to spec sheets and parts lists and service manuals, et cetera. I was in a workshop just last week, and this was one of the main topics of conversation that came up. And I think this is an ecosystem conversation and definitely spot on that these are the types of challenges that as an ecosystem we need to take on because the data or the data structures, the ownership of, you know, how you even get at the information that could be locked away into a system, there are still a lot of OEMs that consider that, or machine builders that consider that to be—

Yeah.

their property and they're not either good at sharing or in some cases flat out will not share. And so I think from an ecosystem perspective, Henri is spot on that we need to fight that as an industry and say that if we're going to truly have seamless integration and really marry together what you're talking about, right, the operational excellence drive to the supporting data and information that that undergirds that, we're going to need access to these things and find ways that we can drop down those barriers.

Yeah, and now I understand the framework a little bit better with Henri's question. Hyper-valid, especially right now. So one of the— we think the critical notions that we on the manufacturing side are going to have to start to deal with is the fact that traditionally when it came to manufacturing, like many other businesses, We always wanted to keep that data in-house, on-premise, and manage that. And oftentimes, to our detriment, the folks in the IT space— God bless them, we love the fact that we have IT— they start to try to manage the OT space, the operational space. And the rules of engagement for OT are very, very different. And this needs to be very clearly understood. If your internet goes down one day, right?

Yeah.

You lose access to your computer, you wait 15 minutes, you come back up. That's not a big deal. But go out and have a 20-ton press that shuts down in the middle of it, right? Have a pump that starts to run away with 10,000 PSI in it, right? You can't do those things. So this is where you start to bring in experts to make sure that you have a sophisticated design to be able to manage that. Sophisticated doesn't necessarily mean extremely expensive. It's not cheap, I'm not going to lie to you. But you want one that is robust and resilient, something that can scale with you.

Okay. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, and I'd like to pivot the conversation a little bit. I see the conversation still going on. One other thing Chris has asked, if we've read the book The Phoenix Project. I have not read that book, but he said it's a good book talking about using lean in IT. So I will add it to the reading list, Chris. Appreciate that. Yeah, so appreciate that. And I think Henry is commenting as well about the fact that they pay for the machine, so it feels like they should have access to everything they need to support it. And I certainly agree with that. But you mentioned about experts and expertise, and we've been talking here for a minute about ecosystem, and we framed this conversation today, and I actually asked you to come here and join us because I love what you guys are doing at Axiom. And one of the biggest challenges that I think that we have in serving the manufacturing base in general, and I hate to just say the small companies, I mean, I live in— we live in Northeast Ohio in the United States, and the, you know, 94% of the manufacturers in our region, northeastern corner of the state of Ohio, have 100 or fewer employees.

Yeah.

But they make up 30% of the employment and 50% of the economic output. Right? So it's really important that we be able to serve them and that we need an ecosystem. And the way projects are traditionally typically sold, that's where a lot of the awareness, a lot of the education comes from the solution providers 'cause they have something to sell. And I don't think that model is ever going to scale and serve the thousands and thousands of manufacturers that we have here. So talk a little bit about, we framed this up as a unique approach to serving this customer base or this manufacturing base. Talk a little bit about what you guys are doing and how you see making access to experts easier for companies.

Yeah, and I think I'm gonna put a little bit of context around that, Mike, just to kind of walk us down a trail. So in my time with the Fortune 50, Fortune 100 company, if I had to do a big project like a global MES solution, I could walk in and I would have this table of 20 experts that were best in class. These folks were fantastic to be able to put together What we needed— cybersecurity, IT, OT, networking, process control, process engineering, maintenance, whatever it was— we had all these great experts and it was fantastic. And it's certainly something that, you know, you can kind of relish in the fact that you've got so much access to talent, right? And it's easy to fall back on the fact that that makes it simple, right? It drags things out because it's a bit slower. But it's a luxury to be able to have. And then when I stepped away from that corporate world and started to engage with smaller manufacturing companies who needed some expertise, you start to realize that oftentimes you're talking to an owner, you're talking to a manager or a superintendent, and they wear 4 or 5, 6 of those hats. And oftentimes some of those hats are not even represented at the table, right?

Yeah.

So they have no idea how to start to bridge that gap and what makes sense. And so what oftentimes ends up happening, and this is one of those critical mistakes, is they start to engage a whole series of people who have point source solutions, right? And hey, I can solve this, I can solve this, I can solve that. And no one's giving context to the fact that you have to have a strategy to be able to tie these things together. Otherwise, you're going to pay folks like my company or traditional SIs to stitch all that together. and to maintain it forever. And heaven forbid somebody starts to leave and a little expertise walks out the door, and all of a sudden you find yourself on an island, right? So our approach at Axiom— and my partners are electrical professional engineers, control engineers, product developers, process engineers— like, we're a very diverse group of folks that have come together to start the company, recognize that You know, this is a common thread. We came at it with individual experiences that all said the same thing. They're all dealing with this issue, and it starts to become a bit paralyzing for folks. So we said, well, if there's a, if there's a niche that's out there that's underserved— we weren't a company yet at the time, we're sitting around a dinner table just trying to figure out, you know, what we were going to do or what have you— said, you know, why don't we form our own company? And why don't we solve that problem? Because if no one else is doing it, in a way that's scalable and repeatable, upgradable, modular, right? If it's not being done that way, then that market's gonna be served at some point. So if not then, why not now? And so our approach to that, we think, was maybe a little bit unique, but not unique in all roles. But we offered a fractional engineering role where we could take our diverse group of engineers and we could start to package them up and say, hey, listen, we can be a fractional engineering offering for you guys, however many hours per month or for however many months you need or what have you, and solve those problems to help you set that strategy, maybe start to help you crawl before you walk. And that way you can start to become self-sufficient on your own and take that journey wherever you want. And let's say you get so far down the journey and you want to come back, you've got some touch points you want to do, you know, we can come in and re-engage then. But I think of the equivalent value is We are scientists who are out there looking at what is available in the marketplace, educating ourselves, doing the tests and trials to figure out what technology really works. And we make that part of our core partnership to bring those folks in. So we're not beholden to company A, B, or C to sell their stuff. We are beholden to one entity, one entity only, and that's the end customer. That's who we serve.

Yeah.

And we don't start with the solution. We start with, tell me what your problem is. How can we help you?

Right. And I think that goes back to the point of the previous conversation about the right to repair and Henry saying, this is mine, why don't I have the right to service my own machinery, et cetera, et cetera? And that's because the objective or the outcome of that machine builder is their machine, not the business outcomes of the manufacturer themselves. So if you come into an environment, and that's what As we talk a lot about from an ecosystem perspective, is that the approach today is an ecosystem approach and you really need to find partners who are wired into the shared business outcomes of the manufacturer. So if that means, whatever that means from a solutions perspective, that's the ultimate.

Let me give Henri a little bit of hope. In a lot of those machines, the older machines, they didn't come with sensors. There was no Industry 4.0. And as a matter of fact, a lot of great machines were built when there wasn't even Industry 3.0. There were no computers out there, right? You just had an HMI and the machine ran. But what's happened recently is there is a big push to be able to attach sensors to machines, to be able to extract critical data in ways that wouldn't have been possible before. And what I mean by that is these sensors oftentimes are wireless. They can be coupled to a device that has its own network established to it. And you can start to work that into a framework to be able to provide analytics that sit over top of all that with a very, very light touch with the IT community. Sometimes in some cases you can go cellular and have no touch, right? And I'm telling you, that's incredibly powerful. And this point is often lost with people. When we talk about sensors, sort of that level 0 in the Purdue model, in the past you would always think about, I need to run conduit, I've got to tie in back at the bucket, I got to pull the wires, I got to do this, that, blah, blah, blah. Right? And so all of a sudden, a $500 sensor costs me $2,500 to install. And what do I get out of that? I don't have any intelligence, right? All I have is some data. Well, we believe that what we'd like to be able to focus on— let's flip the tables a little bit. Let's find inexpensive, robust sensors that communicate natively to do things, right? And bring that data in. And let's spend the money, the time, the energy on how do you turn that into intelligence? And if I could, I'd just like to stump for an organization called CESMI, C-E-S-M-I-I. They are one of the leaders in this space. They've got some really cool stuff out there, a package of sensors that you can get in a kit so that you can learn. And I watched them stand up a sensor that wasn't connected to anything to data that was already being logged in a file in what had to be about 10 seconds.

Yeah.

10 seconds. Think about what that used to be like in the old days when I was a kid, right? I mean, you know, we'll see you in a couple months and we'll have something for you, right? And it's amazing. And so now is the time for the American manufacturing space to be able to open up their minds to new ideals, new equipment, to do the things that they couldn't do before. It's a great time to be in this space.

Yeah, and when I talk to people about where we are today, because we're about to same age with the same level of years in this space. I liken it to countries that, you know, well, just a quick backstory. So I used to bemoan the fact that my kids had cell phones, right? And what they're doing to the, you know, American teens' minds and all that stuff. And then I took a trip, I went to Haiti. And every kid there that I was working with all had a cell phone, and it was amazing to me how it was an absolute lifeline for them because they didn't have the technology infrastructure. There was one phone in town, and people would stand in line all day to make a phone call, right? And then all of a sudden, cell phones come out, and you can skip the infrastructure and go right to this new technology that is now a lifesaver. I still have trouble with my kids and their cell phones, but from a technological perspective, it offers us a new way of looking at things that I think you're poking at that Industry 4.0 offers, that maybe where in the past, if you took a look as a company who's not advanced in their digital journey and say, how am I ever going to catch up? I have to lay all this infrastructure, I have to pull all this wire, I have to do all this stuff. Well, forget that, right?

Right.

There's a lot of opportunity to skip skip some of those steps, but you can't skip the points that you started with, right?

Absolutely.

That point from the top, where are you heading as a business? And I also think the value of this community and folks like yourselves and the work that you're doing, even working through a bunch of different options from a sensor level or a solutions level, there's still, you know, work that needs to be done there. So when you can come in and bring your focus from an operations perspective in and you have People that you trust and that you can rely on to take a look at the technology piece, and you can offer that up to the manufacturers. I think that's still a really valuable missing piece.

Yeah, we think so, because you can start to shave months off of that process. So when you come from a large organization— and let me, I'm going to put a caveat out there— we differentiate between large businesses and small businesses, midsize, right? Here's the truth: they're all the same. They are all looking to execute a business process to convert raw materials into finished goods. Some just have more cells than others. others, truthfully. And I mean that, to be honest. And so I don't get as hung up on really what size it is, except that that core infrastructure that sits over top of that organization is just very different, right? How much talent pool do you have up above to be able to help the process out? That's it. When it comes to manufacturing, it's truly just the same. It's just an adaptation of what's already there, right?

Yep.

So it's just a matter of leveraging what you can. And in For the, the folks on the smaller and midsize, call somebody that can help you work through those things very rapidly. And just remember one thing: you pay us to leave. You don't pay us to come in. That's the beauty. You're not paying us forever. You shouldn't want to pay us forever. You shouldn't want protracted engagements. Pay us to do our thing and get out.

Yeah.

And, and that's different, right? If people are looking to just say, well, you know, I just want to keep getting paid and, you know, Doing that, you're partnering with the wrong folks. Find somebody that wants to help you solve your problems and get done.

So I think we're gonna start to wind this up, but I think a couple things go through my head here as we talk about the organizations, whatever size they are, getting into the game. And certainly there's always conversations around value, right? Return on investment, et cetera. And so I wonder from, your perspective, both in your past when you were working for a large organization on the OpEx side of things, and, you know, now that you're working with smaller companies and you have, you know, a basket full of technology options to bring to bear, how have you historically talked about value and return? And then what are you seeing nowadays as you're engaging with smaller manufacturers that are considering technology solutions?

Yeah, I'm going to try to make this a fairly specific example.

Sure.

And I'm going to walk you through a period in time. When I first started, I was one of those guys that would be out there on the shop floor with a pad and paper and a pen, and I would do my time studies. I will encourage every single person that wants to learn how to optimize a process to do exactly the same thing. Go out, watch what happens, talk to those brilliant people who are out there doing that job every day. Okay, take that data that you've gathered and start to dollarize it at a very, very granular level. Don't focus on just what you saw, focus on the things that weren't seen. Look at why the data that you observe doesn't line up with your aggregate data. There's a significant difference. That's because there's wait times in there. Find out what those wait times are. They have a value. Dollarize all that, put it into a Pareto. That will teach you where to start. Here's the challenge. When we mapped out our process to create a batch end-to-end, from start to finish, it was about 680 steps. Okay, it was a large campus process, but that's what it took. We had to understand it from raw materials coming in to finished goods that were going out, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to figure out where do I begin, where is it, right? So we took those granular processes, turned them into value stream maps, partitioned those and said, okay, here's the sweet spot, this is where all the time is aggregating. But at the same time, we also assigned a dollar value to it. We looked at the fixed and variable costs, layered them into each one of those buckets, which is not what the typical value stream looks like, but that became important because we knew where the money was. And if we were ever going to start to bring money to bear to solve some of these problems, which we had to, right, we knew where we could take money out of the process, oftentimes in the form of working capital, and turn that right around into equipment that we could use to further drive the process. Okay, now that was— that's the, the classic methodology that I still embrace to this day. It's tried and true. It works for funding multi-million dollar projects or $5,000 projects. It's about having the granular information that you can make that argument without question. What's really cool about today is that there are systems out there, really sophisticated, cool systems that are using AI, where you can hang a camera, point it at a process, record 4 hours of data to see what that operation looks like. No matter how many times a repetitive task is done, it will record all of it, break it down, analyze each iteration of that, and give you that full distribution. Take that data, aggregate it with your your annualized SKU data, and now you know exactly what you're spending for every one of those steps. Absolutely brilliant technology, because that way you're not paying guys like me to go out there and do all those studies. I can hang a camera, come back, and the very next day it's all done. I'm not spending weeks, right? The other benefit is it will take 1,000 iterations if you want. I don't have time to watch more than 3, 4, or 5 iterations to try to gather data, and I know that's insufficient. Right? So take that time, leverage those tools, and they're relatively inexpensive tools. I don't think I can mention the company that does it, but you can find them out there in the continuous improvement space that take digital images and convert that into data. Exceptionally powerful.

Well, I appreciate that very much, Patrick, and I appreciate everybody being here with us today. It's amazing to me how quickly these sessions go. So we're going to try to wrap it up here, but certainly encourage encourage Patrick and his team to stay plugged in with the club here. Everybody that's online, everybody who watches this afterwards, please, you know, follow the club. You can find us at industry4oclub.com online. You can find us on LinkedIn, obviously. Patrick, I believe we talked early at the beginning of the event that your website is axiomsystems.io.

Correct.

And so encourage people to connect with with Patrick, ask questions of him. And I guess maybe before we wrap up, is there any parting thought you would like to leave with those in attendance here today or watching this online down the road? One takeaway for us on, I guess, this new way to engage from an OpEx perspective?

Yeah, I kind of do. I'm an evangelist for continuous improvement, but I have I do have a bias. And that is, I think that it's very, very easy for us to get caught up in continuous improvement in incremental ways. And that's great. The industry needs that, right? But I would encourage you to take a slice of time and use lean concepts to do innovation. I am a firm believer in innovation and how that can actually just change entire industries. And I would not leave that part of it out. And so I'm going to tell you just a brief story if you can give me 2 minutes, Mike.

You got it.

Okay, there was a company out there that was called, um, let me get to recall here, People Flow. Okay, I'm going to mention their name now. They've actually been bought up by another supplier. These were folks that made magnetic pumps. And so for any of you that are into the nuts and bolts of the manufacturing world, magnetic pumps used to be a real rarity because they were so expensive. The difference was that instead of having this liquid contact with pump where you'd have packing glands and things that could oftentimes leak and wear out, They had a magnetic couple on either side so that the liquid flow would stay only on one side of this, never came into contact with the drive side. And they were fantastic and they were used in just very specific industries where it was exceptionally high hazard, right? And this company, to their credit, said, you know what, we do not want to compete with mag drives. That's just not the space we want to be in. We want to go compete with the commodity pump market. Insane. They were selling at 10x to 15x. all day long because they were sophisticated and they were purpose-built. And so they brought in a gentleman whose name is Jeff Liker. To your listeners, if you haven't heard of Jeff Liker, he's a legend here in the United States when it comes to lean manufacturing. And brought them in on the design team, and they focused on designing out all the components that they possibly could, took the entire production floor and created one work cell with it. And, you know, they competed with regular pumps by the time they were done. It was an astounding achievement. And I give that team a hell of a lot of credit. After I was working with them for a little while, they actually brought me a book back that was signed by Jeff Liker, you know, one of the people I look up to. And so that was really cool. My point is innovation can take you to places that you couldn't even think of before. And so I encourage all of your listeners, stay focused on innovation at the same time you're doing continuous improvement. because that will do amazing things for your career. So thank you.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that, Patrick, and I appreciate everybody joining us here today. Thanks to Karen and Chris and Henri. We heard a couple of recommendations. Jeff Lycan as a lean guru, The Phoenix Project as a book to read, certainly the Industry 4.0 Club as an organization to be a part of. So again, we thank you for being here. We encourage you to watch our future episodes of our fireside chats. We also have shows on women in manufacturing, on culture around Industry 4.0, and certainly on the technology side as well. So with that, I will say thank you. Thank you, Patrick, and everybody have a wonderful day.

Thank you very much, Mike. I appreciate the invite and the opportunity to reach your, your people.

Excellent.