The Synergy of Collaboration to Drive Manufacturing Competitiveness

Welcome to the Industry 4.0 Club's fireside chat. The club's purpose is to engage the power of diverse worldwide talent to accelerate the global evolution to Industry 4.0. We accomplish this by hosting and supporting respectful, thoughtful, and interdisciplinary open conversations and creating quality content on wide-ranging Industry 4.0 topics to expand the reach of our community. My name is Mike Ungar, and I'm the CEO of the Industry 4.0 Club. I have over 40 years of leadership and manufacturing experience, with most of that being at Michelin. I'm joined today by my co-host, Mike Yost. Mike, would you introduce yourself, please?

Sure. Thank you, Mike.

Welcome, everybody.

My name is Mike Yost. I'm the volunteer chairman of the Industry 4.0 Club, one of the co-founders along with Mike and his co-host on this fireside chat. I've been in industry for about 35 years. First half of my career on the industrial solution provider side and the last half on the industrial nonprofit side. So excited to be here and also excited to be joined by Daniel Reed. Daniel is the Senior Manager of Digital Operations at Baldwin Richardson Foods, and today's topic is the synergy of collaboration to drive manufacturing competitiveness. So Daniel has over a decade of experience as a digital transformation leader in manufacturing, applying his systems thinking approach to design and build solutions across different industries and enterprise scales. His experience spans hands-on application engineering as part of a small business through technology policy and collaborative R&D as part of an innovation institute. In his role at Baldwin Richardson Foods, Daniel owns the development and maturation of the overall digital transformation portfolio. He also leads programs and strategic architecture projects such as enterprise data mastery and workforce upskilling on new technologies.

Thank you, Mike. Well, great introduction.

Thank you. Welcome, Daniel. So just before we get into our discussion today, I want to mention for those listening live on LinkedIn, If you have a question for Daniel during our conversation today, we are live. And so please put your question in the comment box and we'll do our best to get it to Daniel and try to answer it during our broadcast. So Daniel, before we dive into talking about today's topic, can you share a little bit about your journey from a degreed mechanical engineer to digital operations?

Yeah, Mike, I sure can. And I like that question because it's something that I think those of us who work in digital transformation, like, will recognize it. Most of us start on one side or the other of the divide between, you know, more physical stuff and more digital things, and then we kind of bring them together through our career experience. And it's maybe the way that I explain it about myself is I also didn't start in mechanical engineering.

Mm-hmm.

I actually started in physics, and then I took a detour into creative writing, poetry, and I finished in mechanical engineering. So I've always been a bit of an interdisciplinary person, right? I would say kind of a hybrid person who likes to do different things. And I fell into digital transformation basically by accident, because my first job out of school was a small manufacturer where On day 1 of me joining, right, my first day, first job out of college, I was handed a stack of drawings and told, all right, go for it. You know, you're the only engineer for this company. Everything that gets designed, you have to design, and everything that gets purchased, you have to purchase, right? You got to source your own stuff, which was a tremendous amount of, right, responsibility. And also, I very quickly became the bottleneck to that little company. I was fortunate that I just happened to be lucky enough to join that organization at the same time as, as another businessman came in, like an entrepreneur that was basically spinning that company out from its parent. And so he became a really wonderful mentor to me. And he also pushed me hard because we Over those 2 years, we tripled our sales.

Wow.

So how can, right, how can one engineer produce 3 times as much output as, you know, he did the year before? And really, the only answer was automation, digital transformation, right? Those machines are not all that different from each other, right?

They're taller, they're shorter, they're wider, they're at a different angle, But conveyors are not that unique. And yet it was, you know, when I started, it took about 2 weeks to design conveyor, create all the drawings, write about it for production. I developed a parametric configuration tool that reduced that to 4 hours.

Hmm.

And really, that was kind of my first taste of The power of digital transformation, the power of automation to help do more with less, which I think is often said, you know, without understanding that that means you have to also get better at what you're doing.

That's really cool.

Yeah. And Daniel, was it that experience that led you to MXD? Because the National Institute— maybe you could explain a little bit what MXD is and you know, what attracted you there and how it ties in with that experience?

Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to.

I would say, yeah, it did. You know, my first— the first 2 companies I worked for were small manufacturers, right? I lived that. I lived that life firsthand. I saw the challenges that small manufacturers face just remaining competitive, right? Keeping up with, you know, the pace of technology. I saw the headwinds, both kind of geopolitical that they were facing and also from their larger customers who frequently kind of squeezed them, shall we say, in ways, trying maybe sometimes even trying to help them advance. But it was ended— it was perceived as burdensome. And so that really did lead me to want to join MXD, which is a not-for-profit. It's a manufacturing innovation institute, one of a network of these as part of Manufacturing USA. I think there are 17 now, and everyone has their own kind of focus. MXD's focus is digital manufacturing and cybersecurity, and all of the institutes are public-private partnerships and consortia that have members from government, from academia, from small manufacturers, from giant multinationals, all the way across the board. All these folks have similar problems, right, similar challenges, and I was really interested in how can we get together to collaborate, convene, and kind of advance these common solutions to these common problems.

So you took your experience from working in manufacturing and went to a national institute to try to help scale and teach and compel others.

Yeah, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in manufacturing. I come from a manufacturing family. Both my parents are from the Michigan area, right? So lots of auto in my background, you know, and my, my, my mother, when I got my first job, she told me how lucky I was to be actually making things, right?

Right.

And that so few people got that chance in our current economy. I think it's, it's a wonderful industry to work in. It's super important. both for, you know, domestic interests and national security, and boy is it fun.

I want to know how often you get to use your poetry skills.

Oh, well, I would say— Can we get some freestyling? Not as often as I would like, but I am frequently— for my whole career, I've been the person who folks reached out to when they wanted to write a delicate email, right? Like, help me parse the words real carefully. So I feel like it I feel like it's helped me. Not too much poetry in my work though, unfortunately.

Where is—

It's good to hear that you can write.

That's good though. Yeah.

Where is MXD located, Daniel?

It's in Chicago. So it's on Goose Island actually, which is a real island and it does have real geese for anyone who hasn't been there. And that's like where the Future Factory is. So based in Chicago mostly, which is— I'm kind of from the Chicago area. generally. And now I'm working for an organization that's more national, right, and has multiple facilities.

Yeah. So you mentioned this organization, MXC, brings— I mean, we've talked about the collaboration, they bring companies together to collaborate. And you mentioned they do digital and cyber. What were some of the things that you saw happen because of collaboration? I mean, it sounds crazy. I mean, and maybe it's hard to answer because You know, I mean, would it have happened if it— if an individual had been working on it? But maybe there's some clear, like, collaborative things you went, oh, you know, that really happened because they were brought into a common space.

Yeah, I've got a few examples. And I think you're right, Mike, that it's difficult sometimes to put your finger on, right?

Would it have happened otherwise?

What I always say is that collaboration is more challenging. than competition is because the rules are different every time. Every time you're trying to collaborate with someone, you really have to work to figure out what is your shared interest, right? Stay in that lane and don't kind of stray into the areas where your interest maybe isn't common. I've got 2 good examples. One of them is this project called SMART, so was it Sensor-Enabled Metrology Assisted Robotics Technology? And it was a project we did with Boeing and with 2 universities, and they basically were all— because it was this collaboration, because it was funded through MXD, what we were able to do that I think a commercial organization would not be able to do is we were actually able to fund 2 solutions. We didn't have to invest in just one. We funded 2 solutions. 2 different teams of people, compared and contrasted them, then combined the best of both worlds. And ultimately that ended up becoming a standard that was submitted, right, to a standards body for— now if any robotic company wants to implement metrology-aided robotics in their system, they can access that standard. If you were to dig way back, right, we put that team together We funded the research, but we didn't expect to get anything out of it, right, in terms of royalties.

And so I would say that's like one example. And then the other one, in terms of really pushing the state of the art, one of the coolest projects I worked on at MXD was the first collaboration between more than one Manufacturing Innovation Institute. So it was this cross-institute collaborative project with America Makes. They focus on additive manufacturing. They focus on materials engineering mostly. And we were basically trying to prove how you could use artificial intelligence to speed up the process of qualifying metal additive parts. And what that team is able to do, right, is we're able to pull people in the room, like the FAA and the DOD, and also the people who make the additive manufacturing machines, right? And also the people who use the additive manufacturing machines. and the professors who study additive. And that, you know, gives us this really broad framework for collaboration, right? For understanding what different people's use cases are. And I would say, you know, that the institutes are well positioned to be that neutral kind of third party because we don't wanna pick a, you know, the institutes don't want to pick winners. They want the whole industry in the US to improve.

Well, appreciate that, Daniel. And just want to remind everybody that we are live. And so if you have questions or comments, I see Uzair and John, Ryan adding comments in there. So if you have questions for Ryan, please go ahead and throw them in here. Reminder that we're talking to Daniel Reed, the Senior Manager of Digital Operations at Baldwin— sorry, Baldwin Richardson Foods. And so let's pivot. Let's talk a little bit about your role at at Baldwin Richardson Foods? And how are you able to collaborate with other companies to drive manufacturing competitiveness working for a company versus working for the institute?

Yeah, great question.

So I would say like all business is both collaborative and competitive, and I think more of it ends up being, in my opinion, collaborative than competitive if you kind of take the time to make it, to set it up that way. So certainly, right, we're a small organization, Compared to the, you know, the industry overall. We have suppliers, we have customers, we also have, you know, memberships in other, other like consortia, right? So we're a member of SESAME, we are exploring other, you know, memberships. I think where we look as a smaller organization is both to, right, help our customers by being a digital transformation leader so that we kind of stand out, right, and can help them in some cases even, you know, move their own transformation forward. And then secondly, we're developing very close relationships with our vendors, in some cases maybe even like, you know, co-locating facilities, for example, where it's, it's advantageous to do that, you know. And in general, I think that's one of the reasons I, I, I would like— I'm so excited to come onto this podcast is, you know, I'm, I'm very interested in continuing to be part of that, you know, the thought leadership and, and moving the industry forward.

That's a great perspective.

Yeah, so a lot of companies have, um, actually supplier forums. I know Richardson isn't maybe as big. Do you have something like that, or have you talked about that, where you, you might actually get all your suppliers in the room and say, hey guys, we, you know, to work— and it, it can get to the point where it's a little heavy-handed, right? But to work with us, you know, in the next year, you, you know, we need, you know, we need you to implement this. Especially I'm thinking about in the SESAME Smart Manufacturing Roadmap, you know, there's a significant chapter on connected supply chain, for example?

Yeah, that's a really great question.

I would say we are typically the supplier in that room who gets called in by our customers, right, and told, you know, for example, we're in food, right? There's a lot of, you know, a lot of FDA requirements. There's requirements from the vendor in terms of how you must label things or traceability. So I would say more frequently we are the recipient of that, but we try to do our best to be ahead of it, right? We don't, we don't want to get that email and not already have been building towards what we think they're going to ask us for. With our vendors, I could see us doing that maybe next year. Right now, mostly we've been fairly permissive with how we work with our vendors, but I think we've grown enough this year that at some point— maybe next year we'll find ourselves being a little more choosy.

Well, you know, it's a challenging question for a lot of companies, not because it's not in principle a great idea, but there's a cost to doing it for you as a company, right? You have to spend, you have to invest in it. And a lot of companies are hesitant to do that.

So I think, yeah, and it's, I feel like that, you know, landscape has become almost Balkanized, right? Where You've got these different, like, ecosystems of suppliers. And within the ecosystem, if you choose to invest in it, great, you know, you've gotten a lot of ability to share data and things like that. But then between networks, there's so much duplication of effort. And yet, how do we, right, how could we create one common pool that everyone would play in? I think that's one of the challenges the industry is facing right now is You know, depending on who your customer is, you might have 3, 4, 5, 6 separate supplier portal systems, you know, that you have to participate in, and each one has an overhead cost associated with it. So yeah, I think you're very right about that, Mike.

So as the digital transformation lead, what do you see as key challenges, you know, in the arena of digital transformation or Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, all these initiatives.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll try to say something that maybe hasn't been said a million times, right? Because I would say the key challenges are pretty common, right? It's the data, the quality of the data that you have today, right? And/or the lack thereof, right? You may have been using your data, a manufacturer may have been using their data, in day-to-day operations for years, right? And so they assume that it is high quality. But when you try to do something more sophisticated with that data, right, that's where you find the gaps. Change management is probably actually even more so than data is probably number one.

Yeah.

Right? I think I learned a hard lesson in my second role where I was engineering manager, 24 years old, Youngest person who reported to me was 45, right? I had all these great ideas for how to improve things. And yeah, some of them, most of them were pretty good. But there's, in my mind, there's such a thing as a change bandwidth that people can tolerate, right? They can only tolerate their job changing so much so quickly. They need to, they need to know how to do their job and feel like they're good at it. Right. And if you try to push the pace too fast, where people lose that sense of, I know what my job is, I know how to do it, and I feel like I'm good at it or able to execute it well, I think that's where you get a lot of resistance, failure, you know, failure, failed change. And then I'd say the last one, and this is something I feel very, very passionately about. Digital, in my, in my opinion, right, digital transformation is about changing the way work gets done for the people who are doing the work, for their benefit, primarily.

OK.

It's hard to understand someone else's work, right? You really need— they understand their work. You don't understand it.

So you have to approach that with a lot of humility, right?

A lot of, willingness to be corrected, willingness for them to tell you you're wrong if you— if you— what you want is to actually help them.

That is a fantastic insight. I think that is, that is worth capturing and, uh, shouting from the mountaintops for people to understand because that really, really is insightful.

Yeah, I again learned it. I learned most of my lessons the hard way. I've kind of started to realize that.

Yeah, it was one of my— you know, I was building machinery for a factory. They had some very specific requirement that the Maintenance people wanted to keep. I was complaining because it was my job to design the cell and that made it difficult, right? And my boss told me it will never work right if they don't want it to work right.

If they don't in their bones want it to work, it will never be a success.

It doesn't matter how well you design it. Yeah, you know, true.

Hey, we have a question from Ryan. I thought maybe I'll put it up on the screen and If you'd like to take a run at it. Ryan asks, how are we doing on— excuse me— on the ease of use of data normalization— excuse me— from different proprietary protocols and the wide variety of devices in the field to pull data off of? Excuse me. Can a maintenance controls person or small to medium-sized business do this easier now than a few years ago?

Yes, I'm going to say yes to that question. Absolutely, Ryan. I think there are, in the last 5-ish years, have been a real proliferation of excellent tools for like end users who are not themselves data scientists to do this more easily. So I can give you some examples. So MQTT as a protocol are very easy to learn and it can help you kind of create like a unified namespace or a data schema. You don't need to start from scratch either. There's companies out there like OPC UA, the OPC Foundation, SESAME, and others who have like a template reference implementation that you can start from, right? All— every milling machine is pretty much the same, you know, you can download a profile, kind of customize it a little bit, attach it to your machine. And in general, I would say, That's the big change, right, over the last 5 to 10 years is, is the how easy the technology has become to use. You know, you can pick it up, it's much more intuitive, much more visual. You know, these things have user interfaces now where they didn't used to. So I think it has gotten a lot easier, in my opinion. Great.

We have another question too, Mike. Let me jump to share that one if you don't mind.

You're not gonna get choked up reading it again, are you?

No, I hope not. Nitin, I hope I didn't mispronounce your name. Nitin asks the question, you've worked on several projects using AI, mostly predictive analytics. With generative and agentic AI being in the foray now, how do you think advanced manufacturing will change in terms of the products we create and its effect on the workforce?

Yeah, that's a big question. I'm going to split it into 2 and answer them separately, though.

In terms of the products we create, you know, where I think AI, where I can see AI having the biggest impact is in speeding up dev/test cycles, right? So fewer iterations to get to the right thing. It's amazing for discovery, right? Autonomous discovery, like drugs or new materials. Material science, I think, has a lot that they can pull from AI in terms of the products we create. And then like generative design, say, right, where you're generating parts based on criteria, like it needs to be this strong in this axis, and then you let the software tell you what the best shape is to achieve that. So that's kind of the major effects I would— I see in the near term. In terms of people, That's a very interesting question. I always go back to that your people's time is your most valuable strategic asset. So wherever you can use AI to give your people back more time in their day so that they have to do less of the, what I might call donkey work, right? Like just moving data around or pulling things from 3 different systems. You know, no, how about just create an agent that they can ask in natural language, right? And it can go fetch all that for them. This is where those common data structures really come in handy.

Right.

Where if you've put everything in a, like I say, a UNS schema to start with, it's semantic. The AI can read it. It understands that, right? This bearing is part of this axis, which is part of this machine, which is part of this production line. So if you ask it what's going on, it can tell you, oh, that bearing's about to fail and that's gonna, you know, maybe impact your production. So I'd say that's the big one. And then I've seen a lot of really interesting work around kind of what I'll say, trying to codify tribal knowledge in a way, right? Like even generative AI that can interview the human, right? Rather than you asking the AI questions, the AI asks you questions and goes, why did you do it that way, right? Or why is this one different than that one? And then build that tribal knowledge into the system.

That's cool.

Yeah, just 2 things. First, I want to note that it took 24 minutes before AI got brought up in the chat. So that's—

Is that a new record?

Our over-under, we're always looking at where that's going to come in. So no, we appreciate the question.

and the team.

I happen to know, Daniel, that you have a very experienced mentor, somebody who I've known for a long time who has experience at big companies, small companies, nonprofits, really well-grounded in manufacturing and technology and all these things. And I'm just wondering if you could speak without naming names, you know, about the impact on you for having a resource like that, a mentor. that you can lean on?

Oh, it's tremendous, honestly. Both in terms of, right, the vision, like looking out 2 to 3 years in the future, having someone who's, who's able to kind of lift their head and look up. But also someone who just coaches really in, like, in every interaction, right? Every time we have a team meeting, I feel like he's trying to teach us something, all of us, whether it's about business, right? We've got SAP experts, they don't, you know, you're talking about like business strategy, that's not their forte, you know, but he still goes through the time to explain it, explain why it matters to you, right? Because it all comes back to that in the end. Just way more confidence, right? this, this feeling that he has told me, run fast and let me pull you back, right?

I will pull you back.

So don't— uh, and like that vote of confidence, right, just gives me— it really supercharges you, right? When you're like, all right, you know, I can do whatever I need to, and then if I'm doing wrong, he'll, he'll tell me and we can course correct, right? And, um, so I think it's super important. I really, I really deeply believe, right, in— The way to create the most agile organization is to try to empower the frontline. Like, the further— as much empowerment, as much decision-making as you can push to the edge, right, of the system, whether it's a computer or a human being, that's going to be more efficient, faster, more agile.

Appreciate that. And I expected to To hear that. But I just wanted to validate it. We've never had that conversation in public before, so thank you.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, thanks. We've been talking for the last half hour or so with Daniel Reed and Mike Yost, and we're kind of reaching the end of our time together. So I'd kind of like to ask both of you for maybe one final thought for our audience. Maybe start with you, Mike, and then we'll go to Daniel.

Yeah, I mean, I think Daniel's point about change management, right, and it being about the people and empowering the people and knowing their— nobody knows their role better than they do. So I think that was really, really insightful, very powerful. And then align the technology and the rest of it to come alongside that. So I think that's a fantastic takeaway, Daniel.

Thanks, Mike. Yeah, and I think I'll build off that by saying, right, I will reiterate what I started with: collaboration is more complicated, more challenging than competition, but it is so worth it. Take the time, understand whoever it is you're partnering with. Could be your customer, could be your supplier, could be your end user, right? Try to figure out what it is that they want, what is important to them, Figure out where that shared interest is, and then you can go do great things together.

Excellent.

Yeah, thank you, Daniel. The phrase I often like to share is go slow to go fast.

Yes, I totally agree.

And so it's really foundational when you take that time. So thank you for that. Well, it's been great, Daniel. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to talk with us today and share your insights about the importance of collaboration to drive manufacturing competitiveness. I just want to mention for our audience, Daniel's going to be joining us in Greenville, South Carolina at the MXO Southeast event. It's going to be taking place April 22nd to the 24th, in just a little over a month now, and hopefully you'll sign up and join us there. It's a wonderful event, very intimate, great lineup of speakers. Daniel will be one of them. sharing their insights on Industry 4.0 and manufacturing. So, Daniel, look forward to seeing you there with the club, and hope that others will decide to join us as well. So again, here's the website to sign up for that if you're interested.

So with that, I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, thanks, Daniel. So with that, the club would like to encourage you to take action. I mean, you spent half an hour with us. If you haven't learned something today, we'd like you to go out and take advantage of that and make some change. So read an article, another article, perhaps attend a workshop as we just talked about, MXO Southeast, or develop a smart manufacturing roadmap for your plant or your company, or even just challenge your organization to move forward in the deployment of Industry 4.0. We'd like to know what you're going to do. We'd like to know what action you took. So please drop us a note on our website. At www.industry40club.com or, uh, on our LinkedIn page. We also host conversations like this every week or so, and so if you'd like to join us on a future conversation, we'd love to hear from you as well and hope that you decide to, um, to raise your hand and be part of our broadcast. So with that, um, would like to wish you all a wonderful rest of the day and week, and thanks again, Daniel and Mike, for your time. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Daniel. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks.

Thank you.